Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer in the history of the universe, was in Berlin today to receive the Otto Hahn Peace Medal. He spent time with the press and posed for the cameras, despite his obvious physical suffering. Focus describes his condition as "shocking":
Wie in Trance, schweigend und mit geschlossenen Augen habe Ali die Pressekonferenz über sich ergehen lassen. Nach einer kurzen Kampfpose habe der eingefallene und abgemagerte Ali seine zitternden Hände wieder unter dem Tisch versteckt. Alis Ehefrau Lonnie kommentierte die körperliche Verfassung ihres Gatten: „Ihm geht es gut“.
Undoubtedly it took courage for Ali to make the exhausting trip to Berlin, but being honored for promoting peace is obviously important to the great man. Yes, it is sad to see the champion so ill, but we will always remember his glorious triumphs in the ring:
It is doubly sad how the great fighter – revered by millions around the globe – is being attacked by some neocon commentators in his own country.
The Harvard-educated professional Muslim-Hater Daniel Pipes recently published a diatribe against Muhammad Ali that was picked up by the right-wing media in the US. Of course, Pipes hates Ali for his conversion to Islam, but in this piece he attacks him for having evaded military service in the Vietnam War. Basically, Pipes accuses Muhammed Ali of treason, even as President Bush was honoring him with the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
Here is what Muhammad Ali had to say about the Vietnam War:
"I’m expected to go overseas to help free people in South Vietnam, and at the same time my people here are being brutalized and mistreated, and this is really the same thing that’s happening over in Vietnam. So I’m going to fight it legally, and if I lose, I’m just going to jail. Whatever the punishment, whatever the persecution is for standing up for my beliefs, even if it means facing machine-gun fire that day, I’ll face it before denouncing Elijah Muhammad and the religion of Islam."
"Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted. So what I did was for me, but it was the kind of decision everyone has to make. Freedom means being able to follow your religion, but it also means carrying the responsibility to choose between right and wrong. So when the time came for me to make up my mind about going in the Army, I knew people were dying in Vietnam for nothing and I should live by what I thought was right. I wanted America to be America. And now the whole world knows that, so far as my own beliefs are concerned, I did what was right for me."
Fighting in an unjust war violated Ali’s basic values. It should be mentioned that while Muhammed Ali risked prison for standing fast on his beliefs, Daniel Pipes was cheering the killing in Vietnam while safely standing on the sidelines as a student at Harvard. Pipes didn’t enlist to fight in the war he supported; like his paymaster, Dick Cheney, he had "other priorities". Muhammad Ali had the courage of his convictions to refuse fighting in a war he rejected; Daniel Pipes was simply a coward. That a Chickenhawk like Pipes accuses the Greatest of treason is contemptible, but that is the kind of behavior we’ve grown to expect from him.
muhammad ali islam islamophobie
