We Are All Collateral Damage
By Imam Zaid Shakir · October 4, 2011
The Roads to Peace
The roads to peace are paths of war,
The gentle dove will leave her scar.
The moral men to say the least,
Will kill us all to get their peace.
The roads that lead to victories gained,
Are filled with people full of pain.
Only our Creator knew,
We’d kill so many to save so few.
The ongoing slaughter of civilians on both sides of the so-called “War on Terror” is disheartening. Again and again nefarious forces see fit to totally disregard innocent human life in pursuit of a vile agenda that few of us know and even fewer could understand. The fact that misguided violence only begets more violence is perhaps more disheartening, as it promises more of the ill-conceived policies and wrongheaded “Fatwas” that have proven so ineffective in both prosecuting the war on terror and ushering in the victory of the “Jihad.” If current events are any indicator of future developments, innocent civilians will continue to die for absolutely nothing.
This is a war being guided on both sides by self-righteous murderers whose motives and proclamations mirror each other. Each side sees God as being exclusively with them. That being the case, the restraint and judiciousness urged by Christian and Islamic theology to guide the execution of war is cast aside with wanton impunity. Each side manipulates a vulnerable public to create a climate that allows for the perpetuation and the inevitable escalation of the ongoing slaughter. Each side reserves the right to use the spectacle of indiscriminate violence to “Shock and Awe” the opposition, yet will deny that its tactics can be described as terrorism. Each side sees their civilian population as hapless, innocent victims, while the suffering innocent civilians on the other side are acceptable collateral damage.
There will never be any real progress in ending this terror war, until we realize that we have all become collateral damage, unacceptable collateral damage. That being the case, there is no they or we in this affair. We are they and they are we. When a child in New York never sees his mother again because she was crushed in a collapsed tower at the World Trade Center, we all have suffered an irreplaceable loss. When an impoverished family in Afghanistan is bombed from the face of the Earth by a misguided missile, something of our collective humanity is destroyed by the blast. When a child in Iraq is born with gross birth defects due to his mother’s exposure to depleted uranium, we have all been deformed. When London commuters fear ever again entering the underground, because of the ill-advised actions of a handful of desperate fanatics, their insecurity touches us all.
We, the collaterally damaged, will continue to exit in a state of dehumanizing loss, deformity, and insecurity until we rise up, unite, and refuse to support at any level the policies of leaders who continually fail to heed one of the surest of all political lessons: killing innocent civilians will never lead to a positive outcome for the transgressing party. This realization is the first meaningful salvo anyone could fire in a real war on terror. However, as long as we are not as moved by the suffering of innocent civilians anywhere as we are by the suffering of those close to us, it will be a salvo that remains unfired.
Reprint from Scattered Pictures: Reflections of An American Muslim: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004TZP8IG/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_n60Iob1FRXCFX
Comments (37)
Gregory Abdur Rahman
October 17, 2011
as salaam alaikum, Simple math says that all collateral damage is not the same. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims are dying senseless deaths at the hands of the West and the greatest attack from the pseudo-Muslim side was only able to kill 3,000 in one shot. This Al Qaeda thinking and way of waging war is killing many times more Muslims than non Muslims. So both sides are not equal. How do we save the millions of Muslims dying for this nonsense? First, I ask you humbly, for you are the teachers of Islam, aren't there legal concepts that talk about the general good? If we have a few nuts and the Christians and the Jews use our few nuts as justification to kill thousands of Muslims and we know should not respond with an armed response because we have no real military position, then shouldn't we automatically do all we can to restrain the Muslim nuts who think they can match the Americans and the Israelis when it comes to massive death and destruction of innocent people? The West has jet fighters and drones. They run the air in any conflict. These deaths and the two sides of war are not equal. To pretend they are all the same is equivocation. The nuts who come from our masjids are giving justification and motivation for the slaughter of thousands of Muslims. Christians and Jews are not the issue. Bad dumb politics in the Muslim world is the issue. Liberal politics that support criminals and bad guys is the issue. Most of all, supporting Muslims in their bad ways only because they are Muslims, even when it causes massive death to innocent Muslims is the big issue. No leader in the West wants to occupy Muslim countries because it is too expensive. When will Muslims police themselves and stop the corruption and abuse and the fanatical anti-Americanism that poses as Islam is the real issue. The towers came down and then, the Americans invaded Afghanistan. If the Pakis reign in their bad guys, 90% of America's occupation ends. If the Palestinians move the goalposts and demand Israeli citizenship as their ultimate goal, 99% of the negative dynamic goes away between the US, Israel and the Muslim world. As long as these issues are not solved Muslims die 100 to 1. So if we are concerned more about innocent Muslims than we are about anti American politics, the extremists are our #1 problem and we stop the nonsense of lumping them together with the US and Israeli military. Fee Amanallah
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