I, Muslim (V)
Huzaifa jega It is upsetting that I feel compelled to “explain myself”, lest I am profiled as an apologist of terror or sympathizer of terrorists. I thus reiterate that whatever I say here, whatever ideas I seem to be getting, are meant to build a coherent perspective of Muslim consciousness as a means to an […]
Huzaifa jega
It is upsetting that I feel compelled to “explain myself”, lest I am profiled as an apologist of terror or sympathizer of terrorists. I thus reiterate that whatever I say here, whatever ideas I seem to be getting, are meant to build a coherent perspective of Muslim consciousness as a means to an end of curing the Middle East-West (or Muslim-Christian) geostrategic fissure.
This will stabilise and advance the cause of global multiculturalism and hence the prosperous survival of humanity into the high tides of the future. If you open your mind and heart to knowing your adversary, down the road you would perhaps realize that he is not your adversary after all. The fewer enemies you have the better your life will be. To solve some of our biggest problems, we must talk from the heart, hide and hold nothing back. What I want to do is sound the alarm, raise awareness about the looming danger for the world if we do not talk these issues out, hear each other out and assure each other. I consider this campaign as crucial to the welfare of humanity as the hot against climate change. It is about time; the ostrich games are starting to unravel and we must forestall the looming disaster on the pain of perhaps the same scale of destruction as failing to get a handle on our carbon footprint.
As a Muslim, I have been accused of complacency in the face of the evil my kin does, and in the name of the identity we share. I was told that we are not being emphatic enough in condemning and disavowing the bad people among us. I was told that we have to own up, be sincere and forthcoming with the truth because apparently, we only fake outrage, contriving a “half-assed” smokescreen to mask a subterranean conspiracy to dominate the world.
From where I am standing, it looks more and more like the minds of more and more Muslims are being disabused of this grief. I fear the day a critical mass is flipped. What Muslims and the Muslim world is accused of, we see being done by our accusers – and against us most of the time too. Most likely, they don’t see it that way because everyone actually believes they are the good person, that they have the moral and intellectual high-ground. That sentiment is a two-way traffic – the same way they are incapable of seeing their own ugliness when it rears its head but are so great in seeing ours, Muslims see their ugliness much better than they can see theirs.
To many Muslims who cross over to the dark side of the force, this is war! Within such a context, all is fair because morality becomes subordinated to survival. I remember an American congressman using this as an excuse against closing down Gitmo, and a former CIA director justifying a drone strike against a terror mastermind who was sleeping beside his little grandson. To put things in perspective, this is a justification for collective punishment – which is a war crime. During the Second World War, the allies firebombed German and Japanese cities mercilessly – specifically targeting civilians. The axis side also did as much, but that is not the question. The US dropped atom bombs on Japan and the targets were not military assets but people. Revelations from Snowden, from Assange, show the extent of atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. A former boss once drew my attention to a Hollywood movie about a little girl who lost her big brother, who happened to be her one solace in this world, on 9-11.
His question was if I would blame that little girl for any hatred she would harbour for Muslims for the rest of her life. I watched the movie, and it was indeed sad. But the thing is, what makes her story different from those of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of little girls in Iraq, or Afghanistan, who had their loved ones killed by American bombs? Do they also have the right to hate America and Americans – or maybe Christians? Are Iraqis any less human beings than Americans?
I remember another Hollywood flick I have seen quite a long time ago. I can’t remember the title but know that Kevin Ruud starred in it. In a scene, he remarked that he was glad for all the terrible things the CIA does even though he is not proud of it because that is what keeps him safe. It was a necessary evil.
Americans fall over themselves to thank their men and women in uniform. They are called heroes. This is in spite of what we now all know after Snowden, after Wikileaks, after Mai Lai and after Abu Ghraib. We are assured that such incidents do not represent what America is about, we are told that there is the good, the bad and the ugly to be found everywhere and those in the centre of incidents were the bad and the ugly Americans. But then the bad and the ugly caught red handed and convicted of crimes as terrible as those perpetrated by al-Qaeda and the other usual suspects were given presidential pardons. What is that supposed to tell the Muslim girl in Afghanistan who lost not just a brother but a whole family, and if that was not bad enough was also sentenced to life in the Stone Age. What about her?!
What does that tell her about the comments made by Ruud’s character in the movie cited? Does it not insinuate that Americans can be proud of their own mass murderers, and yet expect her nonetheless to condemn the takfiri mass murderers from her own side of the world who claim to be fighting for her?
To her, this is war. The same way it was okay for the allies to nuke and terrorize the Japanese civilians because it was war, she would probably feel it was okay to target civilians, like the Egyptian and Saudi terrorists did on 9-11. It was war.