Point: The backlash against Muslims needs to get perspective
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By Rashed Aqribawi
Photos by Ben Buckley
Around two weeks ago, the world bore witness to a riotous explosion in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Parts of the region, which has been focusing on its own stability since the revolutions that took place last year, rose up and attacked almost every U.S Embassy in North Africa. The protests were not so radical in Egypt, but countrymen in Tunisia and Libya took their protests very far, as the tragic death of ambassador Christian Stevens has shown.
Yemenis, Libyans, Tunisians, and Egyptians took to the streets in violent protest against the release of a film entitled The Innocence of Muslims, an Anti-Islamic film that portrays Prophet Mohammad as a “womanizing homosexual, and abusive individual”. The film has caused distress all over the world, but none so great as the one resulting in the death of an Ambassador.
In response to these protests, Newsweek published an issue entitled “Muslim Rage: How I survived it, how we can end it” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; naturally the cover bore faces of angry bearded men with the title “Muslim Rage” in large black block letters. This issue caused an outbreak of hilarious tweets mocking the inappropriate title. Active tweeters, who happen to be Muslim, have been hash tagging #muslimrage in response to the issue, covered by NPR.
The urban Muslim/liberal population is not to be feared or condemned in these situations, they merely fall prey to depictions like those of Newsweek and the like. The war on Islam, or The Economist-coined term “Islamaphobia,” has reached its peak. Over the past decade or so, the Muslim world has seen nothing but violence, threats, mockery, and discrimination. With movie after movie mocking the very things they hold sacred — a word that we in the West seem to have forgotten. When one releases a highly-controversial movie in a time where violence, socio-cultural and eco-political tension are boiling at the surface of the Arabian Peninsula, where every man, woman and child are still fighting not for freedom or independence, but for good old fashioned stability and safety, that action will have massive repercussions.
The protests were carried out by men of a different socio-economical cloth than the urban city dwellers, countrymen who are uneducated, unexposed and still maintain a rural standard of living. These men have been hearing nothing but the repercussions of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, the drones firing through and over Libya, and other North African countries. They hear about the American solider that took to the streets and murdered 16 Afghans in cold-blood, about the U.S helicopter that shot a group of men and children in Iraq (footage that was wiki-leaked) and the drones that killed several Libyan citizens in the cross fire between supposed al-Qaida members.
These actions are unforgivable, violent, and tragic, but it is hardly fair to wage war on all Muslims based on a minority group of zealots, while ignoring the billion other Muslims who didn’t actually murder a U.S ambassador. So to Newsweek-swilling Americans I say this: if you want the “Muslim rage” to end, then remove your NATO forces, take out your drones, unplug your oil drills, and get the hell out.
