"How Can We Love This One?"

If human beings are not loved by human beings, who should love them? Who should care for them, who should attend to their needs? It is in an unwritten protocol of any culture's moral standards to respect the lives of human beings, regardless of where they are on this planet. Today a great number of people have become the victims of violence and many are grieving and many are sad. And a great many are shattered by the fact that we may still have to spend many years to come in darkness and insecurity. It has not been violence in our past as a human species that has emancipated us; but it has been our compassion and wisdom.

How can one love this action of violence that took place on September 11, on the soil of the United States? It is not the act of violence that can be loved, but the decisions that we make in repairing and preventing further violence are the acts of love itself.

There has been the murmur of Muslim/Arab involvement in this violent attack. If this stereotypical statement is correct, then there is a way to show love in spite of September 11. As there are many orphans left behind in New York, there are also many orphans left behind in Iraq after the US and British bombardments, as well as Afghanistan. Those who grieve for the victims in the US can adopt an orphan, whether in New York, Baghdad, or Kabul. And if the child is a Christian, raise him or her as a Christian. If the child is a Muslim, raise him or her as a Muslim. This may lead us out of the inferno of violence and hatred, and open at last, a gateway to humanism and freedom. This is the core of Gandhi's teachings for those who are seeking a path to inner and outer peace.

No one is asking the US officials to sit in front of a wall and only meditate or pray, but we are asking them not to foster mass violence as the basis of their domestic and foreign policies. To cultivate peace takes more than just talking about it. If, for example, in this crucial, bitter and angry period, the US officials and a selected number of American people, particularly the families of the victims, could put a team together to go to Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, or for that matter other poor African and Asian countries, to distribute medicine, food and tents, the tears of the victims in those countries (namely those of Muslim people) will be shed to an extent that the American team may be flooded up to their knees in tears of joy. In this way we have their hearts instead of winning their dead bodies. And the likelihood of terrorism is drastically reduced and most likely will disappear, as a result of people reaching out to people. This behavior of benevolence is unprecedented in the history of any violent actions.

This is the hard way. This is the unimaginable way. But the simple and easy way is to go and bomb them.

As a Persian poet of 17th century, Sa'eb of Tabrizi, said:
"In loving the enemy, one must be inspired by an oyster:
Once it is cut open by a knife in its mouth,
It gives you a pearl."

If we are not ready for a peaceful world in whichever end and are not prepared to solve our fundamental problems, as we store hatred in our chests the savagery may become a fashionable behavior for a Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, etc.

"What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then?
-Carl Gustav Jung
"Live for others…"

Mostafa Vaziri, MD, PhD

Kathmandu, Nepal
September 17, 2001