ress
reports last week revealed the shocking practice of teaching
anti-Islam material to US army personnel at the Pentagon. In one such
report, offered by The Independent on May 12, the Pentagon has
acknowledged "that an instructor at its Joint Forces (Staff) College
in Virginia for military officers was until recently teaching a course
advocating ‘total war’ with Islam that could require obliterating the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia without concern for
civilian deaths".
The Independent report says that the details of
the course were obtained by a blog on the websiteWired.com, drawn from
a presentation given by the teacher, Lt Col Matthew Dooley, in July
last year. In his course called ‘Perspectives on Islam and Islamic
Radicalism’, Dooley taught that destroying Islamic holy sites without
concern for civilian deaths would follow the precedents of the nuclear
strikes in World War II on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of
Dresden and Tokyo.
The war plan which Dooley presented his trainees with
was based on the need for "a direct ideological and philosophical
confrontation with Islam". He said: "They hate everything you stand
for and will never coexist with you unless you submit." He added that
as America waged that war, it would be free to ignore provisions of
the Geneva Conventions that set the rules for armed conflict as "no
longer relevant", said the report.
In justifying wholesale Muslim civilian deaths in his
war plan to Pentagon soldiers, Dooley said Islam had already declared
war on the US. As a result, he said, the US should retaliate by waging
total war rather than engaging in the current "illogical" American
stance of seeking common ground with Islamic leaders around the world.
He also taught: "We have now come to understand that there is no such
thing as ‘moderate Islam’. It is therefore time for the United States
to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no
longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its
self-destruction."
The elective course was offered five times a year for
groups of 20 officers at a time. It may therefore have been taught to
as many as 800 mid-level and senior US military officers before it was
closed down by the Pentagon. Dooley was described as a highly
decorated officer who had served in Iraq, Bosnia and Kuwait among
other places.
In the meantime, the FBI revealed that it too has
recently been forced to revise some of its instruction material to
excise references that could have been insulting to Islam. So it was
not just the Pentagon.
Naturally, when such embarrassing news came into the
open, the act was deplored by US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who said in a press conference at the
Pentagon that "it was just totally objectionable, against our values
and... academically irresponsible".
Such words may sound soothing and may help calm things
down. But they still leave many questions unanswered. Before I start
listing some of the questions, I should say that such teaching is much
more than objectionable and irresponsible. This is incitement of the
first order. It is the perfect prescription for realising the dream of
those who based their weird interpretation of history on the fiction
of a clash of civilisations in the hope that Islam will be the "modern
world’s" target and enemy. This may unfortunately offer evidence that
the war on terror has indeed been a war on Islam and the Muslim world
and that any claim to the contrary needs meticulous revision.
Now to some questions that may never be answered but
must still be highlighted.
How could a teaching course of this dangerous nature
run for almost eight years – since 2004 – without being known to the
high officials who now rush to denounce it and end it? How did it
escape their notice for such a long time?
Is it possible to accept that the 800 educated
officers who had over the years taken the course did not realise it
was contradictory to US values as well as the simplest principles of
civilised behaviour? Is it possible that none of them questioned the
legality, let alone the morality, of destroying holy places and
killing innocent civilians? And what about the claim that soldiers are
routinely educated on the laws of war and the international
conventions that govern the conduct of soldiers in times of war? Did
no one notice the stark contradiction?
Did none of the students ever mention that something
unusual was happening during that course? How could none of those
officers have noted that what was taught negated the repeated claims
of US President Barack Obama that neither Islam nor Muslims were the
enemy and that the only enemy is the terrorist; or did they possibly
believe that all Muslims were terrorists? Did the abrasive language
used by Dooley not raise doubts in the minds of the trainee officers
that that was not the way to spread democracy, to build institutions,
to introduce civilised values and to win hearts and minds?
How alarming if there were no doubts in their minds
and if the officers accepted the instruction as normal.
These are certainly not all of the questions that come
to mind with respect to this stunning disclosure but may suffice for
the purposes of a short article.
Let me now turn to the Arab and Muslim world and
wonder how the case in question might be perceived.
There could be much shock but little surprise. Shock
because this is probably the first time this part of the world
realises that such hate instruction has been taking place at the main
military establishment in the US. No amount of explaining or rejection
is sufficient to eliminate doubt or accept innocence. And little
surprise because the last 10 years have witnessed other appalling
soldier practices against Muslims and Muslim holy symbols. In 2005 the
eruption of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal shocked the whole
world. So did other cases of desecration, of the Muslim holy book, the
Koran, flushing it down the toilet at the Guantánamo Bay detention
camp in 2005 and the burning of copies of the Koran by US soldiers at
Bagram airbase in Afghanistan this year. It will be extremely
difficult now to defend the claim that such acts were individual
incidents committed by a few bad apples.
It is sad that the US-Muslim relationship has been
unnecessarily subjected to so much harm and abuse when all the right
components for an ideal relationship are firmly in place. It will take
decades to repair the accumulating damage, assuming that no more
shocks and harm are on the way.