By Jonathan Zimmerman
Hey, Americans, stop hating each other! Don't you know there's a war going on?
That's essentially what the United States' top commander in Afghanistan said in a much-publicized interview, condemning a Florida pastor who has vowed to burn Qurans on Sept. 11. "It could endanger troops, and it could endanger the overall effort," Gen. David Petraeus told the Wall Street Journal. "Not just here [in Afghanistan], but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community."
Petraeus was right, but he didn't go far enough. The problem runs deeper than the bigoted Florida minister whose stunt sparked protests around the globe. From attacks on mosques to charges that President Obama is secretly Muslim, America is suffused with anti-Islamic sentiment right now.
As Petraeus' comment suggests, the best argument against our current bout of Islamophobia might lie in the war itself. For the past century, America's overseas conflicts have catalyzed campaigns against prejudice and discrimination at home. So we have good reason to hope that the current war does the same.
During World War I, even as Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany "to make the world safe for democracy," civil-rights activists noted that black Americans were being denied the vote and other basic rights. "Cannot America, while she is preparing to fight for democracy abroad, do something to remove the stain from democracy within her own borders?" the black author James Weldon Johnson asked in 1917. By exempting African Americans from its founding creed, another commentator noted, America became "a laughingstock to its enemies."
A quarter-century later, with America's entry into World War II, the struggle against an openly racist enemy - Adolf Hitler's Third Reich - would again spark challenges to domestic racism. "We have the dual task of defeating Hitler abroad and Hitlerism at home," the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune declared.
In a more poetic vein, Langston Hughes pleaded for the Four Freedoms - freedom of speech, of religion, from want, and from fear - that Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised the world: "The President's Four Freedoms/ Appeal to me. I would like to see those Freedoms/ Come to be./ If you believe/ In the Four Freedoms, too,/ Then share 'em with me -/ Don't keep 'em all for you."
Following the defeat of fascism, America faced another totalitarian enemy: communism. Here, too, our racist behavior at home contradicted the message of freedom we trumpeted abroad.
"In waging this world struggle, we are seriously handicapped by racial or religious discrimination," Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Congress in 1963, urging it to pass a civil-rights bill. "In their efforts to enhance their influence among the nonwhite peoples and to alienate them from us, the communists clearly regard racial discrimination in the United States as one of their most valuable assets."
In our current battle against radical Islam, from Yemen and Somalia to Afghanistan, the foe takes many forms. But it stands four-square against the canons of liberal democracy: freedom and equality across gender, race, and religion.
These are Western ideals, the enemy says, and even the West doesn't practice them; just look at how it treats its own Muslim minorities. So every episode of anti-Islamic prejudice in the United States plays straight into our adversaries' hands.
Go to any al-Qaeda or Taliban website, and you'll see prominent coverage of the controversies over the "ground zero mosque" and Obama's religious affiliation: Look at these hypocritical Americans, proclaiming freedom for Muslims around the world; they hate the Muslims who live next door!
Ironically, some of the most hawkish advocates of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have also been pushing anti-Islamic prejudice. As Petraeus noted, their bigotry undermines the troops they claim to support.
As for those who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have argued that our overseas behavior increases anti-American sentiment among Muslims. So they should also be concerned about domestic Islamophobia, which does exactly the same thing.
No matter what we think of the war, we should be able to unite around a simple premise: To promote freedom abroad, we need to practice it here. So if you care about the future of our country and its role in the world, speak out against the bigots in our midst. They're not just "anti-Islamic"; they're anti-American.