In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

I am no fan of the Taliban. I hate their barbaric distortion of Islam and their barbaric practices and tactics. They are as much my enemy as they are the enemy of the Afghan people. Also, I – like most Americans – grow weary of the war in Afghanistan, and I look forward to our troops finally coming home from that conflict.

Nevertheless, there is no excuse for what those Marines allegedly did on that video. Yes, the Taliban are our enemy. But, we don’t urinate on their corpses. That is not what Americans should do. Ever.

Imagine, for a moment, if Taliban fighters killed our soldiers, urinated on their corpses, and then posted that footage online. How would that make us feel? How outraged – totally rightly – would we be in this country? Just hypothesizing such a thing incenses me to an infinite degree. Thus, we cannot think that what these Marines allegedly did was excusable. We cannot praise what they did, not even for one second.

It reminds me of this verse of the Qur’an: “Never let your hatred move you to commit injustice…” (5:8). No matter how much those soldiers hated the Taliban, that should never give them justification to urinate on those dead bodies. The same is true with Muslim extremists. No matter what America or “the West” has done wrong (in their minds), this never makes attacking innocent American civilians justifiable. It never allows killing the innocent to be right.

Yet, there is another issue at work here. The actions of American soldiers around the world, right or wrong, reflect upon America as a whole. But everyone in America knows that this video is not the accurate reflection of America. This video does not represent the truth of who we are as a people and what our nation is all about. People cannot look use that video and judge all Americans by that truly repugnant footage. We Americans are not those soldiers on the video who acted in our name.

The same goes with extremists who act in Islam’s name. Their actions do not speak for all Muslims. Their crimes do not represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims. We Muslims are not those extremists who act in our name.

If there can be any good that comes out of this terrible episode, it is that perhaps people can understand that the whole can never be judged by the crimes of the few. Just as it would be terribly wrong to attack an innocent American tourist in London because of this video, it is terribly wrong to firebomb a mosque in NY because of the action of Muslim terrorists around the world. The whole is never like the crimes of the few. Never.