A parallel system of ethics

Submitted by Kurt Basking (United States), Jan 18, 2010 at 23:48

Dear Dr Pipes: I doubt that any doctrine whatsoever can prepare a foreign non-islamic army to fight in a Muslim country. For most human beings the sense of fairness and justice is derived from religions but is not entirely determined by them. For us, the religious tag does not define a litmus test about the validity of actions. It is because of this a predominently Christian US Army can easily jump into WW2 (or Bosnian war) to defend non-christian victims against fellow Christians. It is also why a predominently Hindu Indian army can enter Srilanka and fight with Buddist soldiers against fellow Hindus (Tamils). It is also why South Korean army can join hands with Christian US army to fight against culturally similar North Korean armies. And it is why the Buddhist Japanese and Buddist Chinese did not join hands during WW2 to exploit the then vulnerabilities of the Christian West. This is how it is and this is exactly how it should be.

In the case of Islam, the things take a turn for the worse. Muslims are not supposed to fight against fellow Muslims and, in fact, they are supposed to join hands with distant and barely connected fellow muslims to fight against non-muslims. Thus, the tag of Islam provides a parallel system of ehics under which commonly shared rules of secular ethics and fairness are compromised in favor of loyality to the religious tags. It is the availability of this parallel system of ethics that turns everything around.

No manual or doctrine can prepare the US army in Iraq or Afghanistan to deal with this issue.

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