Michel's Commentary

12/12/2001  888WebToday    

"Islam," which in Arabic means "submission," is the religion founded by Mohammed The Prophet.  It numbers a billion adherents world wide; and like Christianity, it proclaims a divine revelation which is interpreted in a bewildering variety of different ways.

It is important to remember that the United States is not at war with Islam!  It is a war with a small handful of terrorists who justify their deeds by resorting to a certain interpretation of Islam which is by no means embraced by Moslems everywhere. Certainly not in the United States, where the vast majority of Americans who adhere to Islam are both loyal and law abiding.

That is what makes the case of John Walker so remarkable.   Native born Americans who who convert to some variety of Islam are comparatively rare, except perhaps for b'ahai, the universalist religion which is an off shoot of Islam.  It is astonishing that a typical American boy like Johnny Walker should convert to the doctrines of the Taliban and their leader Osama bin Laden.  Fox, unlike other traitor from the U.S. Navy in the eighties, who bore the same name, this Johnny Walker did what he did not out of greed but for the love of God.  At least, what he seems to think the love of God requires.

John Walker became a student of Islamic religion in college and, with sincere conviction, wrote the doctrines of the Taliban extremists on his heart. He then went off to fight for their cause in Afghanistan, where he was recently captured, still clutching his AK-47.

This is something almost without parallel.  One would have to go back as far as the Mexican War to find something close to it. There was an officer in the U.S. Army by the name of John Reilly, who was a Catholic immigrant from Ireland.  When the war with Mexico broke out in 1846, he not only refused to take up arms against his fellow Catholics south of the border.  He and some of the men under his command joined the Mexicans and fought against his fellow countrymen.  They formed their own battalion, know in Spanish as the San Patricios (The Followers of St. Patrick); and their memory is honored in Mexico to this day.

Because Reilly left the army and headed to Mexico before the war broke out, he was not tried for treason.  He was punished for desertion and is said to have drifted back to Ireland. Others who followed him after the war broke out, were indeed tried as traitors and hanged.

But what will happen to Johnny Walker?  It seems clear that he took up arms against his own country, and that is a classic definition of treason - a clear case of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" in time of war, as in Section III article 3.  The punishment reserved for treason is death.  It is considered a capital offense.

But the U.S. government was easy on John Reilly, who left for Mexico before the war.  It may chose to be easy on Walker, who moved to Afghanistan from Pakistan eleven months ago, before the September 11th attacks.  The defense would be that he did not leave the United States to make war against her, but found himself in circumstances beyond his control where he felt he had to as a matter of "religious conscience."

Paradoxically, precisely because he is an American citizen, he will most likely be tried in a regular civil court rather than before a military tribunal.  A military jury would be less likely to buy that argument and would hang him.  John Walker can thank his god Allah that he was born an American.

and those are my thoughts..........
 

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