Deepak Chopra is a jerk. I’ve always thought that his spiritual self-help was a bunch of simplistic, self-righteous hooey (“The soul level is a very strange place because it gives rise to all activity without being active itself. Think about that carefully.”). But his political commentary is even more useless.

If you hate Bush as Bush hates Islam, try a change of awareness. Take any cause or individual you feel deep fear, anger, or hatred toward, and instead of nurturing your antagonism, try applying even one of the above points, if just internally. In fact, applying them internally is the most important step, since the war in your own awareness is the root of all external conflict.

The bald accusation against the President has no merit at all--the statement is both amazingly wrong-headed and overly bold. Far from hating Islam, Bush has been very careful to ensure that his actions aren’t construed as making war on Islam. Militant Islamic terrorists and the states that sponsor them, on the other hand, are completely fair game.

It would be like accusing me of hating Christians just because I want to see people like the abortion clinic bomber fry for their misdeeds. That doesn’t mean that I hate Christians, it means that I hate criminals and terrorists. It’s surprising that Chopra can’t manage to wrap his head around the distinction.

Beyond that, Chopra’s suggests acts that can roughly be summed up as: Gosh, if we were just nicer and took the time to understand each other there wouldn’t be a problem. More rational minds would thank him to grow up (even if they don’t support the action in Iraq).

The terrorists understand us all too well, and that fuels their hatred. They understand that we believe (in a very broad sense) in rule of secular law over the rule of religious dictate. They understand that we believe in women’s rights and gay rights and eating pork-fried rice. They understand that we like booze and porn and loud music. They understand that we’re pretty much okay with people who worship in ways that don’t look much like our own--we may make some unseemly jokes about them, but we don’t want them thrown in jail or stoned in the streets. Unless stoning is an act of intoxication instead of an act of violence--another one of those wedge issues between us and the terrorists.

Our understanding of them may not be quite so complete, but we do know that people who go around blowing things up for fun seem to make us a little itchy on the trigger finger. “...[The] war in your own awareness is the root of all external conflict” is pretty much meaningless when the other guy has improvised explosive devices and a charming willingness to blow us all up no matter where we are or what we’re doing. Our immediate conflict seems to have its roots in people who fly fully loaded planes into office buildings in the hopes of dealing an economic deathblow to the Great Satan.

Once we can persuade them that this isn’t the most useful tactic, then perhaps we can go more toward Chopra’s peace, love, and understanding stuff. Of course, if persuasion proves difficult, then it seems only proper that we minimize the risk by killing them off by the bucket load.