With Honor

New Medal of Honor Museum honors selfless service to country, comrades.
By Jack Jacobs
Military analyst
MSNBC
Updated: 9:02 p.m. PT May 20, 2007.

This Wednesday, May 23, Brian Williams will host NBC’s "Nightly News" from Charleston, South Carolina, and moored nearby is the USS Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier. Brian is a member of the Board of Directors of the Medal of Honor Foundation, and the occasion is the grand opening of the new Medal of Honor Museum aboard the Yorktown.

The Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award, was the brainchild of Abraham Lincoln, who sought to recognize exceptional bravery during the Civil War. At the time, the only battlefield distinction was the Purple Heart, awarded in those days for meritorious service, not as it is today, for wounds received in combat.

Since then, about 3,500 Medals of Honor have been awarded. In more recent times, since World War I, most have been posthumous, and there has been no living recipient for any conflict since Vietnam. Today, there are only 110 living recipients, and many of them will be on the Yorktown on Wednesday for the grand opening of the Medal of Honor Museum in South Carolina.

Among them are the oldest living recipient, John Finn, who will be 98 this July and was decorated for action on Pearl Harbor Day. He enlisted in the Navy in 1926 and can transfix the most jaded audience with first-person descriptions of life in America before World War I and tales of his participation in American naval operations in China a decade before the Second World War.

The museum is the principal repository for artifacts relating to the Medal of Honor, but the real thrust of the place is not just the display of things but also the perpetuation of the concept of selfless service to country and comrades. There is an emotion generated there that can be duplicated nowhere else, and one reason is the actions of people. Try these:
Jack Lucas
Jack Lucas was a bit bigger than other kids his age and spent some time at a military prep school. So, when World War II began, he successfully lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines Corps when he was 13 years old. He was so good in boot camp that he was made an instructor, at 14. Not content to serve in the States while his buddies were in combat, he got himself aboard a ship bound for the South Pacific. Landing on Iwo Jima, Lucas saved his fellow Marines by throwing himself on two hand grenades. He miraculously survived devastating injuries, and when he received the Medal [of Honor] from President Harry Truman, Lucas was the youngest recipient since the Civil War.

George Sakato
In danger of being sent to an internment camp like other Japanese-American families, George Sakato moved to Arizona and tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but he was rejected as an undesirable alien. In 1943, the government wised up and allowed Sakato and thousands of other patriotic Americans of Japanese descent to fight, and he became a member of the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team. In eastern France, in difficult, mountainous terrain, he singlehandedly attacked a German strong point and then, only a 22-year-old private, led his squad through ferocious enemy fire to capture dozens of German soldiers.

Jim Stockdale
After being shot down and injured over North Vietnam, Jim Stockdale was a prisoner for eight long years, and for three of those years he was in solitary confinement. By any standard, the treatment he received was criminal and inhumane: beaten, tortured, strangled until he was nearly asphyxiated. He was brought to the brink of death and resuscitated, time and time again, year after year.

But he never gave any more than his name, rank and service number.

He had told his fellow prisoners that they were honor-bound to resist, and he led by example. Rather than let himself be used by the North Vietnamese in a propaganda film, Stockdale beat his own face to a bloody pulp and cut himself with a dull razor so that he could not be presented on film.

They threw him in solitary again, and he feared that he would ultimately break under the torture and cooperate. So he shattered the window of his cell and slit his wrists with the glass. He was found before he bled to death, but the torture stopped because the guards realized that Stockdale would rather die with honor than serve their purposes.

Clarence Sasser
In 1967, Clarence Sasser was a medic in the Mekong River delta of Vietnam. Under continuous and intense enemy fire, and without regard to his own safety, he crawled from soldier to soldier to aid the injured. He ignored his own many painful shrapnel and bullet wounds to save others and did not cease his assistance until loss of blood made him incapable of continuing.

The behavior of these gallant people was extraordinary, but the basic underpinnings of it are not. American service members are imbued with a code that transcends background, race and every other demographic distinction: don’t surrender if you can fight, never cooperate with your captors, accomplish the mission at all cost, love your comrades.

And so it’s not surprising that every recipient of the Medal of Honor will tell you that he wears it not for himself but for those who can’t: all the men and women who sacrificed so that we can live in freedom. It’s something worth remembering each time we have a chance to help our neighbors and instead turn the other way.

Moderate Muslim voices silenced

PBS won't show 'Islam vs. Islamists,' but you should see it, says ROD DREHER.
02:19 PM CDT on Sunday, May 13, 2007.

I've asked myself a thousand times since 9/11: Where are all the moderate Muslims? We're assured that there's a silent majority of Muslims who want nothing to do with the jumped-up jihadists. But those voices are few and far between.

Here's the good news: The makers of the PBS-commissioned documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center found some outspoken moderate Muslims and profiled them and their astonishing courage. The film shows these men mounting a lonely resistance against Muslim leaders in the West who are fronting a false moderate face to the public while using oil money from Gulf Arab sources to make their hard-line version of Islam the norm.

Here's the bad news: PBS refused to air the film as part of its recent "America at the Crossroads" series, even though it had been scheduled. I saw Islam vs. Islamists and concluded that it's absolutely vital to informed public debate. That PBS decided not to show, at least for now, such an important film is shocking.

Or is it? Most of the U.S. media has done a lousy job of critically covering Muslim organizations here, of asking serious questions about what their leaders believe and where they get their funding. These folks are quick to shriek "Islamophobia!" when a journalist points out their connections to radical Islam or asks straightforward questions about what they believe. The idea – and it's a successful one – is to squelch a legitimate and necessary public discussion.

As Islam vs. Islamists documents, it's a tactic they use with far less finesse on dissenting Muslims. Tarek Fatah and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, two of several moderates featured in the film, told me that the Islamophobia canard is useless against them because they are proud, practicing Muslims. Yet they say they can't get a hearing at many mosques or Islamic institutions because those places have been taken over by Islamists – adherents to a highly politicized form of the faith.

"They've basically turned our mosques into a political party of their own," says Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician. "We have nowhere to go to have this debate."

He's talking about the discussion regarding their religion and its role in a pluralistic society, especially in this time of war. Dr. Jasser warns that many Muslim denunciations of terrorism are deceptive.

"Terrorism is simply a means," he says. "The Muslim community has not had a debate about whether or not they endorse the ends of the Islamists" – namely, an America that is thoroughly Islamicized and organized around sharia law.

In the film, Dr. Jasser expresses confidence that most American Muslims are not violent but advises that most accept the Islamist view of world politics – conspiratorial, self-pitying and quick to blame America for all the Muslim world's problems. We also see in the movie a leading Arizona imam denouncing the reasonable and patriotic Dr. Jasser as an "extremist liberal."

Which raises a troubling question the film does not answer: How representative of the Muslim mainstream are these Muslim moderates? The truth, as one counterterrorism investigator told me, is that the Jassers and Fatahs are probably in the minority – "but their voices need to be heard."

Indeed. Muslims, especially young ones, need exposure to competing voices from within their own traditions making the case for pluralism. And the rest of us need to take seriously the warnings these anti-Islamist Muslims are sounding: Muslim leaders' honeyed words when talking to the media and English-speaking audiences do not necessarily make them moderates or friends of peace.

Why would PBS not want to air this film defending moderate Muslims under attack – even facing death threats – from religious hardliners? An official at WETA, the Washington, D.C., public television station overseeing the "America at the Crossroads" series, has slighted the documentary as "alarmist," "unfair" and "irresponsible."

Nonsense – as any fair-minded viewer of the thoroughly professional film would attest, if only they could see it. Islam vs. Islamists would only appear alarmist and unfair to those whose cover it blows – and by useful media dupes willing to protect them. If PBS is too embarrassed to broadcast this movie, it should release the rights so someone else can, and let the American people can judge for themselves.

The West is waging a war of ideas with well-funded Islamists who far too often have the mainstream media on their side. If we ignore prophetic Muslim voices warning us that most Islamic leaders among us are not the gentle lambs they claim to be, and if we leave Muslim allies to fight the battle against these wolves alone, we only sabotage ourselves.

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist. His e-mail address is R. Dreher.

Update: Here are some replies to this article:

Feedback.
Interesting e-mail responses to my Sunday column about Muslim moderates, like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and their courageous struggle against Islamists. This struggle is documented in the PBS-commissioned film "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center," which PBS has inexplicably declined to broadcast. This first one comes from a Muslim American former military officer:

Thank you for your opinion piece in the Sunday Dallas Morning News. What Dr. Jasser faces is not at all uncommon. For a long time, I was shunned by many in my community in [deleted] for having ideas outside the mainstream. Those ideas were completely harmless and included support for electing Republicans to office and support for the first Gulf War. My parents and sister, who still live in [deleted], have had to endure snide remarks and insults because of what I have said publicly . Groups like CAIR and MAS tend to do the heavy lifting for the Islamists in the US and this does truly pervade the mosque/school systems in many cities leaving many moderates no where to go.

Your help in our struggle is appreciated.

This one comes from a non-Muslim in Arizona:

Great and important article Rod. I happen to be a patient of Dr. Jasser's. He is a hard working, compassionate, up-to-date professional physician. He is very open to people of all faiths or no faith. I also happen to have lived and worked in Islamic cultures as a language teacher, in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. I speak Persian and some Arabic. I can do the call to prayer better than lots of Muslim religious leaders. I know many Middle Eastern cultures at their best and worst. I worked 17 years in the Middle East, in 2 to 4 year blocks, between 1965 and October 2001. I have many Muslim friends here in the U.S., especially in the Phoenix area.

Let me assure you that the problem of Islamists taking over Muslim American communities, and thinking, is far worse than the American media and government bureaucrats can imagine. Their critical analysis is impaired by the fear of being tagged as "Islamophobic" for commenting on the obvious. Europe, America and open, related states are in grave danger of destruction from within by Islamists who knowingly, or out of ignorance, pave the way for terrorist acts, by individuals or groups, which will grow in frquency and in spectcular devastation.