Monday, November 30, 2009

Islamic Grievances

Islam feels itself under siege from the infidels and the Jews. All conspiring to dishonour and to continue to oppress them. They long for the reinstitution by whatever means, of global power. The Muslim ummah has accepted what their trusted clerics, their scholars and their politicians have embraced; that Muslims have been hard done by traditionally, and they now, once again, face an organized conspiracy to belittle their faith and the founder of their faith, and to keep Muslim countries in a perpetual state of colonialism.

The propaganda serves a function. It enables dictators and totalitarian rulers, clerical tyrants to turn the frustrated anger of Muslims toward the outside, not the interior, where their civic needs and freedoms are held in abeyance for the greater good of those who rule. It also diverts Muslims in general, and Muslim academics in particular, from the necessity to clean house. The suspicion in which Islam is now viewed in the world outside its own religious house of worship has been well earned.

Young Muslim men who cannot find employment, who see no future for themselves in stagnant economies where the population is fodder for the ambitions of those who rule, are also ready recruits for the call of jihad. The smouldering resentment of champions of fundamentalist Islam, the Wahaabi-Salafist fanatics whose hatred of the West and all its achievements leading to a declaration of war has introduced the world to terror on a new scale of fear and suspense.

Muslim scholars would have it that the Christian Crusaders laid cruel waste to what Islam held dear. Overlooking entirely that the Crusades were instituted as a reaction to hundreds of years of violent and victorious jihad when Muslims engaged in destroying churches, converting them into mosques, the famous Byzantine Hagia Sophia among them. Their Eleventh-Century Caliph destroyed all the most holy of Christian churches and landmarks, building mosques above them.

Much as the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built upon the ruins of the Second Temple of Solomon on Judaism's most sacred symbol, the Temple Mount. Muslim scholars have been denying ever since, that there ever existed the two temples, claiming the area always to have been Islamic.
There has been an active conspiracy in the Palestinian Authority to remove all vestiges of archaeological evidence that Judaism had a ancient presence in Jerusalem, with the intent of eliminating all traces of links with the Temple Mount.

Not only was there a Muslim grand mufti who wrote acknowledgement in the 1920s that there was irrefutable proof of the Temple Mount's Judaic heritage, but an Arab university lecturer and writer is currently in hiding for fear for his life as a result of publishing a book linking Jews with the Temple Mount. "The legendary Temple of Jerusalem may be the place of the Presence of the Almighty and where the High Priests served Him." This does not sit well with the Arab Palestinian insistence that Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are Palestinian.

New research by medievalists reveals that the Crusades were not exercises in barbarism but represented an elaborate theology of protection of Christian nations actively being threatened by a surge of Muslim invaders who had reached far into Europe, from France in the 8th Century to Vienna in the 16th and 17th Centuries. In the process, the Muslim hordes in their holy jihad desecrated Christian shrines and churches, general persecuting the Christian faithful.

Much, in actual fact, as is occurring now, with current-day Muslim countries persecuting their minority Christian populations, destroying churches and murdering their clerics. The Taliban famously destroyed several world-heritage ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan, and present-day Palestinian Arabs deface and destroy ancient Judaic artefacts and places of ancestral worship.

But the religions are not that far distanced from each other; while in antiquity the Crusaders felt that in taking part in the crusades, they would redeem their souls there is the modern counterpart. Just as current-day jihadis believe in their fanatical embrace of Islamism that murdering innocents, both Muslim and non-Muslim, they become martyrs, welcomed in Paradise.

Osama bin Laden exults in spreading the Muslim-palatable propaganda that a global Caliphate is at hand, calling the faithful to respond to the call for holy jihad, blaming foreign interests for "gaining control over the Islamic holy places and the Holy Sanctuaries, and hegemony over the wealth and riches of our ummah". The faithful are called to respond, to take back what is theirs and in the process restore Islam to its former glory.

That the infidels have gained control over holy places and sanctuaries must be news to Saudi Arabia, and would logically, have to be absurd to the two and a half million Muslim faithful who have just concluded the hajj, and are returning from Mecca. This is a propaganda war fully as much as it is an existential war between East and West.

The more gullible and emotional Islam's followers, the less opportunity for sanity to prevail.

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