[The speaker today walks out, carrying a small wooden soapbox. He places it on the ground, makes sure it is secure, and climbs up on it. He speaks.]
Today, I read in Yahoo News the call from Al-Qaida for a holy war against Israel. I was particularly struck by the line: “It is a jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails … from Spain to Iraq.”
Religion can help people. It can provide comfort at times of loss. It can provide a moral center and compass. It can provide seeming answers to unanswerable questions. But it can also destroy.
This statement, together with the behavior of Hezbollah and Hamas, makes it clear the battle isn’t specifically with Israel. It is with the non-Moslem (and perhaps the non-Shite Moslems) in the territory that they consider deemed to them (“Spain to Iraq”). They won’t stop the fighting until these areas are cleansed.
Sound familiar. The Crusades did something similiar, fighting to push the heathen from the Holy Land. Hitler did something similar, fighting to make “the fatherland” ideologically pure. Ideological zeal is one of the hardest things to fight, for you cannot destroy it. The weapon of mass destruction is the zeal itself, the passion to “rid the land of the infidels”. Making additional martyrs does not abate the zeal, it only makes it stronger. Conventional warfighting techniques cannot succeed against such zeal. The only technique that works is stopping the source of that zeal.
Sometimes, that’s easy. The source in Germany in WWII was a single point of failure. We aren’t so lucky today. There are many sources that foment the zeal, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran, in the various militia groups. The voices shout out the voices of the people that really understand Islam, who work to make it the peaceful religion it should be, worshipping alongside the other religions of the world.
I don’t know the answer to the religious and ideological zeal that is Al Qaida. I do know that we must be ever watchful for other growths of religious zeal. They are like algae in a pool, forming pockets of slime when the chemical balance that guards against it is weak. We’ve seen it try to grow here in America, with the “religious right”. We’ve seen it try to grow in other countries. We should also encourage the growth of chemicals of good: those forces that work to moderate the zeal with reason and light. I just wish I knew how to do it: I know that our conventional approaches don’t appear to be working.
[He slowly climbs off the soapbox, picks it up, and walks away shaking his head.]
