THIRTY FOURTH MARHOOM DR. A.M.A. AZEEZ ORATION – 2007
Western hostility towards Islam and Muslims is not something new as they have never missed a chance to demonise Islam and Muslims to suit their agendas. But this campaign came into open with all its ferocity in the aftermath of the 9/11 events in New York and the Pentagon.Accusing Al Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden of masterminding the 9/11 attacks and threatening the security of the United States, President George Bush unleashed a wave of terror against Muslims in all corners of the world.
President Bush, together with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their European allies, managed quite successfully to sell the Al Qaeda threat to justify their designs on Muslim countries although, even today, Al Qaeda remains an organisation without an office, without an address, without a telephone or fax number and even without an e mail address.
Other countries such as Russia, India and even China joined this campaign as it suited their own agendas. Third world countries, especially Muslim countries, were blackmailed to get in line or face the consequences. Regimes in many Muslim countries have become active collaborators. This is the crucial problem facing the Muslim world today.
Muslim countries are being attacked and bombed with impunity; Muslims are tortured and killed, their religion and prophet mocked. Muslims are among the poorest people in the world and their countries the least developed. Ironically, this is despite some Muslim countries having enormous wealth and riches.
Initially Muslims all over the world were confused and frightened. But it didn’t take them long to realise that the fight against terrorism was a skilfully executed Judeo-Christian conspiracy against Islam and Muslims which sought to reduce many Muslim countries to wastelands.
This include Somalia, Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, occupied Palestine, Kashmir, Gujrat and Central Asian Muslim Republics such as Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the Muslims in China’s Xingjian province and many other areas where Muslims were suppressed. But no one speaks about them.
During the past one and a half decades more than 12 million Muslims were driven to refugee camps where they suffer in abject poverty. Millions of Muslims were killed. Muslim men and women carrying their belongings and walking with their loved ones in search of refugee camps have become a familiar sight the world over and Sri Lanka is no exception.
Muslims struggling for freedom in places such as occupied Palestine, Kashmir, Southern Philippines, and the South of Thailand have been regarded as terrorists and jihadists and killed without any justification.
This destructive campaign strikes at the very root of political, military, economic, financial, social, religious and even cultural life of Muslims. It has kindled anti Muslim feelings and ‘Islamophobia’ has been spreading like wildfire, not only in the west, but also in other parts of the world where Muslims live as minorities.
The unanswered question remains: Who are these Islamic terrorists? From where did they appear? Have they descended all of a sudden from another planet to unleash violence on peace-loving people on planet Earth? Worst of all, why do they suddenly turn to violence to redress their grievances?
The fact however remains that Muslims all over the world lived in peace and harmony, even with Jews and Christians, for more than fourteen centuries. Islam gave birth to one of the greatest civilisations in known history, enriched many other civilisations and even contributed towards enhancing modern European civilisation. So how come the Muslims with such a fascinating and inspiring history have suddenly become terrorists now?
The move to associate Islam with violence began with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran when the killings of the Shah’s supporters were exploited to project Muslims as lawless people who kill each other in the name of their own religion.
To crush the Islamic revolution, the United States, Europe, Israel, Gulf and other Arab states got together and pressed Iraq to invade Iran on the pretext of recovering the disputed Shatt Al-Arab region. The almost daily bloodletting during the eight year war were exploited to project Muslims as fundamentalists and. terrorists The only beneficiaries from this conflict were Israel and the arms industries in the United States and Europe.
A year after the war ended, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 .People all over the world were jubilant in the hope that the United States, which preached democracy, human rights and freedom, would usher in an era of peace and harmony .
But they were to be severely disappointed as the real rulers of the world, the Jewish lobbies, weapons industries, oil cartels, pharmaceutical companies, banking, finance and real estate sectors and other corporate conglomerates which control the media had their own agendas to exploit the wealth of the world.
European colonial powers withdrew from their colonies in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1950 and 1960s.But they have now returned through the back door under a well organised programme combining globalisation and the open economy, technological advancement especially electronic media to reach the hearts and minds of people and most frighteningly a regime change programme to install puppet regimes in areas deemed vital to U.S.interests. The biggest threat to this programme was Islam and thus they started demonising Islam to shift the focus of the world, once on communism, to Islam.
The United States selected Muslim Somalia as an experimental laboratory for regime change, armed tribal war lords and triggered off the civil war which turned once peaceful Somalia into a lawless country causing untold misery to Somalis. This experiment failed when footages of US soldiers killed, hands tied and dragged along the streets of Mogadishu, were shown in the television networks turning public opinion in the US against the government .The US forces withdrew promptly.
Since then Somalia, ignored by the whole world, remained a lawless country .After 16 years there emerged a new force called the Islamic Courts which restored law and order, won the confidence of people and was almost on the verge of establishing a stable government when the US got Ethiopia to invade Somalia early this year, triggering off a violent political crisis that has since created more than 300,000 refugees.
The U.S then turned its attention to the oil rich Arab Gulf where they precipitated a political crisis by tricking President Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait .Once Iraqi troops entered Kuwait, the US led West unleashed a ferocious media campaign followed by fierce aerial bombardment before despatching ground forces into Iraq under the guise of liberating Kuwait..
Battered by aerial bombardments and crippled by UN sanctions which killed more than 500,000 children, Iraq was virtually an occupied country. The western weapons industry flourished as they sold a staggering $ 157 billion worth of armaments. Many Gulf countries were thus brought under the political and military umbrella of the United States.
In the aftermath of the war, former US President George Bush Sr said that“Israel is safe and the oil flows freely”. It was Israel that badly wanted this war and the US merely fulfilled this Zionist dream.
Algeria
Then came the Algerians turn to pay the price. After centuries of colonial rule and a long spell of dictatorship, the Algerians gave a massive mandate to the Islamic Salvation Front in the first ever general elections in the country held in December 1991. But the military staged a coup and crushed the people’s choice. In the subsequent civil war around 180,000 people were killed often in a savage manner.
Islamic groups were blamed for these killings throughout the crisis. But later the Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia admitted that government forces killed 17,000 Islamic activists who comprised the cream of Islamic scholarship in the country.
Then came the genocide of Muslims in the heart of Europe when Bosnian Muslims declared independence following a referendum in April 1992. The Serbs opposed and committed some of the worst ever atrocities against Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1995. The Bosnian Muslims were detained in warehouses and other such places, starved for weeks, tortured and systematically and mercilessly butchered and buried in mass graves, some of which are yet to be identified.
The United Nations weapons embargo prevented Bosnian Muslims from defending themselves giving the Serbs a free hand to slaughter them. In the city of Srebrenica alone around 10,000 Muslim men and boys, separated from their loved ones, were massacred in one of the most gruesome killings in recorded history. Most of the victims were under the protection of the UN Dutch peace keepers who handed them over to the Serbs knowing very well they were to be killed.
Admitting the failure and guilt of the UN, its Secretary General Kofi Annan said that “the massacre of Muslims would forever haunt the UN which must accept partial responsibility for this massacre, in the UN “safe area”. With its infrastructure destroyed, and thousands of families left without male members who were the bread winners, Muslim society in Bosnia remains devastated today.
KOSOVO
In its wake came the genocide of Muslims in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo where more than ninety percent of the population were Muslims, with the minority Serbs controlled the Government, Parliament, Civil Services and even Education.
All the Kosovo Muslims wanted was autonomy. Serbian President Milosevic declared a state of emergency, imposed direct rule from Belgrade, and turned the province into a Serb run police state. Milosevic brutalised Kosovo Muslims to accept Serbian rule and remain part of Yugoslavia and so continued his killing spree throughout 1998 while the West watched doing nothing.
Central Asian Republics
The vast and beautiful region of Central Asia comprising the largely unknown Muslim states of Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, renowned for their famous silk route cities of Bukhara and Samarkhand where Islamic civilization flourished, is probably the most obscure area of the world.
In the post-Soviet era, all East European Christian countries such as Poland, Hungary, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia were free to decide their destiny. They became independent and were absorbed into the
European Union. East Germany was united with West Germany. But the Central Asian Muslim Republics were brought under Russia’s grip through the newly established Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS.
European Union. East Germany was united with West Germany. But the Central Asian Muslim Republics were brought under Russia’s grip through the newly established Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS.
The oppressed people throughout these Muslim republics wanted to do away with their puppet rulers who ruled over them with Russia’s help and so set up their own governments to enjoy religious freedom and improve their economic and social conditions. The result was a worse type of oppression, systematic torture and the killing especially of Muslim religious scholars and political activists. Oppressive measures such as dropping people in boiling water and chopping off various parts of the human body failed to draw any attention from the Western media.
Chechnya
In the midst Chechnya declared its independence, in November 1991from Russia. Russia responded by using its military might to subjugate Chechens and caused horrific scenes of death and destruction. Unable to either crush or contain Chechen fighters, then Russian President Boris Yeltsin was forced into a humiliating peace deal in August 1996. Later accusing Chechens of bombing an apartment complex which in fact was bombed by the Russian intelligence Services, Russian President Vladimir Putin bombed Chechnya and ruined this country, forcing hundreds of thousands of Chechens to flee and they could still be found languishing in refugee camps. Who cares for their plight? .
Gujarat
Organised violence against Muslims has been a common feature especially in North India ever since the country was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan. In the state of Gujarat where Hindus and Muslims coexisted in harmony for centuries, fifty eight Hindus belonging to the Hindu extremist Vishva Hindu Parishad, VHP, were killed on 27 February 2002, when the Sabarmati Express train they were travelling in was burnt at the town of Godhra.
Muslims had nothing to do with this incident as revealed by a subsequent government investigation. Yet accusing Muslims of burning the carriage there was organised violence, killings and the destruction of property. Later it was revealed that the Chief Minister Narendra Modi was behind these attacks which killed around 7,000 Muslims under a well thought out plan to oust Muslims out of mainstream areas in Ahmedabad and other places.
The mobs used knives, axes, swords, iron and wooden rods, acids, gas cylinders and all sorts of inflammable materials and every possible other weapon to kill Muslims in the cities and villages. In some cases, they got the entire Muslim population in certain areas electrocuted. In many urban centres, explosives were used to blow up houses, shops, dargahs and mosques. Structures that could not be razed by the mobs were mowed down by trucks. Overnight, once prosperous Gujarati Muslims were reduced to nothing. They languished in refugee camps while their properties were looted. Describing these attacks as India’s shame thousands of peace loving Hindus vehemently condemned the bloodshed while a well known Kathakali dancer even refused to accept an award presented by Modi’s government
Kashmir
People in the Muslim state of Kashmir were known throughout history for their peaceful nature. In 1846 the British colonial rulers sold Kashmir for 750.000 Sterling Pounds to Hindu war lord Raja Gulab Singh who despised and brutally oppressed his Muslim subjects. They were kept so economically downtrodden that even around 1940s their per capital income was eleven rupees of which they paid a tax of 21 percent besides paying levies on everything from salt to saffron.
Their condition didn’t improve even after independence. Political manoeuvrings of the Central Government in Delhi, rigging of elections in 1987 and 1996, years of political turmoil, economic problems, poverty and many other factors led to the 1989 mass uprisings.
Instead of attending to their grievances, the Indian forces used violence and atrocities to crush their freedom struggle and silence them. Since then thousands of civilians were killed and thousands of houses were demolished with the occupants rendered homeless.
After a visit to Kashmir in 1991, the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi said in New Delhi that “the brutalities of the Indian army and the Central Reserve Police meant that India may have lost Kashmir”.
Raping Kashmiri women became a daily occurrence to break the spirit and soul of this great people. The exact number of rapes will never be known as Kashmiri women who prefer death to dishonour, refuse to speak about their shameful ordeal and prefer to suffer the indignity in silence. There are more than 10,000 women, in their 20s and 30s, whose husbands were taken into custody without any trace for years .They remain married widows as they cannot remarry since they do not know the fate of their husbands .Today Kashmiris who demand their political rights are branded as Jihadi Terrorists.
Occupied Palestine
The continuous sufferings of Palestinians by the Zionist Jewish occupiers remain an on going tragedy. Before 1948 there was no country called Israel. The British mandatory authority after World War 1 together with International Jewry brought in thousands of Jews from all over the world and settled them in lands belonging to Palestinians who were driven out at gun point by Jewish gangsters.
These gangsters such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon, godfathers of terrorism, were later elected as prime ministers of Israel .Despite all his crime records Menachem Begin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
The West created the state of Israel for Jews on Palestinian lands while Palestinians continue to suffer in refugee camps for more than 75 years as stateless people and to this day Palestinians struggling for their political rights are branded as terrorists by the West.
In the midst came the 9/11 events in New York. Almost every independent study undertaken by numerous professionals, institutions and organisations came to the conclusion that the Twin Tower buildings were not brought down by the aircrafts but by missiles placed within the buildings.
Some of these studies exonerated Muslims of being responsible stating that they suspect the demolition as an inside job, well timed and set up before the aircraft crashed into the twin towers. An advertisement carried in The Sydney Morning Herald by Jimmy Walter, offered one million US dollars to anyone who proves that explosives were not used in the demolition of the World Trade Centre, and challenged the US government to “Re-open the investigation and address the unanswered questions of 9/11”.
Usually it takes months and even years to find out who the perpetrators were as it involves lot of investigations. But within 24 hours President Bush accused Al Qaeda of masterminding the attacks, invaded Afghanistan within 27 days, toppled the Taliban regime, installed a puppet regime under Ahmed Karzai and started setting up military bases all over the country.
Washington let loose its destructive military might on the poorest of the poor Afghans, pitiable people forced to forage for a single meal and who didn’t know where their next meal would be coming from.
The US blitz turned what was already a battered land into a region of nearly complete devastation. Carpet-bombings, missile attacks, and cluster bombs simply slaughtered thousands of innocent Afghans while many thousands, including children who make up half of the population, died from starvation or exposure. According to reports more than 60,000 Afghans were killed during the early days.
The Taliban would have been the darlings of Washington if only they had agreed to be party to the proposals of the US oil cartels to exploit the resources of Central Asia. Their failure to do so put them on a crash course with Washington.
The Taliban did make some positive contributions to Afghanistan as it brought law and order and stability to that lawless country, wiped out some rapacious war lords and gangsters, ended civil wars, stamped out corruption, paved the way for trade and commerce to flourish by making roads safer for people to travel from one corner to another without the fear of being waylaid or attacked, destroyed poppy cultivations and eliminated drug barons to cite a few. They also took some positive steps to wipe out some age-old unislamic Afghan traditions such as forced marriages.
Invasion of Iraq
Then the Bush-Blair team turned their attention on Iraq. Iraq, the birth place of Prophet Ibrahim, is an ancient country where a rich Mesopotamian civilisation flourished. Iraq’s capital Baghdad was once the seat of learning which attracted people from all over the world. It was also the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Golden period of Islam when Baghdad ruled the Muslim world.
Bush and Blair invaded Iraq and turned this oil rich and almost developed country into a killing field to loot Iraq’s oil wealth and ensure Israel’s supremacy in the Middle East.
Four years later today, the US and British troops have killed nearly1.2 million Iraqi men, women, children and the aged, more than two and half million Iraqis are in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, four million Iraqis are refugees in their own country while more than half the population suffer from starvation. Iraqi society and infrastructure has been destroyed, drinking water polluted, power supply disrupted while schools, hospitals and other places are all in shambles.
The Americans even burnt birth, marriage, death, land, company, industrial and vehicle registration offices and all other such places to create chaos. Israel’s secret service Mossad came up with a list of names and addresses of professionals such as university lecturers, professors, scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other intellectuals, and went from house to house, killing them in their sleep. In many cases they used sharp weapons to cut the throats of husband in the presence of wives who were killed later. American forces looted the museums and robbed very valuable historic artefacts .They armed Shiites and Sunnis to provoke civil war.
Then there emerged shocking pictures of American troops’ gang-raping Iraqi women. These hapless women were forcibly dragged out of their homes, screaming in terror, stripped naked and gang-raped by the very people who had ostensibly been there to protect them. Nonetheless, such criminal depravity had been committed by so-called civilised uniformed personnel representing the most powerful military nation on earth.
Among the victims were ordinary housewives, mothers and daughters – all brought up in a decently conservative society and whose religious traditions have always valued feminine purity as a prerequisite for a happily wedded life? Did the perpetrators of these appalling crimes ever stop to wonder that their victims were the same kind of women as their mothers and sisters at home?
Hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women were arbitrarily arrested and subjected to savage forms of torture which brought swift condemnation from all over the world.
In Falluja, a city of 300,000 people, President Bush dropped internationally banned and improved versions of napalm bombs which burnt and melted fasting Muslims to death. The American media was quite conspicuous in its silence on the Fallujah massacre which is one of the most horrendous acts of genocide in modern history.
Today the entire Iraqi population remains traumatised and these are the obscene images of crimes that cry out to the Heavens for vengeance.
Angered right-minded Jewish, Christian and other intellectuals all over the world openly called for impeaching Bush for misleading the American people and launching what they described as the most barbaric war in modern history. Nobel laureate and British Jewish playwright Harold Pinter called it an act of banditry. They demanded that once removed from office, Bush and Blair should be put on trial along with the rest of their cohorts in The Hague and be categorised in the same class and company as Slobodan Milosevic.
President Bush dispatched harmless young American soldiers, with their full lives ahead of them, to kill Iraqis and in the process, more than 3500 of them were killed and around 30,000 young American men, some married with families, returned home maimed, burnt, mentally crippled and destined to suffer for the rest of their lives.
Besides the pain of being physically disabled, the conscience of these young men, burning inside their minds, were also haunted by the ghosts of the innocent Iraqis they killed, tortured, maimed and raped. Haunted by the blood they spilled and all that they did and saw in the battlefield – burnt out corpses of innocent Iraqis and their loved ones, screams of the suffering, cries of limbless children, weeping widows and fatherless daughters ,they scream in sleepless nights in different corners of America. While they will have to live with this agony for the rest of their lives, what about the pathetic plight of the mothers, wives and children and other loved ones who need to put up with the agony of these young American men for the rest of their lives?
While wives of marines lined up at churches for grocery handouts to feed their children, New York-based tycoon David Brooks, who made a fortune from this war, spent ten million dollars to celebrate his daughter’s bat mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony marking the girl’s twelfth birthday at the Manhattan Rockefeller Centre in November 2005.
Meanwhile billions of dollars worth of contracts for the so-called rebuilding of Iraq was given to companies close to the war mongers including Vice President Dick Cheney, called “Vice President for Torture”, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others.
Frightened and helpless Muslims have been watching the unfolding crimes fearing they would be the next target.
Today Al Qaeda threat has lost its credibility. For example, the Bush administration accused Al Qaeda of bombing Benazir Bhutto’s arrival procession in Karachi while Benazir accused the Pakistani Internal Affairs Ministry and even named the people involved.
It appears Muslims have no one to turn to. Western media which is an integral part of the Western war machine is hostile to Muslims. The United Nations has been used by the United States to implement its evil designs on Muslim countries. Regimes in the Muslim countries are willing collaborators and no one even bothers to condemn these crimes. Only outspoken former Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr Mahathir Mohamed, South Africa’s living legend Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, besides numerous American, British and even Jewish writers had the courage to condemn these crimes.
The situation is so frightening for Muslims that Wolfram Richter, the Economic Professor of the University of Dortmund, expressed his fears that “the next holocaust would be against Muslims”.