The fact is you should question the facts you're given
02/01/2008
Written by a doctor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the letter referred to an unnamed German man whose family was once part of his society's aristocracy, but who ended up in a concentration camp during the Nazi regime while his family's factories were destroyed by the Allies. This man's experience - including his description of inaction in the face of the Nazi rise to power - is used to establish a comparison between the rise of fascism and the rise of Islamic fanaticism.
"The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history," the email says. It continues to draw out its comparison, citing the examples of the rise of the Communist Party in Russia and China, Japanese imperialism during World War II, the Rwandan genocide, and other examples of totalitarian regimes and genocide. The crux of the doctor's argument is that Muslims who remain silent and don't denounce terrorist acts throughout the globe are somehow complicit in those acts, just as the populations who remained silent as fascist and totalitarian regimes emerged were responsible - through their inaction - for those regimes' drive for power.
The real worry, and the real danger, is that potentially thousands of people are reading this email and forwarding it to their friends, family and coworkers. Swept in by the tragic yet ultimately unverifiable story of a German citizen who seems to have learned his lesson about the horrific consequences of complacency, readers sympathize with the argument. But it is ultimately problematic to capitalize on the suffering of the holocaust to accomplish a contemporary political aim: the demonization of Muslims and the characterization of their religion as a force intent on subjecting the world to the same horrors as the Nazis.
The problem doesn't just lie in the moral ambiguities of lumping an entire population with the actions of a few of its members. No, the problem is that the idea that Muslims can be considered an "entire population" is a complete falsehood. There is no one Islam, just as there is no one Christianity. More importantly, there is no one Islamic polity, no global order of Muslims subject first and foremost to the rules of an enigmatic dictator or other leader.
Unlike this fictional German factory owner who was subject to the political rule of the Nazi Party, a Russian citizen under Stalin's heel, a Chinese worker swept up in Mao's Cultural Revolution or even a Tutsi villager fighting against Hutus in Rwanda, Muslims are not part of singular national identity (whether they resist the actions taken in that identity's name, support them, or remain silent). Even a shallow examination of Islam reveals the vast differences between Shiites and Sunni's, each with different aims and different interpretations of Muslim practice; more complicated understandings of the religion show that there are far more than two divisions, each with its own interpretation of the Koran, and that, like Christianity or Judiasm, Muslims in different societies of different classes have different goals, classes and political affiliations. What's worse, the idea that if there were a singular Muslim identity its members would somehow be subject pawns of its imaginary leader is as ridiculous as the idea that Catholics are all tools of the Pope or that Mormons have a blind allegiance to their living prophet.
It is troubling that emails like this get around so quickly. It is admittedly easy to sympathize with compelling stories of loss and dire warnings of the consequences of inaction. Action spurred by false information, however, and driven by fear and suspicion carries far more serious consequences. It is this sort of misinformation and propaganda that truly endangers society, it is exactly through this sort of misrepresentative manipulation of the public's worries and emotions via the mass media that genocide finds its fuel.
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