What about ‘radical Islam’?

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
June 30, 2016

PRESIDENT Barack Obama lashed out after being accused as “soft on terrorism” for allegedly failing to characterise the enemy as “radical Islam” – a phrase that Obama has “refused” to use. This has opened up debates and arguments focusing not just on winning strategies over “terrorism”, but perhaps more importantly to win the coming US presidential elections.

When he asked: “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?” an editorial in the Wall Street Journal of June 15 was quick to provide some hints citing what other US presidents had done. For example, “Dwight Eisenhower routinely spoke of ‘international Communism’ as an enemy. FDR said ‘Japan’ or ‘Japanese’ 15 times in his 506-word declaration of war after Pearl Harbor.”

What was left out, intentionally or otherwise, was the fact that FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), a Democrat, also ordered in February 1942 to relocate all Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the interior of the US on suspicion that they too can be the enemies. Worst still, at the urging of Einstein, Roosevelt set in motion for the killing of tens of thousands of innocent (Japanese) lives – perhaps fully convinced that they were no less enemies who needed to be cowed. Consequently, two atomic bombs were detonated, the first over Hiroshima, the second over Nagasaki in August 1945. In recent times, similar dangerous rhetoric and hateful messages are continuously aired in the run-up to the US presidential elections, this time replacing the “yellow peril” with other hues as the targets to garner votes and worked up emotions.

The editorial was also silent about the Vietnam War (1955-1975), where the enemy was labelled as Viet Cong by the West – not limited to just the US president – as a kind of derogatory term in desperate denials of the hugely popular broad based National Liberation Front (NLF), namely the People’s Liberation Armed Forces in South Vietnam (PLAF) – and in Cambodia, including many non-military cadres, village chiefs and school teachers. Unlike the two selective examples in the editorial, the Viet Cong eventually emerged as the victor underlying the fact that giving names, albeit falsely, is not sufficient, if not a distraction as claimed by Obama. It is well acknowledged that the defeat of the mighty invading US forces had something to do with the arrogance that was imposed on the enemy beginning with the (mis)labelling of the Viet Cong casting them as pushovers. This time it could well be the case of arrogantly attaching labels to the so-called “enemies” and their variants while missing the mark by a wide margin. But that is for the presumptive presidents to figure it out.

What is interesting though is the comparison with neighbouring Canada which is far more hospitable to Muslim refugees than the US – some 10 times more as of November last year. On record, Canada with Muslims totalling more than 3% of its population, against only 1% in the US, does not witness massacres like the recent one in Orlando, or San Bernardino in December. Nicholas Kristof noted in “Confronting Our Own Extremist” (New York Times, June 18) that over the last two decades, Canada had eight mass shootings, in contrast to 20 in the US this month alone. The question then: why is there no interest in finding out who the culprits for the other 19 killings were, and label them? Most of the killings are not related to “radical Islam”. So what is in the name-calling?

The reality is that it is “not unusual for dozens of Americans to be killed by guns in a single day” and this level of violence makes the US an “extremist” of sorts when measured against the experience of other advanced countries. No other rich country has “advanced” so much as the US.

That the accused murderer is a Muslim (radical or otherwise) does not negate the fact that he is an American – a homegrown “extremist” as some put it.

Calling attention to his Islamic faith and ignoring his American nationality is rather sinister, if not prejudicial, as reminded by the same issue of New York Times, citing a prominent headline, “West Street Massacre” that took place in New York more than 35 years ago.

The earlier report about gay “bar patrons being gunned down where they stood” was narrated by David W. Dunlap who drew many interesting points vis-à-vis the Orlando incident.

Foremost, it had nothing to do with “radical Islam” rather it involved one Ronald K. Crumpley who “made it plain to the police that he would have been satisfied with a higher toll.” He was quoted as saying: “I’ll kill them all – the gays – they ruin everything.”

Crumpley, 38, a former transit police officer was later found not “responsible by reason of mental disease or defect”. He died in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 73 which could have been the fate of the Orlando killer too since according to reports in the Financial Times, he “was probably a deranged lone gunman who simply took the IS name as a badge rather than being a trained operative of the group”. FBI director James Comey said investigators had found no sign that the deadly attack was directed by an organised terror cell.

Unfortunately, he was not as lucky as Crumpley, who was spared from any calls for his blood, or demands to be labelled “radical” in any sense; although the carnage he caused was “like a bomb had gone off in New York” according to the description by Andy Humm, the then reporter.

“Blood spattered against the wall and door as bullets ripped into one man’s shoulder and another man’s arm,” wrote another. “In barely the time it takes to light a cigarette, 40 rounds tore into the crowd” sprayed through his murderous machine, the Uzi – perhaps an equivalent of the assault weapon AR-15 allegedly used in the Orlando nightclub. Incidents like this go to prove, as far back as more than 35 years ago, that “a hatred of gay people” is not a monopoly of any form of so-called “radical” idea or person. Presumptive presidential nominees must be more enlightened on this.

Indeed, this notion is summed up well in a letter to the editor in the New York Times, when Andrew Leaf wrote: “We know that for many decades the Ku Klux Klan burned homes and churches and brutalised and murdered black Americans. They often did this under the sign of burning crosses and in the name of Christianity.” Like many, Leaf wondered if “it would be accurate, politically appropriate and socially helpful to designate the Ku Klux Klan as ‘radical Christians’ and their hateful ideology as ‘extremist Christianity’.” A case in point is when in middle of last year 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof allegedly felt that “black people were taking over the world” and that “the white race needed to do something about it,” and decided to gun down nine black parishioners, including a senator, at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, while pretending to join in the prayers. This eventually led to the banning of the Confederate flag to which the KKK remained defiant by holding a pro-Confederate flag rally at the South Carolina state house as a remembrance of white ancestral valour. During this episode, at no time was the word “radical” invoked as if the massacre of the blacks matters little.

Again, in a trial as late as November last year, a Vietnam War veteran and founder of the Carolina Knights of the KKK in his native North Carolina unrepentantly professed: “I wanted to kill Jews, not Christians and I do regret it.” Yet he blamed the victims for their own death by associating with Jews and going to Jewish centres. As reported, he even made a Heil Hitler salute following his sentencing.

Such erratic behaviour raises a pertinent question as to why despite knowing the identity of the “enemy” at close range, radical white supremacists like the KKK, dubbed as America’s first terrorist grouping founded 150 years ago in 1866, and its allegedly “invisible empire” are still lurking around and remain active? In fact, in 1870 a federal grand jury reportedly determined that the KKK is a “terrorist organisation” and issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism but to no avail.

More perplexing still is when the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy was celebrated on June 4. Davis, well known for her militant and radical ideas as a Black Panther, gained “celebrity” status by being a “radical” (that word again!). Ironic as it seems in 1979 she won the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and was bestowed the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honouring women who are first in their fields”. She was a tenured professor (now retired) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and since then, a distinguished professor emerita. Meanwhile the Black Panthers have morphed into a “black racist hate group” called the New Black Panthers, mimicking that of the KKK, complicating the “radical” issue even further.

On hindsight, Obama maybe right when he asked about the wisdom of attaching labels selectively as a trump card to a greater selfish ambition.