I thought this article was interesting: Muslims speak out against terror online. Two quotes in the article drawn from progressiveislam.org particularly caught my eye. The predictable “backlash” comment – “I’m sure there will be an anti-Islamic backlash in the country.”
I have no idea what will happen in India, but in the United States the “backlash” the media and CAIR so desperately seek has never happened in decades of terror attacks by Muslims. No riots, no blacklists, no mosques burned… nada. In America the number of fake Muslim hate crimes rivals the number of real ones. And all reported anti-Muslim hate crimes are still only about 20% that of hate crimes against Jews. In fact, there are only a few more anti-Muslim hate crimes reported than there are anti-Christian ones. (Their 156 to our 135.) So let’s dispense with the backlash nonsense, at least in America. It’s not happening. It’s a lot like the “war on Christmas” nonsense – “everybody knows it’s happening” though even O’Blowhard can’t usually come up with anything more serious than a store that says “holiday” instead of “Christmas” and the standard ACLU complaints about taxpayer funded Christmas trees. But no article about a terror attack committed by people professing to be Muslims and conducted in the name of Islam would be complete without somebody fearing “backlash.”
The second quote in the article was even more interesting and I wondered why it was truncated.
An online post says that the only way to avoid bigotry “is for the Muslims in India to police their own. All too often, it’s an ‘open secret’ in our communities as to which elements among us support such things, and unless we clamp down on our own extremists, I think it’s awfully hard to cry foul when the backlash begins.”
That’s not at all what I’m used to seeing in articles after a terror attack, and I was curious to see what they cut out. Here’s the rest -
The group claiming credit is calling themselves the ‘Deccan Mujahideen’. I’m sure there will be an anti-Islamic backlash in the country, as there was in this country and in every nation that has seen such incidents.
As for the issue of bigotry, well, the only way to avoid that is for the Muslim population in India to come forward and police their own. All too often, it’s an ‘open secret’ in our communities as to which elements among us support such things, and unless we clamp down on our own extremists, i think it’s awfully hard to cry foul when the backlash begins.
This isn’t to say that the backlash is acceptable – in a moral and just society, the facts should reign supreme, and rational arguments should hold sway over the masses. We shouldn’t tar and feather an entire faith for the actions of a minority that is violently expressive.
That’s the rational approach to incidents like these.
But when was the last time you saw the masses being rational about things like this?
I’ve written something similar – that in order to permanently solve the problem of Islamic terror, an “Islamic neighborhood watch” is needed.
I’ve lived – back in my welfare days – in really bad neighborhoods. Combined efforts by good citizens in a poor neighborhood with a heavy drug trade could stop that drug trade and improve the lives of everyone. Neighborhood watch on steroids – everyone watch everything and report, report, report. Stand up to the criminals, and testify against them. Band together and throw the criminals out. Own the problem. Might you be murdered? Certainly. Wouldn’t it be better to be killed outright than to live in bondage to criminals? Yes, in my opinion. But this isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s easier to take a passive voice, i.e. “someone should stop this crime problem” when the hard cold alternative is “I will report my own son for dealing drugs.” So we have a “stop snitching” culture where gangstas are neighborhood heroes to all but a few, and the problem persists and increases. The people who live in those neighborhoods have the information the police need, and they withhold it because their personal concerns are greater to them than the welfare of their community. So be it. The consequence of that decision is that their lifestyle sucks. That’s fair. That’s justice.
How is that different from what goes on in Muslim communities? When they see hateful literature published by our “allies” the Saudis in their mosques, when their Imam preaches terrorism, when their brother in law goes alone to Syria for a three month “vacation” – why do these elusive moderates not speak up? The same reasons that people in poor neighborhoods don’t. And, finally, hopefully, the same consequences.
Nobody’s getting “tarred and feathered.” (And if you watched the John Adams miniseries, you saw that old rhetorical canard was based on a very serious act of violence.) It all depends on the meaning of the word “backlash,” doesn’t it? Ultimately, nobody can clean up Islam’s reputation but Muslims. And I don’t mean CAIR screaming “Islamophobia!” I mean actually turning Islam into the “religion of peace” that CAIR claims it is – in defiance of Islam’s own sourcebook. I’m not really fisking the comment – I generally agree with the author, and her blog is well worth reading. Her frustration is palpable, and I sympathize, to a point.
Christians jump at the chance to marginalize Fred Phelps and his evil spawn. Nobody takes him seriously. Nobody in the media asks for his opinion. He isn’t invited to attend mainstream conferences, much less speak at them. But Ibrahim Hooper and many others are still considered acceptable in polite society. We can treat terrorism as a crime or as an act of war, or some combination of the two. But that’s just reacting to it.
It may not seem fair or just to peaceful Muslims that they should have to pay any sort of price for the actions of a small percentage of Muslims. But it is more unfair and unjust that society at large bears the burden of a problem that peaceful Muslims can solve whenever they choose. And if Muslims feel a burden of societal disapproval until they do – good. Just as people living in crime-ridden neighborhoods have to bear the burden of their own inaction, so should peaceful Muslims.
It’s time to start acting on these “open secrets.” In a moral and just society, those who could prevent evil and choose not to deserve disgust, not sympathy and approbation.
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