By: Tashbih Sayyed
Two more American sons died in Iraq, two more mothers lost their sons in
Israel to Palestinian terrorism. 53 more Muslims were slaughtered by
Wahhabis in a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan. Maher Hawash, an Intel
software engineer whose detention in Oregon, USA, prompted high-profile
protests about civil rights abuse, pleaded guilty to a federal charge of
conspiring to help the Taliban in Afghanistan. And taking advantage of
our democratic traditions, religious radicals, disguised as Islamic
advocacy groups have launched a campaign of intimidation to stop
President George W. Bush from going ahead with his appointment of
foremost Islamic scholar Dr. Daniel Pipes on the board of United States
Institute of Peace. They claim that Daniel Pipes's appointment will
confirm the Islamist assertion that US war on terror is in fact a new
phase of crusades. Is there a connection between these seemingly
separate and unconnected events? Yes there is!
Those who are following the bloody Islamist trail all over the world
will have no difficulty in connecting the dots of these events. Behind
all these murderous activities, there is only one mind - radical Islam's
determination to overwhelm the open societies. They are the different
heads of the same Wahhabi Hydra.
When President George W. Bush, echoing the pain and hurt of the
civilized world, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, declared a war
on terrorism, he neither forgot the American ideals nor ignored the fact
that's ours is a nation that is neither racist nor an exclusivist - we
are to our very core, humanists. That's why Bush took pains to
discourage those who might have taken advantage of the tragedy by acting
in revenge against American Muslim. He emphasized that Islam is a
peaceful faith and our war is not against Islam.
Since Islamists have always perpetrated their crimes against humanity
in the name of Islam, they are using President Bush's declaration of
American faith as a tool to demoralize Americans from taking steps to
protects their values. The world is a witness and the history will
chronicle it that Islamism is not Islam and the neo-Nazi ideology being
spread in the Muslim communities has nothing to do with the message of
peace.
It is time for us to recognize the threat to our way of life that has
set up its bases in our midst. The civilized world has come a long way
from the dark days of holocaust. And we cannot permit the same mind to
take root in our lands now. The post renaissance West has suffered many
a tragedies, just because, it failed to act in time in thwarting the
rising threats of totalitarian ideologies - Fascism, Nazism and
Communism. Western governments, compelled by their cold war needs and
post cold war commercial dependencies have allowed an ideology, radical
Islam - that has potential to be much more lethal - to assume a size and
stature that is, now, not so easy to restrain.
The problem is that we are the prisoners of our own civic faith. We
accord the same rights to the enemies of civilization which are meant
for the civilized people. We do not realize that our misdirected sense
of compassion for underdeveloped and primitive minds empowers those who
have no appreciation for our values. In fact they consider our
compassion for human beings as our weakness. They have been
indoctrinated into believing that our faith in human greatness is a ploy
to colonize their natural resources and corrupt their
"righteous" way of life. They look at our Operation Iraqi
freedom as an operation Iraqi Occupation. If we have to survive as
civilized people, we will have to correct misdirected sense of passion.
In his history of World War II, Winston Churchill wrote that the
war's moral was that the Western democracies, because of their
reluctance to fight, had allowed the wicked to rearm themselves. Showing
compassion to those who seek to hurt you isn't compassion at all. It's
stupidity. Islamists in the US are taking advantage of our compassion's
- the US constitution. Daniel Pipes and people like him, many of them in
the Islamic world, have taken upon themselves the unpleasant
responsibility of warning the civilized world against ignoring the
threat of radical Islam and indulging in misdirected compassion.
It is obvious to the most dumb that the Islamist organizations who
are actively engaged in activities aimed at destroying our freedoms,
know that Daniel Pipes is a threat to their long term agenda of bringing
down this great bastion of freedoms from within. The conduct and
activities of these so called advocacy groups is aimed at only one
thing, to convince the Muslims that the US is against them. They have
already achieved a remarkable success in this direction. A majority of
American Muslims do believe that their lives, properties and civil
rights are not safe in the US. Such a vast scared section of American
nation cannot bring harmony and homogeneity to the principal of
"One nation under One God."
The campaign against Daniel Pipes is another front of the same war
against the free world that is killing our sons in Iraq, Israelis in
Israel, Muslims in Pakistan, Indonesia, Christians in Sudan and
Philippines, moderates in Iran, Bangladesh, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey.
American Muslims before lining up behind the Wahhabi pied pipers, must
understand one thing. Is the US an anti - Islam power? Are the decisions
of the US government aimed at hurting Muslims? I am sure that any one
who is not a devout follower of Wahhabi ideology, will find that the US
is the only place on this earth where Muslims, irrespective of their
sect, school of thought and national origin find the freedom of worship.
Wahhabis want to change all this. They want to impose Saudi Shriah
(religious laws) that consider all the non Wahhabi Muslims an infidel.
Daniel Pipes is nominated by the US government which is not faith based.
It is government of the American people and Muslims are an important
segment of this equation. Daniel Pipes by virtue of his nomination by
the US government is the nominee of all of us. If Daniel Pipes's voice
is muzzled by those who have been influenced by Wahhabi Money, those
who, being too kind, feel obliged by fund-raisers for Congressmen and
Senators with an objective to win support for radical Islam in the US
and those who are misguided by the rhetoric's of civil liberties, racial
profiling and civil rights, another holocaust will be not very far. Only
this time, the victims will not be just Jews.
(The writer is editor-in-chief of Pakistan Today, a
California-based weekly newspaper, and president of Council for
Democracy and Tolerance.)
