I just received another asinine e-mail in support of the President and his war in Iraq. You can see the full content of the e-mail here. In summary, the e-mail chides Muslims who have not spoken out against radical Islamic fundamentalists who have embraced terrorism against the West and, generally, holds them as guilty as the active terrorists because of their silence.

The e-mail attempted to lump silent Muslims in with Germans who stood by while the Nazis conducted the holocaust, Chinese who did not speak up while Chinese communists exterminated 70 million people and Russian peasants who did nothing while the Russian communists killed 20 million. It went on to list several other examples wherein people did not speak out while atrocities were occurring.

At the end of the e-mail, the author states we should cease writings that “denigrate and ridicule our leaders in this war against terror. They are trying to protect the interests and well being of the US and its citizens. Best we support them.”

I take offense to this thesis on three grounds.

First, there are many Muslims who have spoken out against the insane actions of fundamentalist radicals who distort the Islamic religion in order to justify their violence. Many Muslim voices continue to speak out against the terrorists.

Beyond this, I would remind the author the difficulty in speaking out against authority when one does not enjoy the freedom of speech we still enjoy. It is the rare individual who can summon the courage to speak out against injustice when the people against whom he or she speaks control all the physical power while he or she is unarmed and vulnerable. Then, too, one individual’s actions may have repercussions that affect his/her relatives, neighbors and other innocents.

Bottom line, speaking out isn’t always all that easy.

The second problem I have with the author’s point of view is the likening of the universe of Islam, which is a religious grouping, to groupings based on either nationality or quasi-ethnicity. When the Nazis came to power, the non-Jewish German people shared, to a great extent, the same basic socio-economic society. The same can be said for the Japanese before World War II and the Russians prior to the ascendance of communism.

Such is not the case for the Islamic universe. By lumping all Muslims into a single grouping, the author is ignoring the thousands of years of tribal conflict in the Middle East; conflict that still pervades the region and guides the actions of various groups just as much as does their religion. Despite sharing a common religion (well, as common as are all Protestants or all Catholics), long-standing tribal conflict is often the basis of many of the terrorist actions we see in the Middle East. And I won’t even attempt to go into that Israel/Arab thing.

Finally, the author closes his/her e-mail with an admonition that we should cease speaking out against our leaders who “are trying to protect the interests and well being of the U.S. and its citizens.” I fail to understand the double standard of, on one hand, criticizing the silence of a large segment of the Islamic population while, on the other hand, criticizing those of us who speak out against what we believe are wrongful acts by the U.S. government. This attitude seems, to me, to be a simple extension of the neoconservative mantra, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Again, Bush and his minions brook no dissent with what they “know” is in the best interests of all the rest of us.