Open Letter to Muslim Student Association CSU

Khaleel,
There is no need to return items offered when we met.

I really enjoyed talking with you. I sincerely hope that your peaceful endeavors succeed. There are higher priorities in your life now and I can appreciate that. I have changed my mind about the subject matter anyway.

I saw a program on the ever sinful (smile) American media. It is called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where an organization helps an American Iraqi war veteran and builds him a new house. He was a medical corpsman helping Iraqi children at a field hospital in Iraq. He lost his leg from an improvised bomb. Several people were killed. He, while being wounded, still directed his men in their defense and treating others that had been wounded. In this country he is a hero. He was a medically trained soldier who spent his time ‘in the field’ treating our wounded, Iraqi and American. He uses bandages not bullets to bring Democracy to a theocratic region. It may not be your culture to celebrate such men because they are from America, it might be offensive to some in your group and to some of your countrymen, I don’t know.

I do know that this show can be an inspiration for people caught in war. It can inspire Iraqi’s to help each other more. It can inspire Iraqi’s to the truths of compassion and freedom.

I would hope that one day there will be Iraqi television shows of Iraqis helping Iraqis in similar ways that bespeaks a free country. In the meantime they can be exposed to a different world to give them hope that all things are possible. Maybe one day they will realize that unless they are allowed and others are allowed to worship freely, guaranteed by a secular government they will never be free enough. It must be a secular government because a theocratic government would find it impossible to guarantee that. It is against the very nature of Islam or any other religion to allow for equality.

There is an Islamic follower here in Broomfield that has volunteered to translate this program for me. Heroism is universal and America should not be denied hers and the mention of them to the Arabs of the world.

We are sometimes seen as insensitive, boorish, dangerous people. We may be all. If one wishes to oppress, attack the free, we will rise to vanquish the heathen that wish to take away man’s freedom. We are not a class system based on theology.

We have our faults. We have our prejudices as individuals but we have more freedom than the world has ever known. Through that we have helped the poor and underclass in more countries than any other civilization. We have guaranteed that all Americans can worship as they wish because the spirit of this country is that freedom is above all else to mankind. It is our birthright from creation. “All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator…”

Freedom to think and work and prosper whether you believe in Allah, Jehovah, Buddha, Hindi, the Christian God or believe in nothing is cornerstone of our civilization. Anything less is tyranny. We know that. All we ask is that you live in peace. Freedom and peace, not I am right you are wrong mentality to the point of violence against others.

Sure we have sibling arguments and can do harm. We are human. But your friends and enemeies must not remain ignorant of the fact that they are angry at the vast majority of the world. Can all of these people be infidels? Are your Muslim brothers and sisters so sure of their superiority, protected by Allah, that they will vanquish all who do not believe in Allah as they? They have attacked every free country in the world.

Those poor foolish insurgents, terrorists imported from Iran and the Sunni’s, they think they will defeat America and the British. If our countries fail in our proposed changes to the Mid East, we have not lost. The seed of freedom has been felt by everyone that had a purple finger when voting. The infection is there and your Muslim brothers and sisters will have to kill millions of your own followers to kill this infection of freedom.

Muslim, Islam will never defeat freedom. It has been tried by ones even more powerful than Islamic believers. Islamic states where anything that ‘insults’ Islam is against the law, will fail. This is not freedom. What is insulting to one is a joke to another. Only after Islam and the Mid East realize that to disagree is not reason enough to harm. They must take themselves less seriously and have the humbleness to admit they do not own my mind. Disagreement is the essence of freedom. That freedom your belief may temporarily suppress, even for hundreds of years, (the dark ages) through religious indoctrination will eventually fail to the ever eroding water of freedom. As all things on earth are destroyed by water and time, so will tyranny of thought be destroyed by freedom and peace loving people.

Your faith is in need of real reform, not be nibbled at the edges, by those moderate enough to fend off the dogs of the infidels. Your clerics are not infallible, they are human. Each believer has the freedom to reject cleric’s hateful teachings without fear of reprisal because they ‘dare’ to disagree. (Is this the Catholic Inquisition all over again?)

The peaceful among you must arise in righteous anger against any spite toward freedom. You must be as angry and determined to die for freedom as you would Allah. Allah, if he is true to heaven and earth and truly the maker of all can absorb diversity of belief. He encompasses and embraces all freedom and peace. Our old testament is full of eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.

A more refined revelation came with the new compassion of Christianity. Then a finer revelation came, not in a single religion’s terms, but in the realization that every human being had the capacity to rise above that station from which he or she was born regardless of belief.

That finer revelation to believe in peace and freedom above all religions was created during our own revolution with England. America is mankind’s first example of this. It was born of unrefined understanding and again, I make no excuse for our faults, but in the dialogue around America’s faults, America’s divinity has been lost. That divinity trumps religious beliefs, that divinity is freedom.

In ‘defeating’ a country like America or Britain, nothing is really accomplished. Your friends or acquaintances might want to kill an American, but that is hard to do. You will have to kill the French, the Germans, the Australians, the Japanese and several billion Chinese. Americans are free people. Americans are universal. They are just not the free people of the United States, they are the free people of every country on earth. Muslims have attacked every country world wide. Free people in those countries will eventually deal successfully with them. I have no fear. Freedom gives a warrior a greater strength than hatred. It’s been proven over and over historically.

Islam needs to mature and become part of freedom, not a destroyer of it, for it to become successful.

So this American hero featured on Extreme Makeover will be the first entertainment with Arabic sub titles and voice over that Iraqis will be exposed to from this man you met several months ago. It will be done. Either by Iraqi television or a Radio Free Europe child called Radio Free Middle East. My main goal is to break the hold that Al Jazeera and the fundamentalist clerics now enjoy in the Middle East. Your family and friends are being shown only one perspective. The Arab perspective is not the only perspective these people should witness. Al Jazeera and Muslim clerics have enjoyed what America calls a monopoly. I and others intend to break that monopoly by having Muslims ‘preach’ freedom. There are thousands of American Muslims that are in our military that will be only too glad to step forward and do this for freedom’s cause.

I hope you come back to America to live one day. I hope you will realize that as familiar as Saudi Arabia is there is no true freedom there for millions of people, even you. I hope you go home loving freedom more than ever. I wish you nothing but good luck and God’s speed.

Thank you for meeting with me and enjoying a few laughs. I am free to speak about American perspectives to your group at any time. As you wish to educate others about Islam, (peace through education?), you should always promote Muslims educating themselves to the ideals on which America was founded. I will also answer questions from the audience. Maybe one should quit complaining about how Americans are prejudiced and start realizing as a guest in someone else’s house you must make the host accepted as much as the host must make you feel welcomed. Threats are never welcome. To place the sole responsibility of understanding on another without accepting equal amounts for yourself is hypocritical and comes from a position that some might see as superior. If that doesn’t float well from Americans in the Middle East, then it doesn’t float well here.

Your friend,
Gary