Islamic terror

Dec 08, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Today is Eid-Ul Adha, a sacred occasion in the Muslim calendar. It comes at a time when the religion of Islam, the world of Islam, and the meaning of Islam are under intense discussion by the peoples of the world, no matter how far they are separated by borders, given the horrendous tragedy of Mumbai last week.

The story of Islamic crusade against Western values lays bare the ultimate contradiction in religion. The terror that some extremist Muslim groups have perpetrated on countries like the USA, India, Indonesia, and Algeria calls into question the essential fault of monotheism.

How can persons, who swore allegiance to Allah, walk into a room, see a mother with three children eating at a table and gun them down? Do you call this insurgency? Do you call this rebellion against Western domination? Do you call this a fight for cultural preservation? The answer is no. This is a reversion to a barbaric atavism that existed thousands of years ago.

There needs to be more studies on whether religion in fact influences people for the better. I want to believe that it does, but look at the terror extremist Muslim groups are spreading in the name of God.

One must always bear in mind that these people are not attacking symbols of military institutions, symbols of Western military might whose invincibility they say they despise. Muslim terrorists slaughter innocent people. They kill everything in sight. This is what they did in Mumbai. These uncivilized minds were rampaging through train stations and hotels murdering people at random. There is no way one can justify that.

However dominant the is US over Arab countries, however penetrating Western culture is in Islamic states, nothing in the world of philosophy can justify the kind of uncivilized cruelty Islamic terrorism has planted in many parts of the world.

It must be made evanescently clear that a majority of the people who embrace Islam and worship Allah are very good, decent people, as are the Jews, Christians and Hindus. But in each religion, there is the fertile bed of fanaticism. In India, there are Hindus who love to kill Muslims. They wait for an opportunity to do just that whenever a riot breaks out over some religious dispute between the two sides.

In Gujarat, a few years back, Hindu security forces watched and did nothing as semi-civilized Hindus tore Muslim victims to pieces. Yet the Chief Minister of Gujarat has not been charged with war crimes by the International Tribunal in The Hague.

In Israel, the politicians seem to have forgotten what Nazi Germany did to Jews. There is a strong Zionist movement in Israel that not only refuses to give back the Palestinians the land they have forcefully taken, but seems to want more of the little that the Palestinians are left with.

The story of the Palestinians and their land seized by Israel is perhaps the longest tragedy of the 20th Century that President-elect Obama must work feverishly on. If anyone has a mandate from the American people to solve the Middle East crisis, then it is Barack Obama.

The Christian religion is not without its insane followers. The Religious Right in the US has certainly diluted American democracy, and is responsible for reducing the respect the world had for the values that made American society the most admired among the world’s democracies.                  

When one picks up a Bible, or Koran, or any other sacredly religious book, like the Bhagavad Gita or the Talmud, and accepts that there is a Creator, believes in the teaching of their holy ancestors, and embraces the values of the goodness of the mission to help each other as ordered by the Almighty or the Creator, then what happens to the psychic integrity of the believer that he/she can pick up an AK-47 and kill women, babies, innocent old people and pregnant mothers?

Where did religion go wrong? In Algeria, the Islamic extremists, in efforts to destabilize the government, would attack villagers and slit their throats. This was in the name of Islam. Perhaps the worst case of the failure of religion is where two nuns and one priest of the Catholic Church in Rwanda aided and abetted in the commission of genocides against the Tutsi tribe. They were convicted and jailed by The Hague Tribunal on war crimes.

From all that I have read, it is said that Muslim terrorists are devoted to their religion and are sincere in their religious duties. Is it possible that, in the original sources of Islam, in some of the verses of the Koran and in the personal life of the Prophet Muhammad, there can be found justification for this uncivilized attack on human beings? I hope not.

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