Mohamad Bydon '02 spoke to approximately 60 students at Theta Delta Chi fraternity on Tuesday about Middle Eastern culture and America's campaign against terrorism.
Bydon is a dual citizen of Lebanon and the United States and is currently filming a documentary for a senior fellowship on Islamic religious rituals in Lebanon. He was in that country during the Sept. 11 attacks.
As a member of these two different parts of the world, he has a hard time siding with the either the pacifists or the pro-war advocates.
"If you turn the other cheek, they'll slap you again," he said. Yet he questions the effectiveness of shooting cruise missiles into the mountains of Afghanistan.
President Bush has referred to the events of Sept. 11th as an attack on freedom and the American way of life, but Bydon believes the situation is more complex than that.
He noted that the Middle East has a love-hate relationship with the United States -- they envy our wealth and culture but deplore our foreign policy, which is perceived as endorsing democracy and humanitarianism only when it is in this nation's best interest.
Bydon also discredited the theory that Sept. 11 was the result of a conflict between Christianity and Islam.
The religion of Islam forbids the killing of civilians, and most of the Islamic world was "horrified by 9/11," Bydon said, but they also understood that the United States may have "had it coming" because of its divisive foreign policy decisions.
He sees the situation partly as a Cold War issue. After the superpower of the USSR fell apart, countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, China and Libya were left isolated from the rest of the free world.
The United States' overabundance of power has prompted leaders to act as if the opinions of the world don't matter, Bydon said, but "on 9-11 we found out that they do."
So what should the United States do to fight the terrorists?
Bydon advocated intelligence as the key to winning this war. Physically capturing any and all terrorists is more effective than bombing, he said.
Since Palestine is always a rallying point for Islamic leaders such as Bin Laden, establishing a national homeland for the Palestinians would encourage cooperation among Arab people, Bydon said.
He also recommended that the United States learn from Israel's difficulties fighting terrorism. Instead of attempting to crush the will of the terrorists, the Bush administration should seek to improve the living conditions of the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and other neighboring lands.
Food drops are a good start -- the image of Afghans shouldering bags of rice bearing "Food gift from the people of the United States of America" can be a powerful one, Bydon said.
