"Islam is a religion of peace."
Mike, now that I have your attention, read this great article from my new favorite writer...jj
This story was printed from The Cornell Daily Sun.
Site URL: cornellsun.com.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mecca, We Have a Problem
Behind Liberal Lines
September 21, 2004
Sara Townsley
Over the weekend, three Kurdish truck drivers were beheaded and dumped north of Baghdad. Last week, terrorists kidnapped two Americans and a Briton, and a car bomb killed 47 and injured 114. At a madrassah in Bangladesh, a teacher cut off the ears of 17 children with a pair of scissors because they were not reading their textbooks loudly enough.
On Sept. 9, the Australian embassy in Indonesia was car-bombed, killing nine and injuring 180. The same day, major Swedish newspapers reported that Malmø, Sweden's third largest city, has been overrun by gangs of Muslim immigrants. The police can no longer maintain order, ambulance personnel are attacked with stones and weapons, gang rapes of Swedish girls have skyrocketed, and the number of people fleeing Malmø is reaching record levels.
A week earlier, terrorists in Kashmir dragged three informants out of their homes and beheaded them. Two Italian humanitarian aid workers were abducted in Baghdad. Ansar al-Sunna captured 12 Nepalese laborers in Iraq; one was beheaded, the other 11 were shot. Three Turks taken hostage in Iraq were executed and found dead on a roadside. A Turkish truck driver was taken hostage and threatened with beheading. Seven grenades exploded outside a cinema in northeastern Bangladesh, killing two and wounding 10.
At the end of August, suicide bombers destroyed two buses in Beersheba, Israel, killing 16 and wounding 100. A captured Italian journalist was slaughtered in Iraq, and two French journalists were kidnapped. In an attempt to gain their release, French diplomats openly sought the support of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Islamic Army of Iraq responded by blasting France as an "enemy of Muslims." The fate of the two remains unknown.
On Aug. 24, two Russian airliners were hijacked and downed by explosives in the lavatories, killing all 90 souls on board. A week later, a Moscow subway station was car-bombed, killing nine and wounding 51. The next day, a Russian school was overrun, leaving over 300 dead and 700 wounded, mainly children. The butchers of Khartoum continue the genocide in Sudan -- with the help of Syrians armed with chemical weapons -- leaving an estimated 50,000 dead, thousands more enslaved, and over a million refugees displaced.
And yet we all dutifully repeat: "Islam is a religion of peace."
With tiring predictability, academics and the press have taken up their role as apologists for the carnage. Universities cheerfully create Saudi-funded chairs in Whitewashing Jihad, and intellectuals manufacture reasons why we deserve to be slaughtered. Multiculturalists anesthetize us with fanciful "root causes," and students learn that "tolerance" means never pointing out the nexus between terror and Islamist supremacism. Muslim "civil rights" groups play the McCarthyism card, issue apologies for terror that sound more like justifications for it, and all the while their leaders keep pleading guilty to terrorism charges.
And in that bizarre wormhole where the universes of the extreme left and right collide, conspiracy theories proliferate, while the most horrifying actual "conspiracy" of our time is minimized or denied. The good news is, I'm not the only one who's fed up with tiptoeing around the problem.
Kamal Nawash of The Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism (www.freemuslims.org) wrote a heartfelt apology for Sept. 11 and issued a call to action. "We should not be afraid to admit that so many of our religious leaders belong behind bars and not behind a pulpit. ... Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims. ... Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against terror, we need to take the lead in this war."
Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian raised in the Gaza Strip (www.mesaspeakers.com), writes: "The very few courageous Arab writers who think and speak independently are often attacked and terrorized for their views, accused of being puppets of the Zionists. Apparently, standing strong against terrorism and for reformation in the Muslim world is viewed as a 'Zionist' conspiracy no matter how heinous the murders carried out by militant Islamists." She points out that the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has never -- not once -- passed a resolution condemning an Arab country for human rights violations. As the surviving black Christians in Sudan could tell you, don't expect the U.N. to help.
Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam (www.muslimrefusenik.com), also condemns Islamist atrocities and advocates an Islamic reformation. A lesbian living in Canada, Manji terms herself a Muslim refusenik, meaning that she "refuses to join an army of automatons in the name of God." She asks non-Muslims: "Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called 'racists,' or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?"
These free thinkers are Islam's Bonhoeffers, Niemoellers, and Solzhenitsyns. They highlight how Kerry's proposed "more sensitive" war on terror demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the threat rather than any diplomatic skill. Ayatollah Khomeini agrees: "those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless." Keep in mind, Kerry wants to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis by giving the mullahs uranium. Clinton tried that with North Korea in 1994, and gee, that worked out great. It's been said that trusting liberals with national security is like trusting a teenager with a fifth of whiskey and the keys to the car. We are fighting nothing less than World War IV -- the Cold War being number III -- and it's time we start acting like it.
Sara Townsley is a graduate student in BMCB. She can be contacted at set28@cornell.edu. Behind Liberal Lines apppears Tuesdays this semester.
Copyright © 2004 The Cornell Daily Sun. All rights reserved.
cornellsun.com |
