Moving on with 'Hope not Hate'
Moving on with 'Hope not Hate'
by By Susan Whitney
Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, UT)
09/11/2004
Lynn von Koch's parents worked for the Bureau of Land Management and were transferred to Grand County, Utah, just before she was born. So von Koch grew up in Moab. She watched her hometown get bigger every year as the red rocks were discovered by tourists from all over the world.
Yet in some ways, Moab remained a small town. In all her years of school, von Koch never had a friend who was Muslim. It wasn't until she went away to college, at the University of South Dakota, that she got to know any Muslims.
Von Koch is a junior at University of South Dakota now, majoring in political science, and she has a passion to help Americans and Muslims from other countries get to know each other. To that end, she is helping to organize a town meeting. She's inviting speakers and trying to get publicity. Her town meeting is one of a series of town meetings being organized by students across the country.
The town meetings, titled "Hope not Hate," will be held Sept. 11.
As part of the meeting, through a videoconference setup, South Dakota students will talk to Muslim college students in Beirut, Lebanon. Von Koch and one of her fellow students, Jon Walz, are still figuring out the topics for discussion. They are fairly sure that U.S. foreign policy will be one of them.
Walz also grew up in a small town — Huron, S.D. — and says he knew no Muslims until he came to college. He and von Koch found out about "Hope Not Hate" through their school's political science department and went to Vermont for a weekend last July to talk about how college students from Middle America might get to know college students from the Middle East.
Von Koch and Walz met with college leaders from Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, where town meetings and videoconferences are also to be held on Sept. 11. In addition to the Lebanon/South Dakota dialogue, the videoconferences on other campuses will include conversations with Muslim students from Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey. Family members of those who died on 9/11 will also take part in the town meetings.
Seth Green, a law student at Yale, belongs to the nonpartisan Americans for an Informed Democracy and is one of the organizers of "Hope Not Hate." He describes it as a call to action out of the ashes of tragedy. He says it is a response to the recently released 9/11 Commission report, "which stresses that the U.S. must share America's 'vision of opportunity and hope' with the Muslim world."
As for Green, his youth was spent in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was in Princeton, N.J., packing to go to England for two years of graduate school. Like most Americans, he was traumatized that day.
Ten days later, still disoriented, he found himself making a new home in London — in a predominantly Pakistani-Muslim neighborhood. The thing that helped him to feel better after 9/11 was the way he was treated by the women in his new neighborhood. Women his mother's age would stop him on the street when they heard his American accent and ask him where he was from. With worried looks on their faces, they would ask if everyone in his family was all right.
"There was a really deep, genuine concern. It wowed me," he says. Green was able to answer, with gratitude, that his brother had been in New York City that day but was fine.
During the two years he was abroad, he had a beautiful relationship with his Muslim neighbors, Green says. Yet he noticed a change in the attitude of many Londoners — and not just Muslims — a change in the attitude toward the United States. Meanwhile, back in the United States attitudes were changing as well.
Green cites Pew Research Center studies that show Americans have become increasingly suspicious of Muslims in the past three years. In July 2003, 44 percent of Americans said that Islam encourages violence.
Green compares that number to the same question asked in March 2002 — only five months after the Sept. 11 attacks. At that time only 25 percent of Americans believed Islam encouraged violence.
In the earlier survey, he adds, the majority of people in Morocco, Indonesia and Turkey said they had a favorable view of the United States. Today, fewer than a quarter of citizens of those predominantly Muslim countries support the U.S. war on terrorism.
And yet, Green sees reason for hope. "It is important to remember that current tensions are not historically rooted," he says. We had more respect for each other only two and a half years ago.
People in the United States have forgotten that a billion Muslims are moderate and nonviolent, he says, even though Muslims might be critical of U.S. foreign policy. The reason we've forgotten is because "90 percent of our news coverage today of the Muslim world is about acts of terrorism." In the same manner, Muslims are being presented with an incomplete view of America, he says.
The lack of international solidarity comes from our lack of knowledge of each other, not from any lack of common values, Green says.
As for von Koch, she grew up caring about foreign policy and the global economy, she says. And maybe other people her age, even people who came from larger towns, were not all that interested. But since Sept. 11, 2001, they've started to care, she says.
She finds her hope for the future in the people her age. She sees a growing interest in foreign affairs, a growing number of students who are registering to vote. "That's where the hope lies."