#108) Fighting Radicalization

June 5, 2017

Dear Mr. President,

There's this dreadful invasive plant called Japanese knotweed that looks like bamboo and spreads like wildfire.  It's big, it grows fast, and it chokes out every living thing near it. No other plant can survive when Japanese knotweed is around.  There's a huge patch of it that straddles the fence between me and my neighbor so that half of it is on her side of the fence and the other half on mine.   Years ago, when I bought the house, I removed all of it and immediately planted orange daylilies where the knotweed once stood.  Daylilies spread fast and are very pretty.  Now when a stray knotweed pokes it's ugly head up I rip it right out and voila…I have a beautiful daylily bed.  My neighbor ignored the knotweed for years until it got so out of control that it couldn't be ignored any longer.  She hired a guy who spent an entire day chopping this stuff with a machete and hauling it away.  It was a massive undertaking.  But, alas, she did not plant something fast growing in it's place and within a week new baby knotweeds were poking through the soil and reclaiming their territory.  In fact, they came back bigger and stronger than before.

Stay with me Mr. Trump, this is where it gets complicated….because this is an analogy.  An analogy explains a thing or idea by comparing it to something else that is more familiar.  In this case, the Japanese knotweed is the radicalization of Islamic beliefs.  If these beliefs are allowed to flourish and grow they will choke out all other beliefs.  So how do you kill an idea or a belief? (Hint: not with a travel ban.)  Well, it's kind of a trick question really because you can't kill an idea.  But what you can do is slow down the spread of that idea by planting a bigger and better idea; an idea that everyone likes and that will spread faster and farther than the dangerous idea.

In this type of battle, a battle of beliefs and ideas, facts become weapons. Sure we need security forces and guns and the men and women of our armed services are doing amazing work.  But what we need more of are facts. There are Islamic clerics all over the world who are fighting terrorism and radicalization through the dissemination of truth and they need our support.  Muslims must step up and talk to other Muslims and change hearts and minds by building relationships and community.  They must stop young people from slipping through the cracks and falling into the path of terrorism. Non-Muslim religions must be in partnership with mosques and clerics who speak the truth about Islam because it's not enough to just remove the weeds, we must plant something better and stronger in their place.

John F. Kennedy said, "A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.  Ideas have endurance without death." 

In a war of ideas words matter and your words matter more than most. So now is the time use your words (and facts)to plant the seeds of the idea of brotherhood and peaceful co-existence between religions. Before it is too late.

Sincerely,

Amy Beaton