Posted on: Thursday, September 20, 2001

Island Voices
This must not be a crusade

By David Panisnick
Professor of religion, Honolulu Community College

People are anxious. There are rumors of war. And we feel a little lost. We have been told and we sense that this will be a war unlike other wars. This will not be a war against nations or religions, or against races or even singularly identifiable ideologies.

This will be a mercurial war involving friends who like us for less than noble reasons and against "many enemies that know not why they are so, but like village curs, bark when their followers do." As wars go, this is an ambiguous genre.

Our elected leaders sense this dis-ease and have tried to lend shape to formlessness and weight to an airy and eerie face of hesitant resolve.

They have done this by resorting to the rigid and dualistic world view of our detractors. In this world, there is only good and evil, with us or against us, wanted dead or alive.

While this may be a dimension in which our president feels at home on the range, it is not one that lends itself to intelligent, let alone moral, decision-making. Ignoring complexity will not make it go away.

There is no contradiction between desiring the capture and punishment of these agents of senseless destruction and the willingness to critically reflect on our own historical and cultural involvement in creating the conditions that define the horror of our time.

I agree with the assessment that our excessive materialism has perverted human and national relationships and that our runaway consumerism has had an adverse effect on the allocation of resources to those in need, both within and outside the United States.

However, if we take a stand on the values of freedom, equality and brotherhood, how can we expect that this materialism and consumerism would not or should not evolve along the same evolutionary tree?

Nationalism and religion have been the two great profiteers in the market of human misery over the past two centuries. But this is neither about nationalism nor religion. Our children are under a death sentence as enemies of Islam, a view not shared by the vast majority of Muslims.

I reject this idea, not because I am an American, which I am; and certainly not because I favor one religion over another, which I do not. I deplore and will fight against this idea and its sponsors because I think it is intellectually absurd and I believe it is morally wrong.

If war it is, then war it must be. But not a crusade, please not a crusade; and never with a clear conscience.