We hear a great deal about remembering that the United States is not in a war against those who practice Islam. It is less clear if some who practice Islam try to remember that as well.
The Taliban in Afghanistan has taken "credit" for killing 10 international relief workers. Their guilt was manifest as the victims had copies of the Bible. Doubtless, they were spies and trying to divert the children from Muhammad under the guise of treating eyes and teeth.
The International Assistance Mission has been in Afghanistan since 1966. The nonprofit states on its mission page that it follows the code of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent: "We ascribe to the code that aid will not be used to further a particular political or religious standpoint. IAM fully commits to the standard that aid is given regardless of the race, creed or nationality of the recipients and without adverse distinction of any kind."
The leader of this service group was Dr. Tom Little, an optometrist originally from New York. He and his wife had raised their children in Kabul and had stayed there through the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war. He ran clinics for eye disease, always carrying saline solution to provide at least temporary comfort to those Taliban warriors he met.
Dan Terry had been working in Afghanistan on logistics for clinics and health projects for more than 30 years. Dr. Thomas Grams used a yak to carry his dental equipment, and in Afghanistan had learned to "negotiate the etiquette of the burka," as one commentator put it, so he could work on the diseased teeth of women who had never seen a dentist.
The killing of these 10 aid workers had an extra echo for me. My grandmother was born in the Belgian Congo as her parents were missionaries there, sent by the King of Sweden. Nils Westlind founded a station called Mukimbungu on the Congo River, and provided education and medical help to the people there. The Congolese were horribly brutalized by the Belgian rubber plantation owners, a story very well told in the book "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild.
Rubber was hugely valuable as bicycles and motor tires were beginning to be mass produced, and the Belgian government used sadistic oppression to force the "pagans" to work the rubber fields — taking families hostage so the men would work, and cutting off hands and keeping them in a basket to show what happened to those who refused.
When an abortive uprising came, being white was a death warrant. But when the rebels came to Mukimbungu, Nils Westlind and his family and mission were spared, because they had sheltered and aided those who went to them for help. Even in the middle of such horror, the principle that those who were there to help should be spared was still honored.
The Taliban are not such respecters of bystanders. The religious purity of the killings is marred by the fact that they robbed the aid workers before killing them, although they did allow a driver who could recite verses from the Koran to live. Some of these volunteers had been providing medical aid and comfort for so long that it is possible that the terrorists who killed them had been helped at one of their clinics as a child. But that did not gain them mercy; rather, it helped to single them out for killing as the Taliban cannot tolerate such an example that the Christians and the West are not entirely venal and corrupt.
I have often written that we need to realize that this conflict, brought home to us on Sept. 11, is not about money, or government, or poverty, or capitalism. It is about religion. One of the first acts of the Taliban was to destroy ancient statues of Buddha carved into mountainsides as it violated the commandment not to make graven images.
As Charles Krauthammer wryly observed, there is no Buddhist Imperialism. We should pay these people the respect of taking them at their word — they are engaged in a jihad to kill all Christian unbelievers, even the ones that help the afflicted in their country as an act of charity.
What is missing is the condemnation of the "moderate" Muslim leaders — the ones we hear are the majority of the faith, who wish to live in concord with other faiths. I hope that such repudiation comes soon.
