Raheel Raza: In the Muslim world, silence falls

Raheel Raza, National Post | August 13, 2014 | Last Updated: Aug 13 6:45 AM ET

AFP/Getty Images    Syrian refugees arrive at the Masnaa border crossing on the Lebanon-Syria border on August 7, 2014. 

 

In Saturday’s National Post, Rex Murphy asks why there’s so much outrage over Israel’s response to Hamas rocket fire, but the same activists are silent about atrocities committed in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. In the same edition, letter-writer Al Lando argues that the people who are “attacking Jewish citizens, firebombing synagogues and launching protests against all things Jewish, in the name solidarity with Palestinian victims” seem to have no objection to the “200,000 innocent non-combatants [who] are in danger of genocide” at the hands of ISIS.

Rex Murphy: How the specious concept of ‘proportionality’ became code for Israel-bashing

Even other terrorists shun ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The brutal, merciless Sunni terrorist group has been rampaging through town after town along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Now they are besieging the “infidels” known as the Yazidi, a Kurdish ethnic subgroup with an obscure religion all their own. About 40,000 Yazidi have fled their homes and now are encamped on Mount Sinjur without either food or water. Within the Muslim Middle East, the Yazidi are a tiny people, easily extinguished. Western activists throw around the word “genocide” all too lightly. But atop that mountain, the word might become grimly appropriate.

And yet, the advance of ISIS and its horrors has inspired no campaigns of outrage in the streets of the West. No marches in Toronto or Paris. “Proportionality,” a piece of international legal jargon thrown around promiscuously as a shorthand to indict Israel for its (allegedly) excessive reprisals against Hamas’ (allegedly) insignificant provocations, apparently does not govern the scale of protestors’ response to the world’s many injustices.

Indeed, today’s global events seem surreal and fictional in their evilness. The Yazidis of Iraq are facing genocide. Boko Haram and the Taliban continue their reign of terror: Horrifying, brutal, cruel and inhuman terror from beheadings to rape. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world over these atrocities?

I ask this as a Muslim activist who’s exhausted, not from defending my faith, but from asking the same question over and over again for the past two decades. When I asked this question in the aftermath of 9/11, I was criticized for being a “fear-monger.” Following the 7/7 terrorist attacks in the U.K., I called on the larger Muslim community to “wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late.” For this, I was labelled a traitor. Later — as I uncovered and exposed the subversive agendas of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah — I was labelled a heretic.

Today, ISIS is indiscriminately killing women and children in Iraq. These terrorists want women to undergo female genital mutilation and cover their faces — essentially they want to push them back into the dark ages. At the same time, Yazidi women in Iraq are being kept as slaves, while their men are killed. In Pakistan, my country of birth, minorities are being persecuted with no accountability and the movement to eradicate them has been given a religious justification, so the perpetrators are celebrated as champions.

Yet, much of the so-called “civilized world” is frozen by either political correctness or ignorance. U.S. President Barack Obama would rather play golf than address the crisis unfolding all over the Muslim world. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau apparently sees no problem visiting a Wahhabi mosque with strong links to terrorism. And protesters at the Ontario legislature continue to focus their rage on Israel, rather than addressing the heinous crimes committed by Muslims.

So it falls upon the communities where these atrocities are happening to take action. And rightly so.
The world is once again asking, “where are the moderate Muslim voices to counter the evil of ISIS and other terrorist organizations?”

Let me respond by saying that I’m completely revolted by what’s happening in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Arab world. I wish I could say the same for my larger community. When a recent documentary exposed the crimes perpetrated against women in many Muslim countries was released, so-called “moderate and progressive” Muslim women opposed the cause.

I ask all Canadians to please stop asking where the moderate Muslims are. Our voices have been subsumed by the din of the mercenaries vying for power and hegemony in the Muslim world; we have become pawns in the games played by Saudi Arabia and Iran; we are shouted down by those who would lobby for political causes over human rights; and, most importantly, our communities still bask in the belief that all is well.

National Post
Raheel Raza is the president of The Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow.