Not all Muslims are terrorists.
True. Even more, not most Muslims are terrorists, not even a significant minority, nor even a minority that can be represented by a percentage that can be written without scientific notation. However, the majority of terrorists in the world today are Muslims is also a cold hard fact. A large proportion of Muslims provide a cultural, moral, recruitment, and financial pool for terrorists is also an oft unmentioned fact.
The West's colonialism and intervention is the root cause of terrorism in the Muslim world.
Really? Well, colonialism has given the Muslim world a very burdensome heritage to deal with, certainly. But why is it that India and Pakistan suffered from a single colonial power, yet the heritage has yielded terrorism in Pakistan but not India? There is no doubt in my mind that without Bush's invasion of Iraq the problem of ISIL today would be insignificant, and I have no doubt that without Reagan's proxy war in Afghanistan there wouldn't have been 9/11. But the US also had disastrous immoral interventions in Central America that didn't result in people piloting planes into office towers.
The repressive and undemocratic nature of Arab regimes is what breeds terror. Terrorism is only a reaction.
But China is extremely undemocratic and yet there aren't any Han Chinese terrorists. Why is the White European convert to Islam ethnically cleansing Yazidis in Iraq? Who repressed him? If the regime in Egypt was one bit unfair to Muslims, it was a whole byte unfair to Christians, and yet Egyptian Christians never resorted to terrorism.
To me as a Muslim it might have taken some time to realise it, but there is something terribly wrong with how the mainstream of Muslim society conceives its religion. Hearing this same statement repeated for years by semi illiterate blonde hosts on FOX News for years has certainly not helped me reach this realisation any faster. No seriously, hearing White people whose intentions are decisively malignant talk about the problem that Islam poses is one of the biggest barriers to many Muslims recognising the trouble they find themselves in.
But the Arab Spring, a horrible abomination as it has been, has had one nice side effect. It has brought to the forefront of Western rhetoric a conglomerate of neocon and liberal think tanks who are so colossally full of shit that they have jolted a lot of us fixated by what White people think out of our reverie. Hearing a whole lot of Westerners claiming that Morsi won the elections fair and square in Egypt, or that the Syrian opposition is "moderate," helped solidify one concept in my mind: I should squarely not give a fuck what anyone is saying in the West either way.
So with my reaction to the dumb blonde FOX bitch out of the equation, I was able to see the reality for what it is. There is only one religion in the world today, which provides a sizeable enough support base to allow a group of people to kill 100 students in a school. There is only one religion in the world today which provides a recruitment and financial base to allow a group of people to ethnically cleanse entire populations on purely religious grounds. There is only one group of people on Earth today who are seriously discussing the pros and cons of slavery or the proper way to beat a wife.
Muslims need to stop and think about what they have come to be. And it's not because of how the rest of the world perceives us. The rest of the world can try and may manage to isolate Muslims, to make them irrelevant, and try to ignore their presence. But it's the Muslims themselves who will suffer. The insane Iranian dude in the Sydney cafe killed nobody and was killed himself. The Taliban goons in Waziristan killed 100+ Pakistani children. Muslims are and will continue to be their own main victims. The cycle must be broken and Muslims must catch on with the rest of humanity.
There has to be a major revision, a significant paradigm shift. Muslims must decide that freedom of faith is an innate right. Muslims must understand that complete equality between genders and faiths before the law is not an option. Muslims must realise that secularism and liberalism are necessary conditions for success in the modern world. Muslims must collectively and without qualification internalise that even a hypothetical discussion of the merits of slavery is beyond the scope of what it means to be human.
Yes, it's true that we find ourselves in a very weak position today. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of people around the world who want to tear apart our cultures and destroy what sets apart. But the fact of the matter is, the reason they have such an opening to do this is because we as Muslims have reached such a low that it's kind of hard for people not to kick us while we are done. And yes, we as Muslims have to rise from this hole we find ourselves in. But ISIL is not a natural reaction, nor is it an understandable way to lash out. ISIL is a symptom of the cause of the low we find ourselves in. The low is of our own making, it's certainly being used by people who have no love for us, but they didn't engineer it. We engineered it through intellectual and cultural stagnation and lack of malleability.
To rise from the low Muslims must formulate a fundamentally new approach to the texts. The texts is the red line at which the moderate mainstream stops. And it is the snare through which the moderate mainstream allows itself to be bogged down into "exceptions" and loopholes that end up blowing in its face. Whenever mention of the texts is made, the Muslim mainstream withdraws into its protective shell. And honestly, not without good reason. When you have Israeli right wingers, the GOP, and European White Supremacists incessantly discussing how they would like to see the Quran revised, you can't blame Muslims for feeling defensive. But again, the vultures are not the cause of our ills, they are a side effect. Muslims must change the way they view Medieval jurisprudence fundamentally. Muslims must also take a long and hard look at what hadith means. But ultimately Muslims must also consider the way the mainstream reads and interprets the Quran and early Islamic history. This is a taboo of epic proportions in the Muslim world, but it has to stop being one. When there is even a possibility that there is an interpretation of Islam that accepts mass execution of school children, then something has got to give. We have to take a break and think about it.
Change! For your children you have to change.
True. Even more, not most Muslims are terrorists, not even a significant minority, nor even a minority that can be represented by a percentage that can be written without scientific notation. However, the majority of terrorists in the world today are Muslims is also a cold hard fact. A large proportion of Muslims provide a cultural, moral, recruitment, and financial pool for terrorists is also an oft unmentioned fact.
The West's colonialism and intervention is the root cause of terrorism in the Muslim world.
Really? Well, colonialism has given the Muslim world a very burdensome heritage to deal with, certainly. But why is it that India and Pakistan suffered from a single colonial power, yet the heritage has yielded terrorism in Pakistan but not India? There is no doubt in my mind that without Bush's invasion of Iraq the problem of ISIL today would be insignificant, and I have no doubt that without Reagan's proxy war in Afghanistan there wouldn't have been 9/11. But the US also had disastrous immoral interventions in Central America that didn't result in people piloting planes into office towers.
The repressive and undemocratic nature of Arab regimes is what breeds terror. Terrorism is only a reaction.
But China is extremely undemocratic and yet there aren't any Han Chinese terrorists. Why is the White European convert to Islam ethnically cleansing Yazidis in Iraq? Who repressed him? If the regime in Egypt was one bit unfair to Muslims, it was a whole byte unfair to Christians, and yet Egyptian Christians never resorted to terrorism.
To me as a Muslim it might have taken some time to realise it, but there is something terribly wrong with how the mainstream of Muslim society conceives its religion. Hearing this same statement repeated for years by semi illiterate blonde hosts on FOX News for years has certainly not helped me reach this realisation any faster. No seriously, hearing White people whose intentions are decisively malignant talk about the problem that Islam poses is one of the biggest barriers to many Muslims recognising the trouble they find themselves in.
But the Arab Spring, a horrible abomination as it has been, has had one nice side effect. It has brought to the forefront of Western rhetoric a conglomerate of neocon and liberal think tanks who are so colossally full of shit that they have jolted a lot of us fixated by what White people think out of our reverie. Hearing a whole lot of Westerners claiming that Morsi won the elections fair and square in Egypt, or that the Syrian opposition is "moderate," helped solidify one concept in my mind: I should squarely not give a fuck what anyone is saying in the West either way.
So with my reaction to the dumb blonde FOX bitch out of the equation, I was able to see the reality for what it is. There is only one religion in the world today, which provides a sizeable enough support base to allow a group of people to kill 100 students in a school. There is only one religion in the world today which provides a recruitment and financial base to allow a group of people to ethnically cleanse entire populations on purely religious grounds. There is only one group of people on Earth today who are seriously discussing the pros and cons of slavery or the proper way to beat a wife.
Muslims need to stop and think about what they have come to be. And it's not because of how the rest of the world perceives us. The rest of the world can try and may manage to isolate Muslims, to make them irrelevant, and try to ignore their presence. But it's the Muslims themselves who will suffer. The insane Iranian dude in the Sydney cafe killed nobody and was killed himself. The Taliban goons in Waziristan killed 100+ Pakistani children. Muslims are and will continue to be their own main victims. The cycle must be broken and Muslims must catch on with the rest of humanity.
There has to be a major revision, a significant paradigm shift. Muslims must decide that freedom of faith is an innate right. Muslims must understand that complete equality between genders and faiths before the law is not an option. Muslims must realise that secularism and liberalism are necessary conditions for success in the modern world. Muslims must collectively and without qualification internalise that even a hypothetical discussion of the merits of slavery is beyond the scope of what it means to be human.
Yes, it's true that we find ourselves in a very weak position today. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of people around the world who want to tear apart our cultures and destroy what sets apart. But the fact of the matter is, the reason they have such an opening to do this is because we as Muslims have reached such a low that it's kind of hard for people not to kick us while we are done. And yes, we as Muslims have to rise from this hole we find ourselves in. But ISIL is not a natural reaction, nor is it an understandable way to lash out. ISIL is a symptom of the cause of the low we find ourselves in. The low is of our own making, it's certainly being used by people who have no love for us, but they didn't engineer it. We engineered it through intellectual and cultural stagnation and lack of malleability.
To rise from the low Muslims must formulate a fundamentally new approach to the texts. The texts is the red line at which the moderate mainstream stops. And it is the snare through which the moderate mainstream allows itself to be bogged down into "exceptions" and loopholes that end up blowing in its face. Whenever mention of the texts is made, the Muslim mainstream withdraws into its protective shell. And honestly, not without good reason. When you have Israeli right wingers, the GOP, and European White Supremacists incessantly discussing how they would like to see the Quran revised, you can't blame Muslims for feeling defensive. But again, the vultures are not the cause of our ills, they are a side effect. Muslims must change the way they view Medieval jurisprudence fundamentally. Muslims must also take a long and hard look at what hadith means. But ultimately Muslims must also consider the way the mainstream reads and interprets the Quran and early Islamic history. This is a taboo of epic proportions in the Muslim world, but it has to stop being one. When there is even a possibility that there is an interpretation of Islam that accepts mass execution of school children, then something has got to give. We have to take a break and think about it.
Change! For your children you have to change.
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