Author: Ali Sina
Publication:
Date: May 4, 2002
I received 3 emails just today from
Muslims and their supporters with pictures of Palestinians being victimized
by the Israeli soldiers. My answer to all of them and all those who want
to send more pictures is this:
You don't have to convince me of
the Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. This government is a terrorist
government. But does that make Islam a true religion?
The problem is that Quran advocates
violence and violence feeds more violence. The Palestinians are reaping
what they wrought. Their human bombers kept blasting innocent people in,
pizzerias, markets, restaurants, busses and they celebrated calling those
terrorists "martyrs". You and all other Muslims justified these barbaric
acts as "acts of desperation of a victimized people". Now the Palestinians
who jubilantly cheered the death of the Jews are dying by hundreds and
now they portray themselves as victims. Why not celebrate now? Don't you
believe in martyrdom anymore? Or is it that martyrdom is not valid until
you kill innocent people?
The Muslims in India burned a train
full of Hindus. They did it with utter malice motivated by their religious
hate. They did not calculate or care about the consequence. The consequence
was that Hindus retaliated and murdered innocent Muslims including children
and women ten times more.
Why Muslims do not see evil in all
the atrocities perpetrated by their fellow religionists and cry foul only
when their victims retaliate?
Retaliation is bad but it is uncontrollable.
When people lose their loved ones, they lose their rational thinking and
act with their animal instincts. I am a man of peace. I do not let any
thought other than love occupy my mind. But if someone deliberately and
out of malice murders my loved ones, would I still remain calm and cool
headed? I do not want to know the answer to this. Who knows? May be I will
become a beast too. May be I will seek blood too. Retaliation is evil,
but it is a genuine animal instinct present in all of us.
My friend, you and others keep sending
me heart-wrenching pictures portraying Muslims as victims. But we Muslims
are primarily victims of our own violent mindset. We are incapable of living
peacefully with other people. We are incapable of living peacefully even
with our own selves. The recent Sunni/Shiite massacres in Pakistan are
proof that as long as people adhere to Islam, peace will be only a chimera.
As long as you show the Muslim victims
to justify more acts of violence against the non-Muslims, this status quo
will not change. More people will die from both sides and more victims
will be added to the statistics.
Time has come to search for a solution,
to find where we went wrong, to look for the cause of these wars. The cause
of all these wars is in the hatred that we harbor against each other. As
long as we erect tall walls of distrust around ourselves and sort humanity
into Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Kafirs, Believers, unbelievers,
Blacks, Whites, etc, the distrust will linger and these wars will not end.
Why don't we see each other as humans first and then anything else? We
have fought wars with more wars; combated hate with more hate, confronted
violence with more violence and this is the result. Soon if our race is
not wiped out it will be decimated unless we change our ways. Now we have
the means to destroy ourselves and the will is there too. Why not give
peace a chance?
But peace will not come by "subduing"
our enemies and forcing them to surrender, believe in our deity or pay
Jizya to us as is prescribed in Quran 9:29. Peace will come only when we
abandon doctrines that promote hate. Peace will come only when we do not
call others najis (impure), Kafir (disbeliever) or enemy of God. Peace
is the fruit of equality and social justice. A religion that does not recognize
the rights of others to practice their own faiths and worship their own
gods is a religion that promotes injustice. We will not experience peace
with our lips eulogizing it while our hearts are filled with hate.
Why Muslims all over the world can
see only the rights of the Muslims when they are violated and are deafeningly
silent when their Muslim brothers violate the rights of others? Why people
from Bangladesh or Iran care only about Palestinian victims and not the
victims of Palestinians whose body parts are blown to the sky with bombs?
Why this pack mentality? Why can't we see each other as humans first and
condemn the evil wherever it comes?
You speak of the Palestinian rights
to defend their land. But, what about the rights of the Jews!? Jews are
hated in all Islamic countries, as ordained in Quran and their rights are
systematically abused. Shouldn't they have a land to call their own? Should
they continue to live, (or rather die) seeking the mercy of brutal doctrines
such as Nazism and Islam? Why don't you speak of the rights of the Jews?
Or is it that they have no rights because they are zimmis and hated by
your Allah?
Why when Baha'is are persecuted
no Muslim complains? Why they can be jailed, tortured to recant, their
properties confiscated and executed while Muslims say nothing? Why Hindus
can be murdered and wiped out from Pakistan and Bangladesh and no Islamic
apologist would condemn these barbarities? Why is it that you only write
to justify the crimes of Muslims and never protest?
This world is in turmoil. It is
anguishing in pain. We are all victims of our false beliefs. Let us abandon
those beliefs that make us hate each other. We Muslims are the sinners
because we have embraced a doctrine of hate. All religions are false but
no other religion cultivates this much hate in its followers as Islam does.
All religions promote disunity but none is as explicit in fomenting hate
as Islam. Let us empty our minds of these spurious beliefs. Let us cleans
our hearts of these hatemongering doctrines. Let us embrace each other
as brothers and sisters in humanity. Let us be Human first
