AN EGYPTIAN-BORN U.S. MUSLIM

Muslims Mourn For Bosnia in an Indifferent World

By Maher Hathout

In a pluralistic society, a major guarantee of harmony is the understanding of the different components of the pluralism—the understanding of one another, the sharing and appreciation of one another's pain, frustrations and aspirations will contribute to breaking the walls of psychological ghettos. It is morally right and pragmatically important that all the groups in our society reveal their collective suffering.

And so we American Muslims want everyone to know how we feel today—the extent of our agony, the darkness of our anger, the depth of our sadness. We feel what is happening in Bosnia as if it were happening to us.

I will not mince words and claim that we are upset because of the failure of law and order in the world, or the crushing of a promising democratic pluralism in Bosnia or the disintegration of the United Nations. Neither are we solemnly heartbroken because of the disillusion in American ideals or the loss of the leadership of our country to the free world.

We hurt because we see Muslims being killed because they are Muslims, women raped because they are Muslim women, children maimed because their parents carry Muslim names. We hurt because we see the genocide widely publicized, almost celebrated for the scope of its savagery, and yet nobody cares. In our perception, whether it's right or wrong, if the victims were other than Muslim, the situation would be different.

We hurt because the major powers in the world have not only refrained from helping the victims, but have also imposed an arms embargo that is preventing the victims from helping themselves. We hurt because, with unbelievable insensitivity, our country's leaders say that all this suffering is not worthy of the sacrifice of a single American life because the lives of Muslims are not worthy and their blood is cheaper.

We hurt because we see civilized people pricking consciences over the fate of animals while Bosnian Muslims are not exotic enough to be preserved. We hurt because we saw our country lining up the United Nations solid and straight to secure the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, but not to stop the flowing blood of Bosnian Muslims.

We are hurt to hear the obscenity of claims that lifting the arms embargo will increase the bloodshed, which does not mean the quantity of blood, but rather sharing the pool of blood lost with the aggressors. We are angered to see people barbecued in the "safe haven" zones and then to hear the suffering in Bosnia transformed into a debate on how to save the peacekeeping forces. Yes, we are agonizing for our brothers and sisters for whom there is no one left to mourn.

We harbor the kind of anger that is not amenable to erasure by time, an anger shared by one-fifth of the inhabitants of the globe; only fools can ignore its impact.

It is maddening to American Jews to have someone deny the Holocaust, because they know how the world denied the pain when it was inflicted. To American Muslims, it is even worse because the atrocity in Bosnia is not denied; it is shown. Nobody will be able to claim, as most did after the Holocaust, that we did not know, or that we only discovered the horror after the fall of Hitler and the liberation of Auschwitz. Here we all know, we see the genocide in our family rooms, then push the button to see who is testifying in the Simpson trial.

Yes, we Muslims are angry, madly so. It would be dishonest to keep it to ourselves or to create an emotional ghetto. We owe it to our fellow citizens that they should hear it in its crude truth. We will be stuck together with this anger for a long time. I know that I will never forget and I wonder if I can ever forgive.

Dr. Maher Hathout is a frequent spokesman on Muslim affairs and president of the InterReligious Council of Los Angeles. (This article was first published in the Los Angeles Times of July 28, 1995.)