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Muslims
Must Denounce Armed Jihad
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Mainstream
Muslims in the West typically deny the religious dimension of jihadism
rather than condemning it.
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On Nov. 12 -- the day before the Paris
terrorist attacks -- two ISIS suicide bombers blew themselves up in
Beirut, killing 43 people, mostly Shia Muslims. It was the worst
terrorist attack in Beirut since the end of the Lebanese civil war.
One would have expected outrage among the Islamic communities of the
world. However, the blast barely made a ripple in the robust Islamic
social media community. If Islamic leaders and clerics were outraged by
the ISIS atrocity, it was not reflected in any significant manner on
Twitter and other social media.
This would change dramatically the following day, when ISIS struck
again in a multi-pronged attack on Paris for being "the capital of
sin" in the words of Islamic State. In all, 129 people died in what
the French prime minister labelled an act of war.
As ordinary citizens to prime ministers and presidents around the
world reacted in horror, Islamic leaders suddenly remembered the Beirut
tragedy.
The significance of an attack on a NATO country by ISIS was not lost
on the Islamists. As the glare of public scrutiny caught them, they
hurried to equate the Paris attacks to the Beirut bombing and started
venting contrived anger that the media had not given fair coverage to the
Lebanon disaster, compared to France.
The #TerrorismHasNoReligion
hashtag trivializes the Paris attacks.
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Muslims who had not uttered a word about Beirut were now tweeting
their anger about Beirut receiving less importance than Paris.
Of course, this wasn't true. The western media covered
the Beirut blast extensively. As the website Vox.com reported, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, and
many other media covered the Beirut bombings, while CNN aired one segment
after another on it.
Within 24 hours, the hashtag #TerrorismHasNoReligion was trending
worldwide as Islamists jumped on the victimhood bandwagon in a bid to
trivialize the Paris attack. Their argument seemed to be that because
Muslim on Muslim terror was the order of the day across the Islamic
world, westerners should not express grief if Muslims attack the West.
It wasn't just Islamists who were pushing the point that the Paris
attack had nothing to do with Islam. The former prime minister of
Slovenia told the India Ideas conclave in the picturesque Indian city of
Goa that, the "Paris attack had nothing to do with religion."
In Toronto, Islamists and their leftist allies protested with placards
saying, "Terrorism has no Religion".
Of course "terrorism has no religion," but the terrorists do
have a religion and almost invariably that religion is Islam. Of course
not all 1.2 billion Muslims are terrorists or even Islamists, but enough
are.
What more Muslims need to do is openly denounce the Islamic doctrine
of armed jihad, and renounce the application of Sharia in public law. But
they won't.
I read the cliché-ridden statements by imams and Muslim academics, but
no one dared to denounce "armed jihad".
They could do more. Islamic clerics should stop praying for a Muslim
victory over Christians, Jews, Hindus and atheists that takes place in
mosques around the world. Of course they dare not.
We have a choice today. Fight and destroy ISIS and vigorously condemn
the Islamist political agenda, or be ready to die as innocent Parisians
did last week.
Terrorism may not have a religion, but most terrorists certainly have
one, and that religion is typically Islam.
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the
Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B.
Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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