Sergeant Alves

Despite the stylized misfortunes that will follow, Brazil entered this week into the realpolitik so coveted by the American right: the demonization of Islam. Mark my words: our next Captain Nascimento will be called Sergeant Alves. He will be our ancestral combatant against the thunderous forces of "terrorist Islam." The password was given this tragic Thursday by Rio de Janeiro Colonel Djalma Beltrame. "He was a mentally deranged individual with characteristics of a religious fundamentalist." It is with him that the great ideological uproar will begin. Now, consider this: have you seen if this "Islamic assassin" has among his belongings a cover of the latest edition of Veja magazine, suggesting that Bin Laden's people were roaming São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, scratching their holsters to sound the final whistle of the apocalypse?

By sheer coincidence, this reporter was in the United States on April 19, 1995, the eve of Adolf Hitler's birthday. That was when U.S. Special Forces soldier Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Building. Before it was known that the perpetrator of the terrorist attack was a native-born American, U.S. radio stations were broadcasting comments over loudspeakers attesting that, shortly before the building exploded, "men of Islamic complexion had been seen leaving the building."

What a disappointment it was for the American people when, technically on his knees, Tim McVeigh gave his last interview before his execution to the genius Gore Vidal – in which he claimed to have done everything out of patriotism. The matter was buried by analysts. The sentiment of patriotism is unfortunately almost never confirmed by known reality.

Let's clarify a few points. There's a lot of talk about Islamic fundamentalism. The creators of fundamentalism are the Americans, who in the 19th century gave global traction to the term as a literal reading of sacred texts. Now let's consider the well-known figure at the center of the current geopolitical debate: the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He embodies an abject submission to the fundamentalism created by the Americans. And he also follows, in his own way, another typically American invention: millenarianism. Every millenarian, technically, divides the world between good and evil. This is another boast created by another American, John Miller, hence the term millenarianism. For Miller, famous for having predicted, from the USA, the end of the world for at least 50 different dates, the forces of good would return to Earth through the hands of Jesus or the devil, whoever is his equal, and would eliminate the armies of evil from the planet. To be a millenarian, therefore, is to foresee a final battle with the forces of good destroying evil and such.

Ahmadinejad believes, and says so publicly, that this so-called Armageddon will occur between the forces of Shiite Islam and those of Judeo-Christian capitalism. And it will take place, with nuclear weapons, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, more precisely on Mount Mejido – from where, technically, the root of the term Armageddon originated. You see, the greatest distorter of Islam, the Shiite Mahmoud, was the person so celebrated by Lula, Celso Amorim, and their cronies. But don't blame Mahmoud. He learned all this by reading the vulgar versions of the US Republican Party, which he learned so much to combat. As Nietzsche noted, we run the risk of, by getting too close to the monster we want to fight, becoming like it.

True Islam has nothing to do with that: that's why it's the fastest-growing religion in the world, with 1,4 billion followers today. The Mexican essayist Octavio Paz taught that the first form of corruption occurs in language. The US government, whether under Obama or Bush, is technically the same as Mahmoud's: it transforms the beauty of Islam into a gospel of responsibility and violence.

I remember that the late and refined Sergio de Souza, founder of Caros Amigos magazine, contacted me 10 years ago. He wanted to put an Islamic sheikh on the cover of the magazine. I found Sheikh Jihad at the Islamic Tradition Center in Santo André, in the ABCD region of São Paulo. This reporter was used to reading in the annexes of Folha de S.Paulo, Estadão, and Veja that Jihad meant "holy war against the infidels." The immediate question to the sheikh, therefore, was: "Does your name mean holy war against the infidels?" To my shame, he replied that the real meaning of Jihad was "effort." This is how ideology fulfills its role, reducing the number of meanings of signifiers or completely destroying their real meaning.

There is a worldwide struggle to claim that all Muslims are the same as the psychopath who shoots children in Rio de Janeiro or the psychopath who presides over Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, interprets, based on his fundamentalism—which is a message to be read literally—the phrase that the archangel Gabriel said to the prophet Muhammad in the year 610 in a cave on Mount Hira. Namely: "There is only one god, who is Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet." By reading this phrase literally, Mahmoud therefore considers Catholics as his immediate enemies because they acknowledge the Holy Trinity, which invalidates the idea that there is only one god. Another point: the archangel Gabriel also supposedly told the prophet Muhammad that his jihad, his mission, was to create in the world what he calls "one," a supranational community in which everyone is equal, regardless of sex, religion, or ethnicity. If, according to the prophet, all are equal, then, as Mahmoud points out, one must fight those who consider themselves different, or in other words: the Jews, who call themselves "God's chosen people."

Both Americans in general and Shiites omit elements preached by the Prophet Muhammad from Islam, such as "dhimma," a principle by which Islam provides for tolerance of everything and everyone. But the truth about Islam is irrelevant to current geopolitical realpolitik. Minorities recognize it, especially in the US, where a significant portion of the 2 million incarcerated in state prisons are converting en masse to Islam.

Meanwhile, we have to learn to live with the cheapest ideology, which is that of changing meanings, as has been done against Islam. The philosopher Ernest Bloch (1885-1977) already warned in the 1950s about what he called the "contemporaneity of the non-contemporary" (Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigkeit). That is to say: we are in the 21st century and we have to live side by side with contemporaries who have the latest generation cell phones, iPad 2s – but believe that the fact that man went to the moon is nonsense. The psychopath who shot in Rio de Janeiro certainly had access to weapons by obeying the magazines that defended the "anything goes" approach to firearms – and which this week are calling for a public hunt for the presence of improbable Al Qaeda terrorists in the Brazilian interior.

Brazil arrived late, but it arrived, to the campaign that, in writing and openly, attempts to reduce Islam to a den of terrorists, willing to blow up life, the world, the devil, in pursuit of the idea of ​​finding 80 virgins in paradise who moistened their hair with the purest goat's milk.