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Point Abid
Ullah Jan 21st
century Jews
Today, most Americans and other Westerners avoid to have a second look at faces with traditional Muslim beard or heads with a headscarf. Keeping the role of mainstream media in this transition in mind, one can assess that it would not take long to turn these small gesture of avoiding glances at Muslim faces to the decision by many shops and restaurants not to serve the Muslim population. Placards saying "Jews not admitted" and "Jews enter this place at their own risk" began to appear all over Germany in less than five years time. In some parts of the country Jews were banned from public parks, swimming-pools and public transport. History is on the way to repeating itself — this time for Muslims. On the other extreme, there are Muslims swearing on the Holy Qur´an to support their lies about problems in their respective countries for securing a stay in the West. Fifty per cent of the top twenty refugee producing countries for Canada are Muslim or Muslim majority. These are but just some signs of the deep malady forcing Muslims to sacrifice almost anything for living in the West. Unfortunately, many Muslims still do not realise that time has considerably changed for those who dream to live as equal citizens in the West. It matters little for those, who choose to bear all insult and care the least for everything that happens around them. They would definitely earn a few more dollars but not the respect they deserve as human beings. Non-Muslim immigrants may still have opportunity to get equal treatment. For Muslims, however, the time is up. Even citizenship cannot guarantee safety and security any more, let alone human rights. The recent case of US authorities´ detaining and deporting a Syrian born Canadian, Mahr Arar, to Syria should be an eye opener. Canadian officials were fully aware of his illegal arrest and deportation. When he returned after spending 10 months in some penurious prison in Syria, the Canadian government denied its involvement in the crime. When Juliet O´Neill, a Canadian journalist, exposed the reality, Canadian police raided her house and offices to find out any clue about the source that leaked information about collusion between Canadian and US authorities. There are numerous cases of the US authorities´ detaining and returning well-respected Canadian citizens back to Canada. Their crime is their religion and their religious get up. Muslims, who keep beard in traditional Islamic way, are fundamentalists, unfit for integration in Western society. The young, clean shaved Muslims, on the other hand, could be potential terrorists, trying to deceive the authorities. Muslim organisations are advising Muslims to avoid travelling to US. They are advised not even to take Hajj flights via USA. There are cases of taking Muslim off the planes for interrogation in New York even if they were only on the way to Canada. The precautionary calls are understandable, but for how long? The conditions are changing for the worse on both sides of the border in North America and throughout Europe. Canada is issuing Permanent Resident Cards to immigrants. They would not be able to travel without these cards. Poor immigrants came to know recently that the optical strips in resident cards would be holding some 1,500 pages of information on the card holder. A resident card could itself become a one way ticket to Guantanamo bay if anything is slightly mistaken in case of a Muslim card holder. Moreover, the card holder would never know what information he is carrying with him on his card. In the near future the racial profiling, the US Supreme Courts approval for detention on mere suspicion and new ID Cards would become tools for materialising “the final solution” like the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which identified Jews according to the religion practiced by an individual´s grandparents. Consequently, the Nazis classified as Jews thousands of people who had converted from Judaism to another religion, among them even Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish. In another development, Canada customs officers have joined their U.S. counterparts in the coding of international passengers arriving at airports for security checks. Customs agents will soon be assigning passengers numbers from one to 10 based on the security threat they pose. There is no doubt as to who will end up at number 10. Even in the absence of passengers´ coding, a lady, who is Canadian citizen for close to 20 years, after her visit to Pakistan asked the author not to e-mail her Islam-related articles anymore. The reason of her fear is the way she was treated by security officials at Frankfurt Airport while travelling back to Canada. Imagine Muslims´ travelling around the world after a few years from now, when avoiding Islam-related articles would not be able to save their skin From now on, Islam is both an identity and a crime. It makes a person´s citizenship and his rights totally irrelevant. Eighty percent of the Jews in Germany held German citizenship. The so-called racial profiling in the US is nothing but a refined term for pure racism. The US Supreme Court has legalised detention of thousands of Muslims on mere suspicion. Similarly, in Canada the draconian Security Certificate would now take just one minister to sign for locking up someone indefinitely without any evidence. So far, Muslims are the main victims of this certificate. The more than 3000 Pakistanis´ seeking refuge status in Canada each year has forced Steve Gallagher, Professor at Concordia University, to conclude in a message to this scribe: “If these people are in reality refugees then the world is absolutely full of persecution. Logically this would grant western countries the right to take over such countries to deal with the persecution.” Interestingly Steve Gallagher is not alone in holding such views, nor is such feeling limited towards people seeking refugee status in Western countries. People from outside world do not wear distinctive marks to differentiate refugees from legal immigrants. To most Westerners, holding such views, everyone with a different skin tone and features is an unwelcome visitor. Being Muslim is a bonus to gathering extra hate. Muslims are on the chopping block. The time is not far away when they get a treatment worse than the Jews met in the last century. Muslims have become Jews of 21st century. A look at Musharraf and Mubarak at the top, Manji and other kufr-justifying moderates in the middle and the money-maniacs lying and swearing on the Holy Qur´an at the bottom is enough to conclude that Muslims are not victims. They are responsible for turning themselves into Jews of the 21st century. Jews were lucky for having problems only in Germany. Imagine Muslims for whom the whole West turn into a Nazi bloc. There are complaints that Muslim immigrants are more inclined to hold on to the culture they left behind than to adopt and adapt to the one they find in the West. Anti-Semitic propaganda redolent of the Nazi era has taken a nasty anti-Muslim turn and become ubiquitous in the Western world. David Pryce-Jones concludes that Muslims bring a culture and identity with them. However, instead of assimilation, their “self-proclaimed local leaders …proclaim that assimilation is a threat to Islam…If allowed to pass unchallenged, these rival extremisms have the capacity to undermine democracy in host countries.”[1] Expressing concern about the failure of Muslims to integrate, Suzanne Fields, writes in Washington Times (January 29, 2003) that Muslim “assimilation may be the longer running dilemma” in the US. Comparing it with Europe, she writes: “Muslim minorities similarly threaten swift assimilation in Europe. ´While the French government is publicly supportive of Arab causes, it and other European governments are privately worried about future trends,´ writes Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal. ´September 11 revealed that assimilation is working very poorly in much of Europe: terrorist ringleaders like Mohamed Atta were radicalized not in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but in Western Europe.´” Suzanne Fields further shows how Europeans are concerned with the 15 million strong population of Muslims with a birthrate three times that of Christians, Jews and others. The solution and certificate for Muslims to live in the West is get secularized. Muslim problem in Europe has led Europeans to “heavy-handed attempts to secularize immigrants who often don´t want to be secularized, such as Jacques Chirac´s decree to ban the traditional head scarves for Muslim schoolgirls and skullcaps for orthodox Jewish schoolboys while allowing crosses of reasonable size, ´reasonable´ left undefined.”[2] What if the Muslim resistance watering down their identity continues? What if Chirac-like resolve for assimilation strengthened among other secular Allies? The situation will get worse for there is no dearth of Manjis and Rushdies among Muslims. These are not exceptions. Suzanne fields, like others, quote persons such as founding members of the American Islamic Congress to support her argument. But this is no different than what some leading rabbis were doing in Germany. Six months after Hitler seized power in 1933, several leading Berlin rabbis wrote to him pledging loyalty to Germany. The rabbis argued that they, the orthodox, shared the Nazis´ moral values, as opposed to decadent Bolshevism and libertinism, as opposed to the left-wing Jews who made up much of the avant garde. The rabbis promised Hitler that they would do their best to persuade Jews around the world to end a boycott on German products. In retrospect that seems like a terrible mistake.[3] When the going gets tough, the tide does not differentiate between the pro-tyrant moderates and the resisters. Majority of the so-called scholars of Islam in the West have adopted the same kind of attitude which was typical of Yekkim [folkloristic nickname for Jews originating in Germany] who excessively denied the reality with slogans like "Yihye Tov" (all will be well), are made unbased assertions that things will "work out". To deal with this a situation Muslims need to: a) gather the left-over self-respect and avoid dying for living in the West just for material gains, unless it is unavoidable; b) launch campaigns for true self-rule — and c) officially launch claims for reparations and damages for their suffering under colonial occupation. These three factors are interlinked. Most of the people are leaving there homes to live simply to avoid economic hardships. The ever worsening situation in the former colonies is the direct result of colonial rule and the never ending interference in internal affair since then. Out of the top 20 refugee producing countries for canada in 2001, almost half are Muslim, which have suffered colonial occupation in the past.[4] Furthermore, with the exception of Iran, the West recognizes and fully sponsors the sitting regimes in all these countries. Reparation as an answer can be understood in the light of Iraq´s never ending payment to Kuwait, Libya´s payment to the West, and French refusal to pay Haiti. Here, suffice it to say that Muslims who are left with a little sense of self-respect and foresight would never prefer to sacrifice everything for living in the West. They would rather attempt to place their own house in order rather than living in another´s backyard. January 29, 2004.
[2] Suzanne Fields, “Multicultural fear and loathing,” Washington Times, January 29, 2003 [3] SPENGLER, “When rabbis liked Hitler: A tale for the Mideast,” Asia Times, December 09, 2003. [4] Canadian Council for Refugees, Country Report, Calendar Year 2001. http://www.web.net/~ccr/crdd01.html and Calendar year 2002 : http://www.web.net/~ccr/crdd02.html
Abid Ullah Jan´s latest book, The End of Democracy, has just been released in Canada. Also See EU: Commission "compromises" and agrees on handing over passenger data to USA
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Shoba Sama-o-Basr
(Multimedia Department)