by Victor Lama
(Saturday, February 24, 2007)
“The point here is not to make excuses or justify the killing of innocents by Muslims. But it must also be recognized and understood that Muslim violence is not inherently more evil than the violence perpetrated by their accusers – and the loss of Muslim life as a result of western imperialist and colonialist aggression is not more benign than the killing of innocents as a result of so-called religious imperatives. The time is long overdue to stop speaking from a position of apologetic weakness and to start exercising the moral imperative you face to stand up for yourselves.”
Stop apologizing for al-Qaeda. You didn’t create them, the CIA did. Stop apologizing for every act of violence perpetrated by Muslims unless you demand that every Christian and Jew apologize for the murderous acts of their co-religionists, too. Enough already! Stand tall, walk proudly and love yourselves because Islam is a great religion and Islamic history is a very rich and impressive one.
Since September 11, 2001, Muslims around the world have had unrelenting pressure brought to bear on them to apologize or explain or condemn every act of violence committed by those who call themselves Muslims. And that is exactly what Islamic leaders have been so pathetically doing – incessantly and fruitlessly trying to explain to an indoctrinated audience that not all Muslims are evil or violent.
Yes, it was truly a grotesque act of mass murder committed on September 11, which led to the killing of 3,000 innocent men, women and children, but their lives and their innocence is not greater than the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives lost as a result of Western and Zionist aggression. How many 9/11s have been unleashed against the Iraqi people in the last 4 years alone, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands killed as a direct result of American-led economic sanctions during the 8 years prior to the invasion?
Why is it more evil to plan an attack like 9/11 than it is to conspire to wage a war of aggression against a defenseless nation and reduce it to rubble? It’s not, so stop apologizing!
When someone asks you to condemn Islamic violence, demand that they condemn Christian and Jewish violence and apologize for the disproportionate amount of death and destruction they have visited upon the world – for if you totaled every death caused by all the so-called Islamic fundamentalist organizations combined, they would barely equate to a fraction of the murders committed by Christians and Jews in the last 100 years alone.
When you are reminded of how Muslim financial support for terrorist organizations has led to thousands of deaths around the world, don’t forget to remind them of how Zionist Jewish bankers in New York, Germany and England funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Bolsheviks, who killed an estimated 20 million Russian Orthodox Christians between 1917 and 1945. You may also want to remind them that 5 billion US dollars a year has been funding Israel’s 40 year occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, its construction of segregated Jewish supremacist settlements, and its continued violation of dozens of UN resolutions, to say nothing of its history of monstrous violence against innocent Arab civilians.
The Israelis who get blown up on buses are not more important than the Palestinians killed by American-supplied Israeli tanks, planes, bombs and missiles. Cry for and condemn the American and British lives recently lost to terrorist acts, but don’t forget to remind the world to condemn the wholesale killing of hundreds of Lebanese civilians during last summer’s savage Israeli bombing campaign using cluster bombs and other munitions that were supplied by the US and sent to Israel via Britain. Not only did President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair not condemn Israel for what were obviously monstrous violations of international humanitarian law, but they in fact blocked any attempt by the UN to stop it and supplied the weapons to help it along.
It is indeed quite impressive that western leaders don’t “teach’ their young men and women to strap bombs to themselves, like militant Muslim leaders do. But then again, why should they when they have their armies to do that? I mean, why use a pathetic little homemade bomb when you can drop a 5,000 lb Daisy Cutter? Why be satisfied with bringing down two buildings when you can reduce entire neighborhoods to rubble, as has been done to Bint Jbail, Beirut, Jenin, Gaza, Fallujah and Kabul?
To somehow mitigate the criminality of the terror conducting on behalf of the western ruling elite, it is oftentimes pointed out by their apologists that Muslims themselves have in the past, and present, killed each other – oftentimes mercilessly and cruelly, as they are now doing in Iraq. Well, it is also true that Christians have done the same to each other. Remember the 200,000 Germans incinerated in Dresden in 72 hours? Or how about the obliteration of 180,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima, Japan’s only Christian city at the time? What about the massive Christian-on-Christian violence in the Balkans, including 78 days of ‘round-the-clock American bombing? The list goes on. Do those realities somehow negate the criminality of Muslim terrorism against Christians?
The point here is not to make excuses or justify the killing of innocents by Muslims. But it must also be recognized and understood that Muslim violence is not inherently more evil than the violence perpetrated by their accusers – and the loss of Muslim life as a result of western imperialist and colonialist aggression is not more benign than the killing of innocents as a result of so-called religious imperatives. The time is long overdue to stop speaking from a position of apologetic weakness and to start exercising the moral imperative you face to stand up for yourselves.
