People who are viewed as intellectually enlightened and informed are increasingly adopting the fanatical view that this conflict needs to become (or is already) a religious war. The sane moderates maintain in a tragically diminishing voice that this is a political conflict masquerading as a spiritual imperative. Not to diminish the extremity of the horrors which have occured, but unfortunately, framing this conflict as a merely political one offers only mundane, pedestrian benefits to the powerful elite compared to what they can gain through exploiting the frenzied hysteria of a patriotic American fatwa.
Who will our Mohammed be? FDR? Lincoln? Washington? John Adams. Benjamin Franklin? George Mohammed Walker Bush? And when it is all over how will we account for ourselves? Will we bother to examine our collective conscience then? Will we feel any need at all to do so?
We are revealing our true selves as individuals and defining our nation by our response to this attack. I daresay we are a nation of courageous individuals who, over the last thirty years, have abdicated arguably the greatest democracy (certainly the most powerful democracy) of all time, turning it over to an oligarchy of rich, mostly white, men who are using this crisis for their own narrow, selfish purposes. They are the real fifth column in any battle brought today by true patriots and defenders of freedom.
Freedom is not a prize to be awarded to either 'us' or 'them'. Ideally, freedom tolerates no imposed distinction; there is no 'them', only us. There will always be those who seek rebellion against society and who repudiate the inclusiveness of freedom. The danger is to adopt their destructive view as our own, to descend into their brand of hatred and to adopt their posture of judgementalism, thus becoming not defenders of freedom's high ideals, but the petty custodians of some cheap imitation of freedom. Let whatever distinctions there may be, be only the distinctions which others have chosen for themselves. Let us not lose our grip on this precious gift of freedom in the tears of our grief, nor in the fever of our just rage.
It is, least of all, a nation we defend; much more we defend the ideal of a free and open society which can exist anywhere but which, for a couple centuries now and to our great good fortune, has chosen to exist in America. We are blessed. Let's not blow it.