Battling bus ads revisited

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And here are Pamela Geller’s reworkings of the same series of ads, using the term “jihad” in a way that’s both a legitimate meaning of the term within Islam and entirely incompatible with western democratic ideals.

The thing is, there’s an enormous spectrum of beliefs and nuances of belief within Islam, and even within Salafism…

And buses and subway ads aren’t the go-to places to understand that spectrum.

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But they’re worth watching to get a sense of how the public is being swayed.

Ironic, isn’t it, that as the New York Times reports, Erika Menendez told the cops:

I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers.

Hindu, Muslim, Sikh..

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For what it’s worth, Sojourners could have posted an ad that said, Love your enemies rather than Love your neighbor — both are equally biblical:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Matthew 5. 43-44

But then, that’s a bit long for an advertisement, isn’t it?

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Somewhere between Christ‘s command “Love your enemy” and Sun Tzu‘s “Know your enemy” we can surely find a place for “Honor your enemy” — and that, it turns out, may be of considerable importance. Describing the work of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Lin, Mehlman and Abney write in their Greenwall Foundation report, Enhanced Warfighters: Risk, Ethics, and Policy:

Grossman has interviewed many US veterans of the Vietnam War. Not all of his subjects, however, were those with lingering psychological trauma. Grossman found that some of the men he interviewed had never truly achieved emotional distance from their former foes, and seemed to be the better for it. These men expressed admiration for Vietnamese culture. Some had even married Vietnamese women. They appeared to be leading happy and productive post-war lives. In contrast, those who persisted in viewing the Vietnamese as “less than animals” were unable to leave the war behind them.

That, more generally, may be key to understanding why demonizing Islam and Muslims is such a bad idea. In Grossman’s own words:

It can be easy to unleash this genie of racial and ethnic hatred in order to facilitate killing in time of war. It can be more difficult to keep the cork in the bottle and completely restrain it. Once it is out, and the war is over, the genie is not easily put back in the bottle. Such hatred lingers over the decades, even centuries, as can be seen today in Lebanon and what was once Yugoslavia.

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