A sense of loss that we must overcome.

Submitted by abhi (United States), Jun 6, 2009 at 11:28

Dear Dr Pipes:

President Obama's speech in Cairo was based on one fundamental principle that he has often repeated -- we should extend the same trust to our adversaries that we expect from them.

In the modern times almost all non-Islamic religions and nationalities have suffered at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. We also have reasons to believe that Islamic fundamentalists have more support among Islamic moderates than the fundamentalists of other religions among the moderates of those religions.

Non-muslim societies also find certain Islamic tendencies unacceptable. While believing in our respective religions, we have found a common secular ethics that lets us work with each other smoothly and lets us share our resources. We find the Islamic tendency of branding universal good as pure Islamic, selfish and disturbing. In general, Islamic ideology is selfish and non-Islamic more universal.

Under these circumstances when Obama goes to Cairo and establishes a moral equivalency between Islamic and non-Islamic thoughts and practices it is natural for the rest of us to feel a sense of loss. But we must overcome this felling of loss because, unfortunately, this is the only choice that we have (fighting Islamic fundamentalism using fundamentalist Islam's methods makes us no different from them).

The only way to disarm Islamic hypocrisy is to highlight it as often as we can and defend us against it as much as we can. While Obama was delivering a message of hope in Cairo, bin Laden was delivering a message fo continued hate on Al-Jazieera. What can be a better way to disarm bin Laden than this?

I will not call Obama a messiah (not even as a taunt), but what he is practicing has not been practiced with so much courage and conviction since Gandhi (or Dr Martin Luther King). In fact, by openly criticizing certain Islamic tendencies in a Islamic capital, Obama has outdone Gandhi.

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