Last week was an interesting triangulation of events. Some were in real time like the slaughter of dozens in Sadr city; others from the past tense like the Babi Yar memorial anniversary, and the Pope’s brouhaha, a wound still fresh from two weeks ago. Each of these events both signifies and clarifies the state of the world. Sadly, it’s a depressing condition.
Fifty-five years after the slaughter near Kiev of a hundred thousand men, women, and children who were shot and dumped into a ravine there is still no progress to stop the deaths of innocents. The barbarity and the depraved mind-set that give us the bombing of women and children in line for a ration of cooking oil in a Baghdad slum show us that the “civilized” world has no plan for humanity. The parallels are all there. Noncombatants lined up, slaughtered, blown to pieces, killed for hate, killed for being a Jew or a Shiite, killed for existing on the earth against someone else’s wishes.
Yet what aroused the fury, the anger, the threats of death in the Muslim world was not the carnage in Baghdad, it was the words of the Pope. One would think that from the minarets of Qom to the mosques of Jakarta the imams would rail against the butchery in Baghdad. One would hope that they would issue a definitive fatwa prohibiting Sunni and Shiites from this political slaughter. How about demanding an apology from the men behind blowing twenty children to bits while they held their mothers’ hands, waiting for a little oil?
One would hope in vain. The silence emanating from the imams in their Friday night sermons about the Sunni/Shiite slaughter is telling. Especially when their fury at the Pope’s words shows how carefully they monitor events. One reads the English-language Arab newspapers in vain for raised voices against religious murder, while a chorus of scorn and threats is rained down on the Pope for his Byzantine remarks. Words vs. death. Christian vs. Muslim.
Where is the European anger at the religious cleansing in Baghdad and all of Iraq? Certainly the Europeans were awake enough to be horrified at the misguided Israeli bombs that fell on Lebanon’s villages. Where’s Kofi and his entourage of outrage when Sunni bodies show up by the dozens daily, arms and legs tied and drill holes in their heads, dumped like trash in rivers or just a dusty street. Does the world unconsciously hold the Arabs to a lower standard of morality than Jews? Is the European angst and despair at the bombing death of innocents reserved for those who are victims of Jewish death? The sectarian cleansing occurring now in Iraq is in every way equal to the religious partitions of the 1948 Israeli war for independence, but it doesn’t seem like anyone minds this time around.
Those in the Muslim world who are entrusted with its ideological care now have a very special opportunity. They must stop the violence in Iraq. They must stop the Sunni/Shiite hate, the relocations, the slaughter of innocents. They should show the rest of the world that when they worry about Gaza, it is an honest worry about the people, not just a cover for religious hate. The Europeans too should devote a tenth of their concern about Israeli behavior in the West Bank to concern about Shiite children and Sunni mothers. Lace up those Adidas sneakers and Prada boots and march to stop this slaughter, protest these deaths; they are far more numerous than the Palestinians’.
Finally, the imams owe the Pope an apology, not the other way around. Whatever the practical lack of awareness his historical references demonstrated, they are nothing compared to the weekly incitement, the venom of hate and intolerance that pours forth from his spiritual peers in the mosques. In Damascus and Tehran they call for war not understanding; they make calls for conquest through death. They demand to regain the power of Islam and redress the loss of their lands…violently.
Sadly, on this Day of Atonement we are shown that those sacrificed and buried in the trenches of Babi Yar should remain asleep; the world is not ready for them to awake and be redeemed.
