Sally Quinn Column on 9/11 Trashes Conservative ‘Ignorance,’ Sharia ‘Scare Campaigns’
In Saturday's On Faith section in the Washington Post, they allow religious leaders to reflect on 9/11, including Imam Abdul Faisal-Rauf, the organizer of the Ground Zero mega-mosque proposal in Manhattan through his Cordoba Initiative. (He said don't worry about those violent Muslim radicals, they're a tiny and spent force.) Sally Quinn, the editor of the On Faith website, unleashed a column in the Metro section that quickly transformed from thoughts about where she was on 9/11 to trashing the “right wing Christians” for denouncing Islam and the intensifying “ignorance” of politicians and their clueless “scare campaigns” against Sharia law. She even blamed the media for calling Muslim terrorists Muslims and not calling Christian terrorists Christians: Sadly, the answers many came up with after 9/11 were to blame this and other atrocities on Muslims. There are over a billion Muslims in the world. Most are peaceful. Only a handful distort their religion to commit murderous acts. In the past decade, false perceptions and ignorance have intensified. When Barack Obama ran for president many thought he was Muslim (he is a Christian but almost 20 percent of Americans today still believe he is a Muslim and have a negative opinion of him for that reason.) Since then we have had candidates like John McCain say he would have trouble voting for a Muslim for president and Herman Cain saying he wouldn’t want a Muslim in his administration. Right wing Christian leaders have denounced Islam. Politicians have run scare campaigns against “sharia law” about which they clearly have no clue. The outcry against the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero, which was not a mosque and not at Ground Zero, became an international affair. The Koran burning resulted in many deaths abroad. Women wearing headscarves have been forced to defend their choices. Muslim terrorists are routinely identified as Muslim terrorists while Christian terrorists are not identified by their religion. Why won’t Muslim leaders speak out against terrorism if they are so against it, critics ask? They do all the time in newspapers and Web sites, including this one. Muslim communities across the nation are constantly reaching out to combat those who attack a religion that has been hijacked by a small group of zealots. One such effort, this week in Washington, are blood drives around the country to try to save more lives than those lost on 9/11. These are citizens who care deeply, many of whom have sent sons and daughters to fight and die for this country. At Dulles Airport last weekend with my family, I watched as a Muslim family, father and son in Western clothes, mother and daughter in long dresses but no headscarves, baby girl in tow, were stopped at immigration and fingerprinted. “Why don’t they dress like Americans?” someone in the crowd murmured. My daughter in law, who is half Persian and has not yet received a passport with her new surname, was questioned by the immigration officer when we came through. “How is she part of the family?” he asked. I pointed out that she was my son’s wife and that she had a different name from her husband as did I. I, of course, was not questioned. As I mentioned, I did not pray on 9/11. The only thing I could think of to pray about was for answers and there were none. However, I will pray this Sunday. I will pray that we as Americans, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics and others can come together to end prejudice, discrimination and hatred. Violence is not more a feature of Islam, than those qualities are features of other faiths and people of no faith. Let’s stop it before it gets really ugly and turns us into the very people we criticize and so desperately do not want to be. Quinn took the same approach in a new interview about 9/11 with evangelical preacher and author Joel Osteen: QUINN: Obviously the terrorists were Muslim and then a lot of people sort of became anti-Muslim in this country because of that. You know, there are over a billion Muslims in the world and most of them are peace-loving. What do you say to your parishioners and people you speak to when they try to blame Islam for this and focus in on that as sort of the source of evil? OSTEEN: I always encourage them that this is a small group of people that are way off base. It’s not one religion; you can’t define them all as a whole.
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Sally Quinn Column on 9/11 Trashes Conservative ‘Ignorance,’ Sharia ‘Scare Campaigns’
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on September 10, 2011. Filed under