GUEST OPINION, Oct. 3
By: Frank Strasburger
The arrest of Muslim Army chaplain James J. Yee arouses uncomfortable memories of another army captain in another country in another century. Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction of treason against France largely because he was Jewish and therefore easy prey for the powerful should give us pause. Since the Army is holding Captain Yee without charges and isn’t saying why, his guilt or innocence is impossible to judge. The few clues the military has released, however, are unsettling not because they seem to convict him, but precisely because they don’t.
A West Point graduate, Captain Yee is one of just 17 Muslim military chaplains (out of 3,150 altogether). Newspapers have made much of his conversion from Lutheranism to Islam in 1991, and CBS News, among other media sources, reported that "after leaving the service, he traveled to Syria, married a local woman, and changed his first name James to Yousef." Well, not quite. He did go to Syria to learn more about his newly adopted faith, and he did marry a Syrian. He never changed his name; Yousef is simply his wife’s affectionate nickname for him, based on his middle name, Joseph. That any of this is interpreted as presumptive evidence against him says more about our prejudices than his guilt.
As for Captain Yee’s arrest, we know only that he was carrying "classified documents" described thus far as a list of detainees and prison diagrams. Is it simple-minded to imagine that he would have needed the names and locations of his flock in order to serve them? It’s at least a reasonable question, but the Army isn’t answering questions. Equally disturbing, the public isn’t asking. Accepting at face value the claim that the documents were "classified" (and assuming there was some good reason for them to be), abetted in their suspicions by all of the circumstantial "evidence" the trip to Syria, this Chinese-American’s Syrian wife, his conversion to Islam and, worst of all, his supposed change of name from apple-pie "James" to terrorist "Yousef" most Americans have already convicted him.
It can’t be much fun to be a Muslim in America these days, as majority panic mocks our Constitution’s minority protections. Had our forebears written that document out of fear instead of faith, none of us would be safe.
If we let fear overwhelm our best instincts, if we permit our government to use such laws as the Patriot Act to rob our neighbors of their rights, if we willingly close our eyes to the wholesale internment of innocent people without due process, if we let jingoism trump the justice that is America’s true pride, then the terrorists will have won. For whether it is their terror or ours, a nation motivated by dread is a nightmare for all who live there.
To say such things in 2003 America is to risk being branded unpatriotic. An American flag has hung over my family’s front door since 9/11 and will remain there not as a proclamation of American supremacy but as a reminder of the distinctive gifts for which it stands: liberty and justice for all.
The Rev. Frank C. Strasburger is associate rector of Trinity Church and a member of the Princeton Clergy Association.