by: Asghar Bukhari
I am
going to tell you a tale of two stories’ and one of them could get you killed.
The first
is the story of Western political elites. Their story is about Islam. They tell
you that Islam (or if they can’t be honest ‘ Islamism’), is a threat to the
world, that this medieval religion is violent and barbaric, a faith that leads
to violence and one that the West must take action against in order to defend
itself. It is a story that inevitably leads to a clash of civilizations.
It is
repeated in newspapers & news channels in the Western World every single
day in various subtle ways and as a result white westerners believe it.
Muslims
also tell a story, and it also involves Islam. This is the one that could get
you killed. They tell a story of an American Empire pushed by Israel and its
lobby and old European hatreds into yet another war against Muslims. In their
story the West had been waging wars to uphold their manufactured borders across
the Muslim world that allowed them to control and dominate the region and kept
that order & maintained it by propping up ruthless dictators. The resulting
deaths and broken lives now measured in their millions.
So they
looked for another identity and found it in Islam. And as they gravitated to
this new identity they no longer saw themselves primarily as Palestinians,
Iraqi’s or Pakistani’s etc. Instead they started to identify themselves - as
Muslims.
When I
say a Muslim identity I do not mean a passive spiritual consciousness of people
who practiced certain rituals. Internal religious understanding that demanded
adherence to strict rituals but could change nothing about their world being
destroyed, or the millions suffering as a result — apart from perhaps, giving
some charity; an apolitical identity that Muslims took to after their defeat at
the hands of colonizing armies.
Instead,
what I mean is a Muslim political identity was re-emerging. A consciousness was
forming of who they were in this world. People who were not passive spectators in
a world controlled by others; people who saw themselves as one community and
not split into tribes by manufactured lines drawn in the sand by their colonial
masters. In short a Muslim identity that was politically awakened; an identity
that was not given by their colonizers but by themselves.
The other
difference was, more and more of them were prepared to fight for it.
It is
these two narratives that are at war in the world today. It is these two
narratives that Western politicians, are using laws & wars to either uphold
or destroy.
When the
reader hears the words ‘hate preacher’ or ‘Islamist’ or Jihadist’ or
‘extremist’ — what they were really hearing was political propaganda for a
political agenda. In truth it was nothing at all to do with real ‘terrorism’.
It was in
reality to uphold a world order they had imposed upon the Muslim World after
the First World War.
And
Western Elites would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure the dominance of
their narrative. Their order depended on it. Thus these propaganda words were weapons;
they were used to legitimize the subsequent action they needed to take against
those who spoke a counter narrative.
In Muslim
countries this was easy. They simply got their local dictator to eliminate the
citizen who expressed his beliefs too loudly. This is documented in the superb
book Dirty Wars by Scahill and in the equally shocking book Cruel Britannia by
Cobain.
But here
in the UK the Government used subtler methods.
Black
lists are complied, previously apolitical institutions like Universities and
the Charity Commission are used to spy on and intimidate Muslims into silence.
If that failed, calling them ‘extremists’ was a catch-all and could smooth the way
to silencing them by putting them in prison or house arrest, ASBO’s, press
vilification, black mail and harassment by the intelligence services. The power
structure was guaranteed public support, they had been taught to fear these
‘buzz words’ surprisingly even Muslims were silent — no one after all wanted to
be seen defending an ‘extremist’.
The
average white non-Muslim would never truly understand either why his Government
was waging wars abroad (or demonizing Muslims here) or why Muslims seemed to be
ever more ready to take to violence themselves. It would all be explained away
as fighting ‘terrorists’.
Am I
saying that all these Muslims were freedom loving, liberal minded people? Of
course not! But hell does not produce many poets and the Muslim world and it’s
bombed out cities were as close to hell as you could get on this earth.
However
there was a fly in the ointment for Western Elites. Muslims were increasingly
becoming politically awakened.
The
problem was the brutal force the West was using to maintain its order was in
fact its Achilles heel. The more the West killed; kidnapped; tortured;
demonized; brutalized; and the more they denied people the ability to choose
their own destiny — or even speak about it — the more the Muslim story of
oppression and their quest for freedom appeared to ring true.
If before
it was just an abstract and interesting theory, it now came alive before their
very eyes, and the insoluble proof lay in the dead bodies or broken families
they witnessed — and thanks to the internet, millions were witnessing it daily.
And that
is why the West cannot beat Al-Qaeda. Because it’s not Al-Qaeda they are
fighting anymore. The story of the struggle is growing beyond a small group.
Today across the world they are fighting young, committed angry men, from all
walks of life, in Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Mali, Yemen, Kenya, Libya and
the list is growing.
And these
men and women are no longer willing to accept that they must live under Western
backed dictators, in Western manufactured states and do not think their lives
are cheaper than anyone else’s. They do not see it is their lot in life to see
their people slaughtered by drones or kidnapped never to be seen again — they intend
to stop it.
We can’t
beat these groups by doing the very thing that made them take up arms in the
first place. Violence begets violence.
Putting
it bluntly
Muslims
are human beings. No human being can live under an unjust order for ever.
Eventually they will fight to overturn that order — and that is exactly what
they are doing.
And if
you were a Muslim saying exactly what I have just said in this article …it
could get you killed.