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FRONTLINE : This is an edited transcript of an
interview that took place in September 2006.
Q: Linden MacIntyre : What are the roots
of Muslim rage?
A: Hamza Yusuf: If you
had one word to describe the root of all this rage, it's humiliation. Arabs in
particular are extremely proud people. If you look at what happened in Lebanon
recently, the Arabs kind of raised their head-- they think it's a big victory,
the fact that their whole country was destroyed and over a thousand people were
killed, many of them children. Why is it a victory? Because they fought back.
That's all. "OK, you can crush
us into the Earth, but you're not going to get us to submit." And I think
that's deeply rooted in Muslim consciousness, the idea of not submitting to
anything other than God. "You can abuse me, but you're not going to win me
over. But if you treat me with respect and dignity, I'm going to fall in love with
you. I'm going to sing your praises all over the world because you're powerful
and you treated me with human dignity."
Q: Where do they see the proof of the humiliation?
A: It's everywhere. You don't think it's humiliating to have a foreign force
come into your land? You see, Muslims don't have this nation state idea.
There's a tribe called Bani Tamin. It's one of the biggest tribes in Saudi
Arabia and in Iraq, and they're intermarried. The West doesn't seem to
understand that. The Moroccans feel the Iraqi pain as their own. It's one pain.
So when you see some
American soldier banging down a door and coming into a house with all these
women in utter fear who've done nothing, that's humiliation, and it's going to
enrage people. And what are we doing there? There are no weapons of mass
destruction. They were never a threat to us. You know, Shakespeare wrote a play
called Julius Caesar, and it was all about the danger of pre-emptive strikes.
Brutus is convinced by Cassius to kill Caesar. Why? Because Caesar's ambitious,
because he might declare himself king. And the end of that play, everybody
dies; it's just disaster. That's the tragedy of pre-emptive strikes.
Q: What goes through your mind when you hear about all
these roundups of young Muslims who are supposedly plotting things in London
and in Toronto?
A: We keep being told about these roundups, and in the end, they're more
aspirational than operational. I'd love to have been in the meeting when they
thought that one up. It seems to me that they're just a lot of bumbling fools
out there.
Q: On which side of the equation?
A: On both sides. I mean, that's part of the problem. Violence is the last
refuge of the incompetent, and I think that's really what we're dealing with
here, incompetence. Both sides have been incredibly ineffective at achieving
their goals-- at least their stated goals.
Q: I'm trying to get a measure of just
how concerned people should really be though.
A: Listen, hurricanes are a much greater threat to us right now. Katrina did
much more damage than anything the terrorists could ever put together. Yeah,
there's nuclear weapons are out there and that certainly is a concern. That's
the job of these intelligence people to stop that, right? But stop making us
all live in fear and telling us about orange and red levels. All that nonsense
just simply has to stop. We need to calm down and think at a deeper level.
People can't think when their minds are clouded with fear. The fear tactic is a
tactic that's used by people who want to maintain control, and it's very
effective.
A democracy is predicated on an educated citizenry. You cannot have a democracy
with people that are more interested in what Nicole Kidman is doing or whoever
the latest fashion model is. If that's your interest, democracy can't survive.
You also have corporate interests here. We have an arms industry in the West
that is our No. 1 industry. It's bigger than anything-- automobiles,
everything. Now if you don't have reasons to build weapons, where do all those
contracts go?
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