Celebrating Ramadan With President Bush

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from Reuter’s News Service, November 19, 2001, dateline Washington.  Hoping to give America’s wartime image a boast in the Islamic world, President Bush brought ambassadors from Muslim countries to the White House on Monday for prayers and a traditional Ramadan dinner, telling them the bombing must continue because evil hath no holy days.  In what officials called an unprecedented gesture by a U. S. President, Bush used the White House dinner marking the Muslim holy month to make the point that the war in Afghanistan is not a war against Muslims.  “We share a commitment to family, to protect and love our children.  We share a belief in God’s justice and man’s moral responsibility and we share the same hope for a future of peace,” Bush told the ambassadors who gathered in the ornate state dining room for a Ramadan blessing and to break their sunrise to sundown fast with a customary Iftar meal.  It was the first Iftar meal held at the White House and attended by a U. S. President, spokesman Ari Fleischer said.  Bush was joined by Secretary of State Collin Powell and other top administration officials.  Before the meal, the ambassadors representing more than 50 nations including Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen, gathered in the East Room of the White House for prayers.  Lebanon and the PLO were also represented.  Iran, Iraq, and Libya were not.  Bush did not attend the prayer service.  Monday’s event was part of a broader public relations campaign by the administration aimed at isolating Osama Bin Laden, whom the United States accuses of masterminding the September 11^th hijack attack and blunting criticism of the air strikes against the Taliban, which Washington refused to halt during Ramadan.  Bush defended his decision to keep up the bombing during the holy month, telling the ambassadors and other guests that terrorists have no home in any faith, evil has no holy days.  On another front in the battle to build support among Muslims for the anti-terror coalition, the Bush administration hosted a meeting of women cabinet members, law makers and business executives on how to insure that Afghan women have a voice in their country’s future.  “The rights of the women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable,” Powell declared.  At the meeting the Feminist Majority Foundation handed out tiny swatches of blue mesh attached to safety pins meant to be worn as a symbol of remembrance for the women of Afghanistan.  A spokeswoman explained that they represented the obstructive view of the world for an entire nation of women who were forced by the Taliban to wear burqas, head to toe shrouds, with only a mesh opening to see and breathe through.  “We are working for more opportunity and a better life for the people of Afghanistan and all the people of the Islamic world,” Bush told the ambassadors.  “I thank you for your friendship and I wish you a blessed Ramadan,” he said.

Tom:

Dave, there seem to be some contradictions here, this last segment that you read in terms of women’s rights.  On the one hand it seems that the country is trying not to offend, bending over backwards not to offend Islam and I would assume, the Qur’an, the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. On the other hand they are imposing women’s rights here, which is a contradiction to—

Dave:

Well, they are pretending that it was the Taliban and that they are extremists, like we are told that the terrorists are extremists.  In fact, this is Islam and the Taliban claim to be enforcing real Islam, they are true Muslims.  So yes, on the one hand we are really criticizing Islam.  We are saying, wait a minute! This is how Islam treats women and this is official, there is no doubt about that.  I find a number of other contradictions in here.  This whole thing was, it says, intended to show that the war in Afghanistan is not a war against Muslims.  We are trying to say that Islam is peaceful and Bush keeps saying that, other leaders keep saying that.  I would like to know when and how and where Islam obtained this reputation of being peaceful, when did it bring peace?  I don’t know of one incident but I can tell you hundreds of them how it brought war.  I just saw this morning, interviewed on CNN, a young Muslim who was captured in Kabul and I found it rather informative what he had to say.  He said, Osama Bin Laden is not the only one; there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims out there who want to destroy America.  And he said this, he said the real enemy of America is the Muslim Nation and that is what this is all about.  So it is Islam itself, he said, which opposes America and we have proof of that.  Who were the people that were involved?  It wasn’t just the Taliban there in Afghanistan, you had warriors coming from the whole Muslim world right next door thousands of them from Pakistan which is supposedly our, at least part of them, our allies in this campaign against terrorism.  And then he talks about, we share the same goal, that is, for peace.  Well, Arafat says peace for us means the destruction of Israel.  The peace they have or that they want is for the whole world to submit to Islam, to submit to Allah.  And, what that means is you must live like Muhammad, you must dress like Muhammad and the women of that day, you must eat like them and act like them and so forth.  They want to bring the whole world back to the 7th century when Islam began.  Tom, there is no doubt that this is Islam and President Bush is trying his best to hold together a coalition and say, “This is not Islam, these are fanatics.”  If the hijackers hijacked Islam, Muhammad hijacked it before they did.  I mean, we don’t have to go back over that.  He killed every Jew in Arabia; he forbade that a Jew could ever be there, no Jew could be in Saudi Arabia today.  It’s the death penalty to convert to any other religion.  It was Muhammad who said, “He who relinquishes his faith, kill him” and so forth!  This is Islam; this is what Muhammad initiated into this world.  It is jihad against the whole world, the whole world must submit and I don’t know what the Muslims think when our President continues to say that Islam means peace.

Tom:

Dave, in addition to that we have statements like, ‘We share a belief in God’s justice and man’s moral responsibility,” and so on.  That’s assuming that Allah is the God that Christians worship, that everyone that there is one God and we are calling him by different names and coming to the same—here’s my point.  What can Bush do?  Seems to me, in trying to solve this problem, he’s adding to it.

Dave:

I think the best thing that could happen is for the Muslims to realize you cannot make someone believe something by force.  And, if they made the whole world believe, that’s not victory that’s defeat.  What they need to do is recognize you win people with love, with compassion and with facts, with truth.  But they don’t have that, therefore they have to force people to become Muslims and we are seeing in Afghanistan that they have forced them to do something they didn’t believe and now they are celebrating freedom from what they supposedly once were the followers of