Where’s the outrage over Iran’s call for genocide? Nov. 3, 2005
Maurice M. Eisenstein
Post-Tribune guest columnist
The parents of the Porter Lakes Elementary School second-graders who listened to a presentation on Islam were upset because they were not forewarned.
This public discussion was dominated solely by “politically correct” perspectives. In reality, the parents may very well be feeling as I do: damn mad and not going to take it anymore.
I am damn mad about the “politically correct” watered-down presentation in educational and political circles of Islam, while the Judeo-Christian tradition is presented, if at all, for its centuries-old negative historical consequences. Twenty-first century Islam is a religion overtaken by hatred and intolerance in some quarters, advocating suicide murders and beheadings in the name of Allah.
What’s sad is, most Americans are too trusting to recognize this and too believing to recognize that their tax dollars are going to promote this brand of anti-Americanism.
Last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded that “Israel must be wiped off the map” during a conference in Teheran entitled “World without Zionism.” I am damn mad that this kind of call for massive genocide, second only to Hitler’s, is going unchallenged in the great halls of power in America.
Where is the anger from the politicians, the civil rights leaders, the church leaders or our educational leaders?
The Iranian’s call is especially enlightening when Islam was the one religion to openly support the Nazis. To this day, wanted Nazi mass murderers have a safe haven in Islamic countries.
What is most striking is that no Iranians or Muslims overseas or in America are challenging this call for genocide. This made front-page headlines in every news outlet — government or independent — in the Islamic world. The foreign ministers of America’s “allies” — the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudi Arabians — all refused to criticize the Iranian president’s comments.
On Friday, after the United States, Great Britain and the United Nations, among others, criticized the president’s statements, more than 1 million Iranian Muslims took to the streets in support of genocide.
Sadly, in our own community, tax dollars go to support many Iranian and Islamic faculty members at Indiana universities. Not one came out to criticize these genocide comments, but they have time to travel back and forth to Iran (and other mother countries) and publish journals and articles critical of America and American values and behavior.
It is difficult to argue that this was the belief only of a small group of fanatic radicals. The call came from the president of a major country with a lot of oil and with a full-fledged nuclear program.
What else did the Islamic president say? The goal of a world without the United States and Zionism “is attainable and could definitely be realized.”
The thinking is that the West, and in particular the United States, placed Israel at the heart of Islam and, therefore, they all must be destroyed.
The defenders of the second-grade presentation stated that it was not for the purpose of proselytizing. That may be true. But many of us certainly see it as propaganda to put America to sleep about the true nature of the war we have been fighting.
The parents should have been much angrier. Forget political correctness; call for accountability for America and your tax dollars.
Maurice M. Eisenstein is a professor at Purdue University Calumet. His comments do not reflect the university. Contact him at