LETTER TO THE EDITOR
In her letter (“Peace-loving Muslims must take a stand”, August 1) in response to my letter (“Vast majority of Muslims are peaceful”, July 17), Ms. Marian Schneps erroneously claimed, “Vietnam was colonised…..but the Vietnamese do not go on murder sprees” but appears unaware about the 33,000 people who were killed by Vietcong terrorism in South Vietnam in the 1950s, according to Carol Winkler, author of In the Name of Terrorism or the 80,000 people who died between 1954 and 1975 from Vietcong terrorism, according to Benjamin Valentino, author of Final Solutions: Mass Killings and the Genocide in the Twentieth Century?
Your correspondent also expressed discomfort that ongoing series of terror attacks are a blowback of failed foreign policies by the West, citing, “there is no justification for the slaughter of innocent people”. But to genuinely understand how the seeds of violence the West planted in Muslim lands, causing the deaths of over 4 million Muslims, according to a 97-page report by Physicians for Social responsibility, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group in Washington DC:
let us not turn a blind eye to all the West has done to the Iraqis for decades, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Afghans, Libyans as well as Arab dictators the West have supported for almost a century or since at least two to three decades before 9/11 and the disastrous “War on Terror” that followed, let alone the repeated misadventures in the Middle East by the West that directly led to the creation of ISIS.
Worse still, worth asking why did it take up to an entire generation of people wiped out since Gulf war one in 1991 or before, for the equally abhorring blowback to now start?
Last but not least, your correspondent tritely claims, “It’s a logical conclusion, when people point to Muslims, since these acts are committed by Muslims” but why is it that when a Muslim commits a terrorist act, his faith is mentioned?
Timothy McVeigh, a Christian killed 168 in April 1995 in Oklahoma, while Anders Breivik, a baptized Christian killed 77 in Norway in July 2011. Craig Steven Hicks from the February 2015 Chapel Hill shootings is a self-avowed atheist yet why is every Christian or atheist not held to account in the same way Muslims have to (when ordinary Muslims understand violence has nothing to do with Christianity or atheism)?
SIDDIQ BAZARWALA
Siddiq Bazarwala 