We Need a Deeper Understanding, Wiser Rhetoric

In response to the terrorist attacks in India, how would you advise President-elect Obama and his new foreign policy team to confront religious extremism and terrorism?

1.....Responsive to any terrorist attack anywhere, the White House should immediately express sympathy to the sufferers and inquire of the afflicted government how the U.S. might be helpful. Nothing more should be said until there is some clarity about who the terrorists were and what they hoped to achieve.

2.....The White House should be careful about calling terrorists religious. Some - for example, the leader of the 9/11 attack, Mohamed Atta - clearly are. Some have mixed motives. And some are not religious in any traditional sense.

3.....But even if there is clarity about who the terrorists were and that their motivation was dominantly religious, the White House should avoid emphasizing the religion factor. Religion-driven terrorists hope to achieve, in addition to chaos, an intensification of inter-religious conflict. They see themselves as the purist representatives of their religion, which they view as under attack by any government mentioning their religion as the central motivation for their terrorist activity. The more their religion is mentioned, the more heroic and martyrial they feel, and the more energized to further their terrorism.

4.....Any non-governmental religion-driven terrorist act anywhere provides the White House with the opportunity to denounce sectarian violence and to promote inter-religious understanding and cooperation. The fact that Obama has had personal experience of more than one religious culture - a range of experience unique in the history of the U.S. presidency - is a plus in seizing just such an opportunity.

5.....The White House is the executive branch of a government which never has been identified with any one religion. This is an internal textual fact, clear in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. The international advantage of this fact appeared first in the (1796) Treaty of Tripoli, which specifies that the U.S. government, being nonreligious, is free to make peace with governments which are religious. The fact that the American people practice the Christian religion more than do any other people in the West is irrelevant to the religion neutrality of the American government.

6.....I would "advise" the Obama White House to "confront religious extremism and terrorism" with greater rhetorical, intelligence, and military skill than the present White House has exercised. The rhetoric should appeal to governments, religious and nonreligious, to cooperate in quashing anti-governmental use of violence to promote sectarian ends. It should use the fact that the U.S. government is nonreligious to counter Islamist rhetoric accusing the U.S. government of being "crusader," Christian against Islam.

7.....Empires die from the self-impoverishment of over-extension. The American empire is dead: from the point of view of debt, the U.S. is the world's poorest nation. We can no longer afford the audacity of Wall Street and the Pentagon. But crisis is opportunity. The Obama White House, with "the audacity of hope" through America's historic ideals, may lead us to a new understanding of Jesus' counter-intuitive beatitude, "Blessed are the poor."

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Willis E. Elliott

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We Need a Deeper Understanding, Wiser Rhetoric