Come on, people: Look where an eye for an eye got Babylon.
Police investigate ‘backlash’ attacks in the UK.
I might also add that Hammurabi’s eye-for-an-eye came hand-in-hand with innocent-until-proven-guilty.
A couple of recent interesting notes from the Arab and Muslim blogging world:
There’s a ton of Arabic or Arab/Muslim-related material out there either apologising, publically condemning, or hand-wringing, almost all that I’ve read coming via here and here — an excellent site, by the way). One of the key threads throughout these sites, and one worth pondering, is whether all of this apology and condemnation is appropriate. On the one hand, terrorists do not represent the will or politics of most of the Muslim world: as a well-to-do, apparently heterosexual, white, American male, I frequently speak out against globalisation and capitalist dehumanisation (my people’s ill of choice), but I do so within my own society, in my own language, in an attempt to address the perpretrators and perpetrators-to-be of these ills; I don’t do so in Twi, Thai, or Arabic so that speakers of those languages will know that we’re not all like that. The United States government has feigned horror at home regarding the tortures of its minions in occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, but has never apologised. Part of that is an indecent pride, but part of that is the reasonable (though wrong) claim: ‘We aren’t the ones who did that!’
On the other hand, many of these protestations are in Arabic or Farsi. Poignantly from هنا دمشق (This is Damascus): ‘… تعليق سريع على تفجيرات لندن وإعدام السفير المصري يا …لصوص! أعيدوا إليّ ديني!’ ‘Brief comment on the London explosions and the execution of the Egyptian ambassador… Thieves! Give me back my religion!’ Commentary like that is not directed at people like me, who need a dictionary to read it… A lot of these blog entries are aimed at fellow Arabs or Muslims, and are aimed at inspiring change internally. But even for those entries in English (many of which are directed at the international Muslim community), there’s an argument for apology: Sometimes, to make cycles of injustice end, someone has to swallow their pride and take one for the team. Sometimes, an apology — even from the wrong party — does a little to ease pain.
Obviously, at the end of the day, ‘Should we apologise for the wrongs of our co-religionists, or should we stand our ground and reject the legitimacy of this image of our religion?’ is a question that individual Muslims will answer for themselves, and there will probably never be a global consensus among that sixth of the Earth’s population. Nonetheless, it’s a question that’s got implications for all of us.
On a lighter note, HijabMan, with his ever-perfect pitch, scares the Hell out of some people.