On Sept. 17, 2001, just six days after 9/11, President George W. Bush made a gracious and generous gesture. Standing with some of the top Muslim leaders in the United States, he declared Islam to be a religion of peace and asked for all Muslims, as people of faith, to be treated with respect.
He did not blame Muslims or Arabs for the attacks on America, he blamed terrorists.
It is that word that must be used to describe the perpetrators of the Paris attacks. They are, as Bush would say, "the worst of human kind," angry men with guns, bombs, devious tactics and an agenda of murder and destruction.
Recognizing them as anything more than terrorists is to allow them to not only hijack Paris and its people, it allows them, even in death, to hijack our views of the hundreds of millions of decent, law-abiding, peace-loving Arabs in the world and the more than one billion Muslims worldwide who share those same characteristics, including the ones already living in Prince George and Northern B.C.
To let terrorists appropriate the word Islam into their name (the Islamic State) is to give them a significant victory over one of the world's great religions. It would be the equivalent of allowing the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda or the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nations to identify themselves as Christian in their name.
They have stolen Islam's holy book, as well, twisting its words and ignoring its major themes to justify murder and violence in the pursuit of an apocalyptic vision that will earn them God's blessing and eternal life in heaven. They are incapable of seeing the horrible irony of trying to impress a merciful God by showing no mercy towards their fellow human beings.
Sadly, too much of the response is playing right into the hands of these terrorists.
Everyone from Republican presidential candidates to concerned Canadian premiers and MPs to area residents don't want to accept Arab and/or Muslim refugees because they might be terrorists. Some of the Republican hopefuls, including Bush's brother, have gone so far as to say America should only accept Christian refugees. These men are ignorant, of the wisdom of their party's last president, of the teachings of Jesus Christ, of the teachings of Islam and of Muslims themselves.
It was Christ, in the Gospel of Luke, who told the story of the Good Samaritan. A traveller is beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. A priest passes by but does not stop to help. A member of the traveller's clan does the same. A passing Samaritan, the equivalent of the non-English-speaking Arab Muslim, stops to provide aid. The point Jesus was making is that to love thy neighbour means loving all your neighbours, near and far, and extending mercy to those deserving of assistance, regardless of where they are from or how or whom they worship.
Real Christians, as opposed to hypocrites hoping to occupy the Oval Office, understand that as followers of Jesus, they are compelled to bring comfort to Syrian refugees. They embrace this responsibility and are willing to make personal sacrifices of time and money to be Good Samaritans.
While governments should be vigilant of refugee applicants to Canada, it must be recognized that terrorists disguised as refugees is a horribly inefficient way of gaining access to this country or any other Western nation. It's so much quicker and easier to acquire fake documents than to pose as a refugee and endure the months of uncertainty with family members in the squalor of refugee camps with no guarantee of being chosen.
The terrorists win if they turn us away from being Good Samaritans, turn us away from accepting other peoples and other beliefs in our modern secular society.
The terrorists hate us because we are free to choose or reject traditions, beliefs and even God himself, so long as we respect the rights of others to hold different views and the laws that offer both protection and peace to everyone equally.
We can remain true to our human decency in light of challenges to those ideals - be they based on Christian or Muslim or non-religious foundations of treating others the way you would like to be treated - or surrender those beliefs and become as unmerciful and unyielding and intolerant as the terrorists, to become our enemy to defeat our enemy.
Lay the blame where blame is due, not on the feet of Syrian refugees or Arabs or Muslims.
