WITH ALL KINDS OF ATTACKS HAPPENING IN THE WEST TODAY, HOW CAN ANYONE CLAIM MUSLIMS LOVE PEACE?
In an introspective article exposing the role of violence in Western history, with excerpts below, France’s pre-eminent 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte put it best in condemning his fellow French for their brutal rule in Algeria: “First, the only violence is [ours]; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror . . . So by all means, let us blame Islam for the carnage done in its name. But let’s be honest about how much all of our most cherished ideals, identities and ideologies have contributed to the death and destruction piling up around us”. (Source: Go ahead, blame Islam by Mark LeVine, 15 November 2015, Aljazeera.com)
MUSLIMS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR SOME OF THE WORST VIOLENCE OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS.
Since 1980, the U.S. has bombed, invaded or occupied at least 14 Islamic countries. Who invented and actually used the atomic bombs? Who invented and used the chemical bombs? Who launched illegal wars under the pretence of bringing freedom to a country? Who launched illegal wars under the disguise of WMDs and War on Terror? How about Catholic IRA bombing versus Protestants bombings? How about the destruction of black churches by white racists? In fact, who was behind the bloodiest wars that is, WWI & WWII in human history? Did Islam have anything to do with any of the above? (Source: Unknown)
Also, what about people with no religion who are just as much, if not more – guilty for crimes against humanity? Citing only a few brief examples, how about Pol Pot, Stalin, Chairman Mao, among others? Last but not least and given what a number of oil-producing Islamic countries are going through, further complicated by the failed Arab uprising disappointingly unsupported by the West; Western-led misdirected foreign policies that has led to several civil and sectarian conflicts under the pretense of the “War on Terror” – And yet even at its worst, violence by Muslims doesn’t compare with the horrific atrocities committed by the West’s global and colonial wars over the last hundred let alone fifty years.
BUT ISLAM IS A VIOLENT RELIGION AND THE MUSLIM WORLD MUST BEAR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE RISE OF EXTREMISM.
Considering the wars waged by the Christian and secular West over the last 50 years killing millions of Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide in Africa, the Middle East let alone Central Asia, it is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle back to accuse Islam of violent tendencies. In fact, Raba K writing for Huffington Post neatly surmised the following points:
Individuals who seek to blame Islam for all that is wrong in history, the world, and anything in between [need to be asked] how through centuries of history, spanning the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, European Anti-Semitism [The expulsion of Jews from Christian Europe], the Cuban genocide, the American genocide of more than 100 million Native Indians, and the brutal British colonisation which stole the lives of more than 15 million Indians [as well as deaths that occurred in] the First World War, Second World War, nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with a lasting impact to this very day), the British concentration camps of Africans and the enslavement of black Africans which resulted in the death of 158 million as well as the ethnic cleansing of Australia’s Aboriginals, Vietnamese being subjected to phosphorous gas by the US [during the Vietnam war in the 1970s], up to 200,000 killed in the Mexican Caste War of Yutucan, and millions of Russians by the hand of Stalin, etcetera, and yet not one of the above [more than a billion] corpses piled, involved the role of a Muslim or individual associated with Islam . . . (Source: How the Islamic State & The Mainstream media lies about Islam, 28 Oct 2014 by Rabah K, Huffington Post)
Given such, isn’t the secular atheist West or Christianity many times over more violent than Muslims collectively can ever be and whether each and every Christian or secularist today ought to apologise until he is on his dying bed for something well outside the pacifist teachings of Prophet Jesus (PBUH) and Christianity?
BUT AT LEAST THE JEWS AND CHRISTIANS HAVE NEVER BEEN THIS VIOLENT TOWARDS PEOPLE OF OTHER FAITHS.
A man of a Jewish and Irish background should know better about religiously motivated violence. Both Judaism and Christianity had their own violence-ridden dark ages and how the Old Testament in Christianity talks a lot more about violence, than the Qur’an does. The stoning of fornicators, blasphemers and the killing of homosexuals can all be found in the Old Testament. The Jewish Torah is not so different from the Old Testament either but this has no bearing over whether this makes a person following the Christian or Jewish faith any more violent than an atheist or agnostics could be. (Source: An Atheist’s (Somewhat) Relaxed View of the Qur’an on 1 Aug 2014 by Ronald Lindsay, President, Center for Inquiry)
Therefore let us all have a little sense of perspective. Muslims today are going through what it must have felt like being a Catholic in the 16th and 17th centuries. They too had “religious terrorists” who caused mayhem and bloodshed or in fact in some ways:
“Muslims have become, at least in many ways, the new Jews [of the 19th century]. They have become the scapegoats onto whom Europeans are projecting their anxieties about the future. Conservative and far- right politicians constantly intensify and exploit these anxieties in order to enhance neoliberal and nationalist agendas, while most liberal and left-wing parties have imitated the racist right, perhaps hoping it will bring them more votes.” (Source: On anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe on 5 June 2014 by Dr. Sara R Farris, Aljazeera.com)
STILL, THERE IS SOMETHING INHERENTLY VIOLENT ABOUT MUSLIMS AND ISLAM.
The imperialist West always try to dislocate the blame. It’s always the foreigner’s, the non-Westerner’s, the Other’s fault; it’s never the fault of the enlightened West . . . The West is incapable of addressing its own imperial violence. Instead, it points its blood-stained finger accusingly at the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and tells them they are the inherently violent ones . . . This does not mean we should not mourn the Paris attacks; they are abominable, and the victims should and must be mourned. But we should likewise ensure that the victims of our governments’ crimes are mourned as well . . . If we truly believe that all lives are equally valuable, if we truly believe that French lives matter no more than any others, we must mourn all deaths equally . . . The West, in its addiction to militarism, played into the hands of the extremists, and today we see the rotten fruit borne of that rotten addiction: ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of Western imperialism. (Source: Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves by Ben Norton, 15 November 2015, Salon)
WHY THEN ARE MUSLIMS FIGHTING EVERYWHERE?
Not all of the world’s Muslims live in countries with civil war. In fact, most of them do not. Among the 10 countries with the largest Muslim populations, only three – Pakistan, Nigeria and Iraq – saw civil war in 2014. (That’s the last year for which the Uppsala Conflict Data Program has data.) . . . The other seven – including Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Egypt, four of the five countries with the world’s largest Muslim populations – haven’t faced civil war for a decade or more. They may not necessarily be peaceful – certainly countries such as India and Egypt have seen their share of turmoil that has turned violent at times – but that violence hasn’t been sufficiently severe to be defined as a civil war, an armed conflict with at least 1,000 battle-related deaths in a calendar year . . . Over the past 15 years, several military interventions replaced relatively stable dictatorships with unstable semi-democracies where civil war still rages. The Arab Spring, which was at first a nonviolent popular uprising, wasn’t successful in toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, leading to the chaos and humanitarian disaster we see today. (Source: Are Muslim countries more violent? By Nils Petter Gleditsch and Ida Rudolfsen, May 16 2016, The Washington Post)
WHAT ABOUT VIETNAM THEN? THE COUNTRY WAS ATTACKED BUT THE VIETNAMESE DID NOT GO ON MURDER SPREES.
33,000 people were killed by Vietcong terrorism in South Vietnam in the 1950s, according to Carol Winkler, author of In the Name of Terrorism or how about 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? Surely, this classifies as a murder spree.
Siddiq Bazarwala 