What Will Happen When Gene Editing Is As Easy As Cut-and-Paste?
Perhaps you’ve heard of CRISPR — an enthralling bacteria-based gene-therapy technique that is spelled like a Silicon Valley joke, pronounced like the vegetable-drawer contraption in your aunt’s refrigerator, and promises, in fact, to so completely change the nature of our relationship to our own genes that Michael Specter’s recent account of it, in The New Yorker, was called “Humans 2.0.” They weren’t being all that hyperbolic: CRISPR is a way of dispatching a probe into a cell to seek out and modify a particular stretch of genetic code about a million times more efficiently, and much more cost-effectively, than has ever been possible before. It is often described as a genetic cut-and-paste tool: Using it, you can easily select any segment of DNA and replace or delete it. Which means that anything that’s genetic is editable, and since everything is genetic, at least partially, a whole lot of stuff might just be possible, from eradicating cystic fibrosis to (theoretically, anyway) gene-therapy sex changes. They’re already CRISPR-izing pigs to more easily grow human organs inside them for transplant. And, to fight malaria, unleashing an air force of reprogrammed mosquitoes.
(It is worth reading debate in in today’s NYT on similar topic like ‘ Why some American Muslims fall prey to extreme ideology of violence?’)
Muqtedar Khan teaches at the University of Delaware. He is a co-founder of the Delaware Council for Global and Muslim Affairs and is on Twitter.
How can we wrap our minds around the perverse appeal of ISIS to youth growing up in modern, liberal and democratic societies of the West? What is it that compels a young woman in Paris or a well-established young professional in California to eschew the fruits of modernity and liberalism, to join a radical movement that is so brutal and inhuman that even Al Qaeda finds it repellent?
According to some, these youth have embraced an ideology, a radicalized interpretation of Islam, that teaches gratuitous violence against unbelievers. Their policy solutions — profiling Muslims, making a registry of all Muslim-American, closing mosques, etc. — seem as arbitrary as the violence.
Others argue that when Muslim youth in the West — who are experiencing racism, Islamophobia and socio-economic marginalization or already alienated from their home communities — see a movement that is fighting Western imperialism, such as support for Israel and invasion of Iraq, they run to join it in the hope that they will earn victory in this world and in the next.
Finding real policy solutions won’t work until we subject modernity to a fundamental scrutiny. Why are youth in the West, where there are religious and political freedoms, equality and economic opportunity, turning away? The key question here is not what is the appeal of ISIS but rather why has the American dream and the promise of Western liberalism lost its appeal?
The answer is that modernity promises much more than it delivers and hence ultimately engenders disenchantment.
Muslims were told that if they embraced modernity they would become free and prosperous. But modernity has failed many Muslims in the Muslim World. It brought imperialism, occupation, wars, division and soul stifling oppression by home states and foreign powers. Today the most important element of modernity, the modern state, is crumbling across the Arab World, precipitating chaos and forcing Muslims to seek refuge abroad.
For Muslims in the West, unjust foreign policies of their new homes, persistent and virulent Islamophobia, state surveillance, discrimination and demonization can be at best alienating and at worst radicalizing. Perhaps it is those whom modernity has failed at home and abroad who are tempted by the fatal attraction of extremism.
But why Muslims only you might ask? My answer: Open your eyes and look, modernity is failing non-Muslims too. Egregious income inequalities, police brutality, rampant institutionalized racism, mass-killings, drugs, gang violence, sexual predatory behaviors, militarization of police, diminishing civil rights as the state becomes more intrusive and rising rhetoric of intolerance from mainstream politicians — they are symptoms of institutional failures, extremism and even domestic terrorism.
We can combat extremism only by recognizing and resisting it everywhere. But we must make the promise of modernity a reality for all in order to render the appeal of radical utopias less attractive.
Read views of other writers by clicking on the link below:
Washington — I am an American Muslim. I have spent my adult life teaching and advising senior military leaders in the fight against terror. Last night, as I watched representatives of the American Muslim community in San Bernardino, Calif., denounce the shooters who had just killed 14 people in their city, I recognized in their bearing and words their feelings of humiliation, horror and loyalty to the United States — alongside a great fear that a new round of Islamophobia will now follow.
I know from my own experience that more Islamophobia would be the worst outcome for American efforts to defeat the Islamic State.
As a naval officer I’ve taken an oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve trained members of the Navy SEAL teams, and my mentors include the former head of the National Rifle Association, the supreme allied commander of NATO, and the commanding general of the war in Afghanistan.
I have been deeply troubled by the anti-Muslim vitriol in our country since Islamist fanatics wreaked havoc in Paris. Fearmongers have already called for registering Muslims and closing mosques. The F.B.I. has warned Muslims about possible attacks from white supremacist militias.
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Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, comforts Farhan Khan, the brother-in-law of one of the suspects involved in the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.CreditMatt Masin/The Orange County Register, via Associated Press
If we don’t want to play into the hands of Islamic State propaganda that America is at war with Islam, we must stand up against Islamophobia. We should separate the few extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding patriotic American Muslims by working with the moderates, not against them.
The Islamic State has little to no support in most Muslim-majority countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll after the Paris attacks. Instead, with more than 60 countries aligned against it, the Islamic State is banking on Western societies to alienate their Muslim populations to increase recruitment.
In the latest edition of the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, which glorifies the Paris attacks, a recruiter makes a telling pitch. He writes that a Muslim in the West is “a stranger amongst Christians and liberals … fornicators and sodomites … drunkards and druggies,” and must come to the Islamic State to avoid sleeping “every night with a knife or pistol … fearing an overnight or early morning raid on his home.”
The Islamic State wants every American Muslim to feel alienated. Its false utopia rests on the warped dream that the estimated three million American Muslims will believe they can no longer live, thrive and worship in peace in America. We must not let that happen, even while we remain vigilant about the few American Muslims who wish us harm.
Certainly, Islam faces a deadly cult of fanaticism, and a few American Muslims have attacked their countrymen: Colleen LaRose, Nidal Hasan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, for example. More than 250 American Muslims have joined the Islamic State, according to a report by the House Homeland Security Committee, and 68 have been indicted on charges of supporting it, according to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. According to New America Foundation data released before Wednesday’s attack in California, in 26 deadly attacks inside the United States since 9/11, Islamist extremists had killed 31 people. By comparison, right-wing groups had killed 48, the data said.
Indeed, a few American Muslim preachers stoke sectarian divisions, ignore human rights, fail to condemn female genital mutilation, look the other way when women are killed in the name of honor, and demonize gays. Like me, most American Muslims condemn such perversions of our faith.
But critics argue that Islam is against democracy, nation-states, human rights and the separation of mosque and state. There are no good Muslims, according to die-hard demagogues. The message is clear: Be an American or be a Muslim.
Thinkers Forum USA is appalled and condemns the mass murder shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. Our condolences and thoughts are with the families of the victims of this senseless shooting and we pray for the speedy recovery for those that are wounded.
Thinkers Forum USA agrees with President Obama that sensible gun control is urgently needed to take the guns away from the criminals , mentally deranged and hate mongers who inflict injuries on the innocent civilians.
