This past week there was a telling moment in the U.S. Senate when Tim Kaine of Virginia warned: “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator -- that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’s, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.” Kaine was effectively corrected by Senator Ted Cruz who noted that the famous statesman from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson set the proper answer to Caine’s concern by stating in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Kaine’s misguided concern about America being like Iran betrays an important lacunae in our current intellectual and political mindset as we approach the anniversary of 9/11. The terror attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 remains a defining moment of our century. Though this particular paradigm of violence afflicted the United States since at least the Barbary pirates of North Africa and President Thomas Jefferson’s own struggle to meet that threat.
Our intellectual culture is willing to worry about Christian nationalism. It is sadly willing to worry -- especially on college campuses -- about Jewish nationalism. The unique political danger of Islamic supremacism remains largely taboo. President Bush rightly sought to characterize Islam as a religion of peace. The world’s largest Islamic nation -- Indonesia -- is not a hotbed or primary political root for the kind of terroristic violence witnessed on 9/11 and the decades that have followed. Nonetheless, and because Muslims deserve peace, it remains important to challenge our intellectual culture that refuses to see the threat of Islamic supremacism. To be clear -- as President Obama often liked to predicate, it is innocent Muslims who bear the foremost brunt of the savagery that is Islamic supremacism. One need only look at the tens of millions of Muslims abandoned to the sovereignty of the Taliban in Afghanistan to understand the ugly dehumanization spinning like a top back toward militant terrorism. Women have been unable to attend school since America abandoned the people of Afghanistan twenty years after 9/11. Devastating earthquakes killing thousands there recently leave little recourse for the largely Muslim community directly harmed by the Islamic supremacism of Afghanistan. The same harms pervade the nation of Pakistan and Sudan. The same harms abound in Gaza where the Islamic supremacist group of Hamas kills largely innocent Muslims.
It is not, however, irrelevant as Senator Kaine notes in the case of Iran, Islamic supremacism does engage in genocidal violence against Christians, Jews, Bahai, and other religious sects. In Nigeria, Islamic terror threatens a sizable Christian population and has killed hundreds of people. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States formed a coalition of the willing to fight against “terrorism.” The term of terrorism was a convenient signifier for the militant Islamic supremacism that brought the crimes to New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. The U.S. scored many military successes against Al Qaeda and Bin Laden and ISIS and Baghdadi. This war must inevitably continue and we need to focus upon those in our intellectual culture who seek to continue deception surrounding this threat. Hamas is an Islamic supremacist terror group. It is fully responsible for every civilian death in Gaza since 2006 when they came to power. Recently, a Jewish woman from Mexico who was captured by Hamas on October 7 was released and able to make this justifiable rhetorical observation in Spanish: “I am also here today as a Mexican woman, because that is where I was born, where the cartels kill and torture people. They call them as they are -- terrorists, criminals, delinquents. The world doesn’t hesitate to condemn them, so that's why I wonder why Hamas, which burns children alive, rapes women, mutilates bodies, kidnaps children and adults, why are they not condemned in the same way? Why is Hamas considered differently? Why is it not considered the terrorist group that it is? Why are Jewish groups questioned when others are immediately believed? It's not just hypocrisy, it is betrayal.”
Mexican cartels employ all the symbols of savagery seen in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Afghanistan, and too many other places but the intellectual framework does not largely celebrate them as some sort of unsung hero like Hamas. This is a deliberate sabotage by our intellectual elite of the larger human conscience. On the night of September 11, 2001, Chair of Ethnic Studies and professor at Colorado Boulder Ward Churchill sat down to write a poisonous essay, ‘Some People Push Back’ where is stated that the World Trade Center victims were “little Eichmanns” who got what they deserved. I got to hear him in January 2005 mount his antisemitic screed about Israel after he accepted an invitation to speak for thousands of dollars given by our Jewish assistant dean at Miami University. I have warned for decades that antisemitism is burning a hole in our academic conscience.
From September 12, 2001 until around 2004, the United States was united in its understanding of a collective global enemy that wants to erase the United States and Israel from the map of the world. That momentary unity created a burst of patriotism largely unknown in the American 21st century. Sachin Peddada, a Ph.D. student in economics and research coordinator at Progressive International, stated this past month, much like Churchill: “therefore, the thing to do is to destroy the idea of America in American's heads so that they can see the humanity of everybody outside the warping of American exceptionalism and imperialism and all these evil things.”
America’s cyclical turn toward isolationism and a pretense that those who hate us will be deterred by the oceans is as foolish as the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797. In that treaty, we promised Islamic supremacists that we were “not a Christian nation,” and therefore not a meaningful threat to their political vision engaged in vicious killings and piracy across the Mediterranean. That logical fantasy failed and not until Jefferson sent the Navy and Marines to sack the pirate bases at Tripoli did the violence take a turn toward abatement. American military power remains so exceptional that as demonstrated in the annihilation of the Maduro drug boat, our primary political problem is not the lack of force but a lack of will. The annihilation of Iran’s nuclear weapon building program was a powerful signal against Islamic supremacism, but we must become concerted rhetorically at home that there is no justification for men to stand at any pulpit around the world and call for the annihilation of the United States and Israel. That is precisely the root of the problem. While in Iraq, the U.S. military went to such mosques and for a time squelched this acidic genocidal rhetoric. Iraq is far less dangerous than it has been in 50 years. While in power as dictator of Sudan, Omar Bashir argued in a public speech in Khartoum: “There is one battle -- in Darfur, in Iraq, in Gaza, in Somalia, in Afghanistan -- against the Jews and we are fighting one enemy.” He was pushed from power but new Islamic forces continue to commit genocide in Sudan killing hundreds of thousands of people today. Much of the violence is also racist in nature where the black skin of Africans is taken as a negative rhetorical marker versus Arab skin tones.
There can be no peace with the Islamic supremacism that remains orchestrated around the world. Disingenuous statements like those made by intellectuals within the United States should be strongly condemned. We should shed the fear of being called “Islamophobic” and challenge those rhetorical manipulators about how Muslims are the foremost victims of these radical supremacists. Hamas has killed thousands of Muslims in Gaza. The Taliban have killed thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan. Islamic supremacists have killed thousands of Muslims in Sudan. And yes, the killing of non-Muslims is a genocidal threat that they are acting upon around the world. The events of 9/11 were more than what Ilhan Omar described as “some people did something.” We must remember 9/11 and uphold the rhetorical safeguards necessary for a true world of peace.
Dr. Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of several academic books regarding political communication, presidential rhetoric, and genocide.
Image: National Institute of Standards and Technology/Robert Levine