The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily
Thursday 9 September 2004 (25 Rajab 1425)
A Wake-up Call : Almost all terrorists are Muslims..
Abdel Rahman al-Rashed*
It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are
terrorists, but it is equally certain, and
exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are
Muslims.
The hostage-takers of children in Beslan, North
Ossetia, were Muslims. The other hostage-takers and
subsequent murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers
in Iraq were also Muslims. Those involved in rape and
murder in Darfur, Sudan, are Muslims, with other
Muslims chosen to be their victims.
Those responsible for the attacks on residential
towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two
women who crashed two airliners last week were also
Muslims.
Osama bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who
manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles,
schools, houses and buildings, all over the world,
were Muslim.
What a pathetic record. What an abominable
"achievement." Does all this tell us anything about
ourselves, our societies and our culture?
These images, when put together or taken separately,
are shameful and degrading. But let us start with
putting an end to a history of denial. Let us
acknowledge their reality, instead of denying them and
seeking to justify them with sound and fury signifying
nothing.
For it would be easy to cure ourselves if we realize
the seriousness of our sickness. Self-cure starts with
self-realization and confession. We should then run
after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that
they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture.
Let us listen to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the sheikh the
Qatar-based radical Egyptian cleric and hear him
recite his fatwa about the religious permissibility of
killing civilian Americans in Iraq. Let us contemplate
the incident of this religious sheikh allowing, nay
even calling for, the murder of civilians.
This ailing sheikh, in his last days, with two
daughters studying in "infidel" Britain, soliciting
children to kill innocent civilians.
How could this sheikh face the mother of the youthful
Nick Berg, who was slaughtered in Iraq because he
wanted to build communication towers in that ravished
country? How can we believe him when he tells us that
Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is
turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?
In a different era, we used to consider the
extremists, with nationalist or leftist leanings, a
menace and a source of corruption because of their
adoption of violence as a means of discourse and their
involvement in murder as an easy shortcut to their
objectives.
At that time, the mosque used to be a haven, and the
voice of religion used to be that of peace and
reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests
for a moral order and an ethical life.
Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent
religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees
in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder
the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that
if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a
whole, has been turned into a global message of hate
and a universal war cry.
We can't call those who take schoolchildren as
hostages our own.
We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct
journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we
cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the
sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds.
These are the people who have smeared Islam and
stained its image.
We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the
shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic
enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented
by Muslim men and women.
We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all
these heinous crimes, without confronting the sheikhs
who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as
revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons
and daughters to certain death, while sending their
own children to European and American schools and
colleges.
*Abdel Rahman al-Rashed is general manager of
Al-Arabiya news channel. This article first appeared
in the London-based pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq
Al-Awsat.
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Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
Allah yang disembah orang Islam tipikal dan yang digambarkan oleh al-Mushaf itu
dungu, buas, kejam, keji, ganas, zalim lagi biadab hanyalah Allah fiktif.
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