How relevant is our own innocence?
Reader comment on item: ICNA's Search for Radicalism Should Start Within

Dear John K.,

If you believe that because of our own lack of collective innocence, we should be allowing domestic groups to encourage acts of violence against us and others, I think you are misguided. I too found that the lack of recent evidence in this article was a bit telling. However, these fve youths were not born after July 2001, thus they were most likely influenced by things they were taught during their impressionable youths 8 years ago. Furthermore, they are probably not the only youths in this position.

I don't believe the point of this article was to say that we Americans are blameless, but rather to try to get Muslims and non-Muslim Americans to wake up a bit and recognize that this message is being taught to Muslims right here in our country and it has serious repurcussions.

Islam does not hide the fact that it is a universalist religion and its goal is that all humans accept its message. Furthermore, the history of Islamic violence and conquest is not relegated to the post-September 11th world, this century, or even this millenia. If you want to blame American policy for Islamic violence and terrorism, then I think you sorely miss the bigger picture. Islamic violent conquest has a history that goes back to the founding period of Islam. It predates American foreign policy, Western colonialism & imperialism and the crusades. I am not saying that Islam is the problem, rather the problem is the message of hatred and violence, of jihad, crusade, holy war, etc. whatever the ideology that spews it: The religion of death and the worship and glorification of death as opposed to life and tolerance. We must be aware that this message is spreading and its source is domestic as well as abroad and it has to be stopped. We should take a long, hard look at our policies, as we always should, but not in the hopes of appeasing those who wish to kill or covert us so long as we value our freedom and independence. And we should take a long, hard look at those within our own country who use the freedoms that it provides to try to destroy it and replace it with the intolerant religious regimes of the past. I think the goal of this article was to get the ICNA to wake up, look at its past messages and accept its own partial responsibility for this situation, and then hopefully work to correct the situation in the present for the sake of the future.

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