Author: Ravi Shankar
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: July 11, 2015
URL:   http://www.newindianexpress.com/columns/ravi_shankar/Terror-Code-is-Islam-Versus-Islam/2015/07/12/article2914922.ece

Parables are often prophecies made palatable. In an Aesop  story, a camel complains to its Arab master that it’s too cold outside. The Arab allows it to put its head inside his tent. In the end, it moves in, forcing the Arab out.

Terrorism is the camel, and the Arab, as then, is the Arab now.

Having been used by the Saudis, Qataris, Libyans, Palestinians and Yemenis against the infidel West, the Arab is slowly realising that his camel has become a monstrous beast that has turned on its master. The world thought al-Qaeda was Frankenstein, but compared to the IS camel, it’s just a goat. In the end of June, for the first time, IS beheaded two women for “sorcery”. Women are stoned to death for adultery. The terror group crucified five men in Syria for eating in the day during Ramzan. So all the young men and boys from India, seduced by the silver-tongued preachers on the Internet who woo them to come to Syria for the IS, should be aware of one cardinal fact—this is not a clash of civilisations, but a clash of camels for a single tent. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights states that 3,027 civilians, rebels, soldiers and even IS members were executed by the group since it declared its own ‘caliphate’. Some IS fighters, sick of the brutality and hypocrisy, were fleeing back home. The people al-Qaeda and IS are killing are not infidels, but fellow Muslims. Over the past one year, 1,787 civilians, including 74 children and 86 women, have been executed by IS by shooting, beheading, stoning, flinging down from heights and burning. More than 930 Arab Sunni and 223 Kurdish civilians were murdered recently. The few beheadings of Westerners shocked the world—because the days of the Crusades when infidels fought against believers and shed the blood of millions using similar methods are in the distant past. The apple in the Bible was not by Steve Jobs.

Official figures show that since 2003, over 20,000 civilians have been killed by terrorists in Pakistan. In the same years, over 100 mosques were bombed—for example, in January 2015, around 40 people were killed in a bomb blast at a mosque in southern Pakistan. In December 2014, the Taliban massacred 145 in a Peshawar school, 132 of them children. The Ahmadiyyas have been facing genocide in Pakistan from the state itself.

Between 2003 and 2013, in Iraq, over seven civilians were killed daily by suicide bombers and car bombs. Every month, since 2011 when US troops pulled out of Iraq, over 10,000 civilians—all Muslims—have died in terror attacks. In the Libyan civil war that felled Gaddafi, over 30,000 people lost their lives while another 50,000 were wounded. Thousands of Kurdish Muslims have been killed by IS fighters, ravaging towns and villages; two weeks ago, they murdered over 150 Kurds in Kobani, a Syrian town on the Turkish border. Hundreds of women have been made into sex slaves or sold into the flesh trade. In the Nigerian town of Baga, Boko Haram wiped out over 2,000 people in January this year. They had kidnapped schoolgirls who were either forcibly married off to Islamist soldiers or sold. People were beheaded with chainsaws. Mosques have been bombed in Egypt and Yemen. Last week, there were efforts led by the US to unite the powerful Syrian clan leaders to fight the IS. But they are not on the same page as far as faith is concerned. Some support Bashr al-Assad, while others oppose him. In the tortured history of tribal loyalties and medieval blood feuds, this is a chapter that would be a hard read.

The reason Islamic terrorism cannot take over the world is that Islam is at war with itself. The Shias, Sunnis, Salafis, Wahabbis and Kurds have been rewriting the story of Islam for centuries in blood. With its magnificent Sufi tradition of tolerance and beauty, and the nuances of Urdu and the fusion cuisine of Mughal and Arab, India is the safest place for Muslims in the world. This is the reason for Pakistan and terror groups to target the country. Historically, India absorbs and transforms, instead of