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Clinton struggle2 "A struggle for the soul of the 21st century" | 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
Last point I want to make is this. We have to recognize that special challenges are presented by the Muslim world. I think I've earned a right to say this, I was the first president ever to recognize the feast of Eid-al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan every year. To bring large numbers of Muslims into the White House and to consult in every way. The last time we used military power was to protect the lives of poor Muslims, in Bosnia and Kosovo. And I tried to create a peace in the Middle East that would give the West Bank to the Palestinians and protect their equities in Jerusalem and a Palestinian state.
I think I have earned the right to say that this is partly a Muslim issue because there is a war raging within Islam about what they should think about the United States in particular and the west in general. And the war can be found in America. I was in Buffalo the other day and on the front page of the newspaper, a part-time chaplain at the state prison up there was suspended from her job for bragging on bin Laden and basically expressing sympathy with the terrorists. The New Republic has a story saying a prominent activist is now in trouble with the White House because he kept bringing Muslims into the White House who actually supported terrorist networks. This debate is going on all over America and all over the world. We've got to flesh this out. We've got to quit pretending like this is not going on.
One problem is that in the Middle East most governments are characterized either as theocracies, that is, there is no separation between faith and state, or they're secular governments but they're either very weak democracies or they're not real democracies. And underneath there are fundamentalist movements that essentially say the West is the source of all evil, and all truth was revealed and knowable once the Koran was given to Mohammad, and the practices of the Prophet were codified in the ensuing 300 years after his death. So it's all backward-looking. No open questions, nothing debatable. And in the complex combustible mixture of a lot of these countries, a lot of the governments allow people to go into the mosques and demonize us and demonize the West and demonize Christianity and demonize Jews because as long as they do that they think they're shifting the heat of popular distress off of the governments. And a lot of these folks have been our friends, America's friends and my friends. But we have created a discordant world in which it's hard to sort out who's where here. And we've now reached a point with all these people lying dead and these terrorist threats, with the anthrax and everything where people need to actually say what it is they believe. What do you believe is right and wrong?
And we need to a better job of getting the facts out. Most Muslims in the Middle East I'll guarantee you don't know that the last time we used our military power was to protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. I had a Kosovar family in my office yesterday in Harlem, bringing their kids to see me because they were so grateful that America had given them a chance to build their lives. Most people in the Middle East have forgotten, if they did know, that it was America that advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state and a reconciliation with Israel, which would protect both sides' equities in Jerusalem.
Now, we're not for running Israel out of the Middle East. If that's what they want, they ought to say that, but don't pretend that America has not been sensitive to the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians. It's not true. And I think in America we need to do more to give courage and voice and pictures to our vibrant Muslim community of people that are anti-terror. We ought to get out all over the world how many Muslims died in the World Trade Center and what countries they claimed as home. Everywhere I go in New York, yesterday I was down in a park and these young people came up to me and said they were proud to be Muslims and proud to be living in America. One was Egyptian, one was Pakistani, and they just hated all this terrorism. They ought to be given courage and identified and given support to stand against this.
And we need to do something, I will say again, about the schools. I saw a story the other day about a kid in a school in one of these madrassas who was taught everything about the Koran and he was a very admirable young man, the kind of person you'd like to have in your family. He got up at four o'clock every morning to pray, he could answer any conceivable question about the Koran. He had good character, but a poisoned mind. He was taught that no man every walked on the moon but that dinosaurs existed because Americans and Jews re-created them to devour Muslims. But he was a good kid. He didn't teach himself that.
So, we have to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate. You have, you know, Mr. [John L.] Esposito here at Georgetown whose book is probably the most well thought of text about the history of Islam. But you ought to understand what have been the theological battles between the conservatives, the fundamentalists, and the moderates in Islam. Why has it been a thousand years since there was a serious challenge mounted from reformist moderates? Except for Ataturk in Turkey, what Sadat wished to do and didn't live to do in Egypt, and what King Hussein did in Jordan. In 1991 he got everybody together and he said, "I'll give up some powers. I'll let you have a parliament, everybody can run, the fundamentalists can run, but here are the boundaries beyond which you can't step, because we're going to hold this country together." It is no accident that in the inner Middle East it is the most stable country now, because there is some popular expression of opinion and people have to take some responsibility for themselves. And that's the last thing I want to say to all of you here.
This battle fundamentally is about what you think of the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. You're at a university which basically believes that no one ever has the whole truth, ever, because you're human. It's part of being a human being. It's part of the limitation imposed on us by God. We are incapable of ever having the whole truth. They believe they got it. Because we don't believe you can have the whole truth, we think everybody counts and life is a journey. Hopefully we get wiser as we make this journey, and we learn from each other, and we think everybody ought to be entitled to make the journey. They believe that because they have the truth you either share their truths or you don't. If you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel. If you are and you don't agree with them, you're a heretic, and you're a legitimate target. Even a six-year old girl who went to work with her mother at the World Trade Center on September 11th. We believe that a community is you. Doesn't matter where you come from, doesn't matter what your religious faith is, you just got to accept certain rules of the game: everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, we all do better when we help each other, and we ought to argue like crazy because nobody's got the truth and we're trying to get closer. They believe communities of people are those who look alike, act alike, dress alike, and just to make sure they enforce the rules. That's why you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks in the Taliban in the movies on television. They paint the women's windows black, so God forbid, they won't be able to see outside and might be polluted, and in some cases even shoot people when they go outside where they shouldn't go.
This is not a perfect society, but it is one that is stumbling in the right direction. When you strip everything I said today down to one sentence, it basically comes down to this. Ever since civilizations began, people have fought with their own inner demons over whether what we have in common is the most important thing about life, or whether our differences are the most important thing about life. That's what all this comes down to. I'm glad America is a lot more different than it was when I was your age. This is a much, much more interesting country. But what gives us the freedom to celebrate our differences is the certainty of our common humanity. Otherwise we'd have to fight each other over our differences. But this is very hard to do.
Remember this is a country that was born in slavery. In my lifetime Martin Luther King was killed just before, a couple of months before I graduated from Georgetown, trying to preach this message. Bobby Kennedy killed two days before our college graduation, trying to preach this message. The greatest spirit of the age, Gandhi, killed not by a mad Muslim but by a Hindu who thought he was a traitor because he thought India could be a home for the Muslims and the Sikhs and the Jains and everybody. Sadat killed not by an Israeli commando, but by the predecessor of the number two guy in al-Qaida 20 years ago, angry at him, thinking he was not a good Egyptian because he was not a faithful Muslim believing as he did in secular government and peace with Israel. And my great friend, Yitzhak Rabin, killed not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli who thought he was not a good Jew or a patriotic Israeli because he wanted peace and a homeland for the Palestinians as the surest means of security for the Israelis.
This is not easy to do, but I'm telling you, no terrorist campaign has ever succeeded, and this one won't if you don't give it permission. You can have the most exciting time in human history, but we have to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. Then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things that we deny for others. Then in the end, we've got to be able to stand up and say, we are not against Islam, but we want to have a clear understanding about what we think is the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. If we do that, you will still live in the best time the world has ever known.
Thank you very much.
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