If I can accept that the Paris murderers aren’t real Muslims why won’t the MUSLIM world say so too?
This is war.
Let’s not pussy-foot around the terminology here when it comes to analyzing the sickening events in Paris over the last 48 hours.
But it’s not a religious war, as the cowardly, murderous thugs carrying out these atrocities would have us believe.
These terrorists are not ‘real’ Muslims. In fact, they slaughter Muslims as much if not more than they slaughter everyone else.
One of their two police officer victims in the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices was a Muslim.
On the same day, Al Qaeda car-bombed a police college in Yemen - killing over 40 people, all believed to be Muslims, many of them students.
And lest we forget, several dozen innocent Muslims died in the twin towers on 9/11 including a pregnant woman.
So forget all the garbage about these lunatics representing Muslims. They don’t.
They represent a small faction of fanatical extremists who have hijacked Islam to justify their nefarious trade in terror, and grotesquely and deliberately distorted the meaning of the Qur'an for the same purpose.
They can chant ‘God is great’ all they like, but their currency is death and destruction not genuine religious ideology.
And their excuse for all this mayhem is predicated entirely on a pack of lies; the Prophet Mohammad never advocated killing people who blasphemed him. Nor does the Qur'an tell anyone to do that, or even mention blasphemy.
As my former CNN colleague Fareed Zakaria pointed out today, draconian punishment for blasphemy, including in many cases death, has been created in law by Muslim nations intent on suppressing their people.
So when these barbaric assassins scream that they are ‘avenging the Prophet’, they’re doing nothing of the sort. They’re just using him as an excuse to commit murder.
It’s a sickening deceit.
But they don’t give a damn what I, or most of the West, think about them.
All they care about is spewing their hateful rhetoric and violence as chaotically as possible, preying on the impressionable vulnerability of many disenfranchised young Muslims who live, for the main, in poverty and hopelessness.
This is not going to be an easy war to win.
Terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are a hideously difficult enemy to combat because they exist in so many varied and amorphous guises around the world, some large in number, some tiny.
Nobody really knows how many there are, or where they reside.
But they’re increasing in number and as we’ve seen, they’ve growing more audacious in their attacks.
Beheading hostages and gunning down cartoonists may seem particularly horrific to us, but to them – many of who have fought on the brutal battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - it’s just another day at the office.
They’re going to keep on committing these outrages, and the scale of them is going to get bigger.
It’s going to be the new normal. They’re going to attack us in our restaurants, churches, shopping malls and modes of transport.
It’s going to severely test our collective resolve, and we’re all going to have to face up to it with the same defiant stoicism that Britain showed when Hitler or the IRA tried to bomb us into submission, and which New Yorkers displayed after 9/11.
As to what can be done to curb this threat, the West’s traditional response of invading and bombing the countries that harbor them - along with our arrogant attempts to force our brand of 'freedom and democracy' down their unwilling throats - has been a spectacularly self-defeating failure that has simply served to dramatically increase support for the terrorists.
Every Drone strike that strays and kills innocent civilians in the Middle East acts as a perfect recruiting agent for hundreds, if not thousands more vengeful members of Islamic State.
Every day that Guantanamo Bay stays open, keeping people prisoner without charge or trial for years on end, is used as a perfectly justifiable example of America acting as just the same repressive, inhumane, law-flouting regime that it professes to abhor.
We need different thinking, smart leadership, effective military action where appropriate, and a firm coalition of global intelligence to thwart the attacks.
But there is a limit to what the West can do on its own.
What’s really required right now is for the Muslim world to stand up, be counted and cry: ‘ENOUGH!’
I want to hear the leaders of predominantly Muslim countries, like Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, come out and condemn these murderous bastards, without equivocation.
To denounce them as non-Muslims, to urge REAL Muslims - the vast majority who loathe these extremists as much as we do - to rise up against them, alienate and marginalize them, root them out of their society.
In short, I want real Muslims to reclaim their Islam faith and to make it crystal clear that these terrorists don’t act in their name, nor the name of the Prophet Mohammad.
As a journalist for 30 years, and someone whose wife was born and raised in Paris, I feel particularly incensed by what’s just happened in that wonderful city to so many fellow journalists and Parisians.
I’m no great advocate for the kind of savage satirical stuff Charlie Hebdo used to pump out. Some of it was funny, some plain nasty.
But they were a non-discriminatory offender, everyone copped it.
My own faith's leader, the Pope, was lampooned far more regularly and wickedly than the Prophet Mohammad ever was.
Yet I didn't see Roman Catholics storming to Paris to kill everyone involved in mocking him.
Why should one religion be afforded special rights to being offended?
In the end, it comes down to this: killing someone for drawing an offensive cartoon is infinitely more offensive than any cartoon could possibly be.
And if you don't agree with that premise, then you are as deluded as those who inflict the terror - and should have these words tattooed on your forehead: JE SUIS STUPIDE.
Follow him at https://twitter.com/piersmorgan and on https://www.facebook.com/piersmorgan
Source: Daily Mail
Post a Comment Blogger Facebook Disqus