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**Toramana** · 09-20-2012, 02:46 PM

Only God can help Muslims from ourselves

In recent history, every few years the Muslim ummah breaks out into a spasmodic convulsion of uncontrollable hysteria and violence that defies reason, leaving the rest of humanity bewildered.

The burning and killing continue unabated across the Islamic world as we Muslims, provoked by a pathetic amateurish film mocking the Prophet Mohammed, validate every negative stereotype about us.

Muslims like me revere Mohammed not just as a Prophet, a Messenger of God to humanity, but also as a beloved father-figure, greatly admired and adored. However, what we Muslims fail to recognize is that the rest of the world does not share our opinion and have the right to disagree with our beliefs.

At best, non-Muslims consider Mohammed a mere historical figure who laid the foundation of the first-ever Arab empire in the 7th and 8th centuries. At worst, Islam’s critics consider Mohammed to be a false prophet who introduced warfare as part of the practice of Islam, and whose followers conquered the lands of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, massacred Jews, Hindus and Sikhs. These critics maintain contemporary Muslims are also following the same path of armed or civilizational jihad.

The world’s saner elements may not say so on the record, but they are left angered, wondering how to deal with the sheer madness that unfolds every time Muslims sensibilities are offended. And getting offended, it seems, is the most identifiable attribute of my Muslim brothers.

We burned down the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad in 1979 for no reason whatsoever when Saudi Islamic fanatics took over the Ka’aba in Mecca. We have caused many deaths — mostly Muslim — following the publication of the Danish cartoons. And who can forget the turmoil and murderous mayhem that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses 30 years ago or Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s documentary Fitna in 2008.

What alarms me is the devious, unethical and immoral nature of a critical mass of Muslims who are not offended when Saudi Arabia destroys the 7th century home of Mohammed, but freak out at a film they have not seen or a book they have not read.

Fourteen thousand dead and disappeared youth in Pakistan-occupied Balochistan does not offend their sensibilities; 500,000 Muslim Darfuris killed by the Arab Janjaweed does not bother them; blowing up the Bamiyan Buddha statues is celebrated or shrugged off; 20,000 dead Syrians triggers no attack on an Iranian Embassy — but a mediocre, C-grade film on Mohammed causes mayhem and the murder of an American ambassador. Why?

Our collective hysteria is not helped when shortsighted politicians such as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton try to appease the murdering mobs.

Her reaction brought an uncharacteristic blunt criticism from the former Pakistan ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. The exiled Boston University professor writing in the Wall Street Journal, said:

“When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to calm Muslims Thursday by denouncing the video, she was unwittingly playing along with the ruse the radicals set up. The United States would have been better off focusing on the only outrage that was of legitimate interest to the American government: the lack of respect—shown by a complaisant Egyptian government and other Islamists—for U.S. diplomatic missions.” If it were possible (and I know it’s not), I hope for divine intervention putting my Muslim ummah in a medically induced coma so that the source of this spasmodic convulsion that makes us behave as the world’s most irrational people can be excised from our souls. For only God can help us Muslims from ourselves.

Toronto Sun

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/09/18/only-god-can-help-muslims-from-ourselves

**Toramana** · 09-20-2012, 03:01 PM

Below is one comment on the essay above.

"Muslims like me revere Mohammed not just as a Prophet, a Messenger of God to humanity, but also as a beloved father-figure, greatly admired and adored

My dear Tareq ..therein lies a, if not the, snag...the Quran promotes a mindset that the earth is flat and fixed and the sun goes round it on a set path.(not true in reality, according to science every schoolboy knows, but to be only as a phenomenological observation, not to be believed in as some God-given 'reality' by any means)..Consequestly as there is nothing respectable about such an idiotic belief system which tries to transform a mere phenomenological observqation as the absolute truth revealed by the all-knowing Allah to his most trustworthy 'prophet' it starts the ball rolling in terms of what is claimed as the SUBLIME into what is actually the most RIDICULOUS......It is a fact that the world is law governed ( Laws of Physics, for example, and the Laws of Evolutionary Biology)but there is not an iota of evidence from science and reason that any God ever existed or made them as assumed and repeatedly forced down your throats by, for exaple, by the quran and made such a fuss of by the clever Mr. Mohammad in the past....It is also very clear humanity does not need a messenger of any shade or background today who tries to plunge humanity back into its past bestial roots from whichit has evolved into a completely new species (by invoking marauders to butcher humanity in the name of a God that does not exist leading to a phenomenon of human beings ripping each other apart and wanting, as it were, to eat each others flesh, as the chimps are known to Evolutionary Biologists to do as part of their nature).......How many lies are perpetuated every day by all sorts of people everywhere today in order to do what they can to keep an unperturbed face to the scientific untruths being daily exposed as part of the system they are told to revere at all cost!....Consider, for example, a cover up lie here by a person that the Zero did not come to the Arabs from India but was an original contribution to the European science by 'Muslims', WHEN THE TRUTH IS THAT THE ZERO CAME FROM INDIA (I mention this to point out the malaise responsible including that responsible for the hysterical reactions we are talking about by Muslims here as well)....In the past it started, for example, as burning of preceous books of the Greeks and other civilizations at the time of the Arab Islamic conquest of Egypt in Alexandria [saying now that we have the Quran, we don't need any of those other books]....The defects, therefore, Tareq are of a foundational nature which, being daily becoming indefensible, has necessitated hideous attempts to cover them up one by one by one ruse or the other INCLUDING NOW BY SPIN DOCTORS SUCH AS DR ZAKIR NAIK OF PEACE TV OR DR TAHIRUL QADRI OF IDARAE MINHAJUL QURAN)..As .I am for modernism and contemporary revelations of truth from science, I would not want to believe in the hocus pocus that is taught in the name of Quran, Mohammad or Islam if it is manifestly false scientifically.... is without any evidence ......and smacks of deliberate dishonet and vicious CUNNING. This then is doubly objectionable when it is promoted as something sacred or holy as not to be questioned beliefs!.......What is needed, therefore, is not so much to 'revere' the Quran, Mohammad or Islam, as much as TO SUBJECT THEM TO THE THOROUGHEST POSSIBLE CRITICAL EVALUATION AS TO THEIR TRUTH OR FALSEHOOD, OR THEIR HONESTY OR DISHONESTY, THEIR SINCERITY OR CUNNING. If you don't do that as a people who are classed in the eyes of the world (willingly or unwillingly) as 'followers of Quran, Mohammad and Islam, then the falsity of it all breaks out in the shape of these ludicurous cartoons and films (crude and despecable in their presentation as it may be depending on the capabilities of the objector) by the disgusted OTHERS down the throats of whom these totally unacceptable beliefs are sought to be forced down with the consequent displays of unleashed bestialities which is what people are brainwashed into believing they should respond with, in order to hide the ugly untruths of the system in a Goebbles-like fashio"

**Toramana** · 09-20-2012, 03:12 PM

Another comment.

"islam is a wicked EVIL religion,they hate and detest EVERYTHING CHRISTIAN.they have no love orl feelings for ANY animal.just look at their halal meat?putting these dear souls through terrible agony and pain,just so they can say a prayer to their NONE existant god allah?muslims cause nothing but trouble and mayhem in every western country they are allowed to reside in,the time WILL SOON COME WHEN THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF THESE COUNTRIES WILL SAY,ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.DEPORT THIS ****.mohammed their so called propthet was a PEDO,muslims in the uk have been rapeing young girls here for the last 30 years?and only now are the british public being made aware of this sick racist crimes.muslims and done, are a cancer,and like ALL diseases should be eradicated and wiped out.but after all is said and done NOTHING BECOMES OF EVIL.what goes round comes round?"

And two responses to the above comment.

"You should learn the difference, between a Muslim, and a Islamists... between Islam as a religion and Islam as an Ideology..."Muslims have been raping young girls in the UK for 30 years?" And UK men have been raping them for thousands of years...So what's your point? Your understanding of Islam is elementary at best..But your bigotry, ignorance and hatred, is on par with the radicals you complain about...You sound just like them, just have to change the words for Muslim/Islam with the West, and you sound just like the Islamists Mullah's...Pot say hello to the kettle."

"Roy you say Muhammed was a pedo? The age of consent for females in England was set at 12 in 1275, It was lowered to 10 in the latter part of the 16th century..In California in 1889, the age of consent for females was 10..raised from 7years old....In 1890, the age of consent was raised from 12 to 14, In Canada.If the Prophet Muhammed had lived, in California between 1859, and 1899, His marriage to a 9 year old, would have not only been accepted by society, but within the law at the time...Your hypocrisy, for judgeing the Prophet Muhammed for the standard of living today! and not judging the Prophet upon what was accepted amoungst Christians, Jews and Atheists throughout history, is absurd."

**Toramana** · 09-20-2012, 05:00 PM

Rather predictably, The Guardian this week argued that the wave of violence sweeping the Middle East was a spontaneous reaction to the anti Islamic film, "The Innocence of Islam". The film, we were told, set off a "long fuse that led to an explosion of violence that killed the US ambassador to Libya".

The Independent adopted a similar line with its article headlined: "An incendiary film –and the man killed in the crossfire". It added: "The mob enraged by film mocking Prophet Mohamed kills US ambassador in Benghazi rocket attack".

Then on BBC Newsnight on Thursday, ex-Foreign Office mandarin Sir Jeremy Greenstock waded in. The film, he declared, was definitely the "immediate, proximate cause" of the bloodshed.

Nor was this a British reaction alone, for in the US Hilary Clinton made the same causal linkage. The Guardian's Andrew Brown went even further. "The Innocence of Islam" was an "incitement to religious hatred" that deserved to be banned.

Those who blame this murderous mayhem on an obscure film miss the point by the proverbial country mile. The killing of the ambassador appeared to be the result of a carefully planned assassination by jihadist extremists, such as the violent Sunni group, Ansar al Sharia, rather than a mere spontaneous act of anger.

Far from being an expression of Muslim protest in Libya, it was a deranged act of militancy from radicalised Muslims for whom America and all western influences are mortal enemies. The same can be said for much of the violence sweeping every major Arab capital right now. Reducing murderous violence to "protest" risks legitimising behaviour or at least failing to understand its true motivations.

Certainly, one can understand why this amateurish production, a 13 minute clip of which appeared on YouTube, was insulting to Muslims. Its depiction of Muhammad as a pervert and child molester was certainly designed to be intensely provocative. But so are the venomous anti-Semitic and anti-Christian cartoons and images that proliferate in the Middle East. These too cause outrage but we never see mosques or the embassies of Muslim states torched as a result, and rightly so.

It stands to reason that those who are genuinely enraged by this film have a choice about their behaviour. To suggest otherwise is to paint Muslims as backward people who cannot respond to insults except by the sword or the bomb.

It attributes to them a complete inability to defuse their rage by more democratic forms of protest, effectively viewing them as savages from which little better can be expected. Such a view panders to the Islamist grievance culture rather than demanding that Muslims, like everyone else, behave better.

But condemning the "grievance" as much as the perpetrator is fast becoming the default response to mass Islamist violence. In 2002, Muslim mobs went on a murderous rampage in Nigeria, following newspaper comments that Mohammed would have approved the Miss World pageant which was being held in that country. Afterwards, some commentators condemned the organisers of Miss World in more forthright terms than the violent jihadists.

In 2006, there was a prolonged and outrageous display of global violence following the publication of satirical Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. Some of the cartoons depicted the prophet Mohammed in unflattering terms though again, much of the violence was stoked up by local agitators using these cartoons as an excuse.

But as well as condemning sword bearing, embassy burning fanatics, former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and some of his European counterparts condemned "irresponsible" Danish newspaper editors for publishing the material.

There was another global outpouring of Muslim rage following a speech by the Pope in September 2006 in which he quoted an obscure medieval Emperor, Manuel II. Manuel had condemned Muhammed’s command to "spread by the sword the faith he preached" and the Pope noted, quite correctly, that Islam had a history of using force to spread and defend the faith.

Indeed the instant frenzy of anti-Christian violence was evidence for that very point. Again, many non-Muslims made the mistake of criticising the Pope’s comments, rather than condemning the illegitimate responses of the extremists. Some media outlets gave airtime to the outrageous and incendiary comments of the Islamist Anjem Chaudhry who argued that "capital punishment" would be an appropriate punishment for the Pope.

Lumping offensive remarks or publications with barbaric behaviour excuses the latter while nurturing the extremists’ own victim mentality. But in one sense, this already mirrors the Zeitgeist in liberal Europe. Islamic fanaticism and its terrorist offshoots are seen as the understandable response of a minority aggrieved at "unjust" foreign policy. It is our "provocative" policies in Iraq, Afghanistan or "Palestine" that cause a violent reaction among Muslims.

Hence, it is necessary both to condemn the terrorism and address its "root causes" in foreign policy. As well as being an intellectually false argument, it is morally dubious because it suggests that there is only one inevitable way for enraged Muslims to respond to "our" behaviour. Terrorism remains a choice, and a highly illegitimate one.

Certainly, "The Innocence of Muslims", like the Danish cartoons, is provocative and, for most Muslims, blasphemous. But mob terror and the slaughter of innocents is the preserve of those with an unyielding hatred for western values.

To truly defend those values, our leaders must uphold a system in which we can be offended and, in turn, give offence. The alternative is that we cease to be a magnet for those fleeing from repressive and backward societies.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1655/westerners_who_fuel_the_muslim_world_s_grievance_culture#.UFbGu4Jj7Cc.facebook

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