Summer Joyan, a 13-year-old Australian, reported in Newsroom
The anti-Islamic stuff I’m reading today makes me wonder if those who write it know any Muslims. I was close to one—sadly he has moved to the US where he has a decent job (and probably has to keep his mouth shut about his faith)—and we grew up together. I still bump into his parents from time to time. And there are others I grew up and still connect with today.
On the al-Jazeera page, one gentleman wrote, ‘Well, if you choose to be quiet in times of oppression, you are siding with the oppressor.’
It’s better to quote one Muslim response to this directly.
Ali Mahad writes, ‘I was just making a larger point about how easy it is to make the assertion and equate 'silence' to passive aggression. Most Muslims are from non-English speaking countries. Just because they don't tweet in support and aren't given enough media coverage, doesn't mean they directly/indirectly propagate the oppression conduced by radical Islamists.
‘I’m a Muslim who vehemently opposes attacks such as the one in Paris. I can only say this to you because I'm equipped with the privileged circumstances to do so. Most people on this planet (let alone Muslims), do not. Claiming that I have a stake in these attacks, however, is blatantly unfair too.’
Another wrote, ‘With all due respect, what you said is a false dichotomy and thus is classified as a fallacy. Added to this it not apply as an effective measure for detecting side taking in a conflict. Most of these people have their lives and the ones of who they love on the line if they openly rebel against the extremist regime. On top of this your statement, implies that these people should take a side, when they really should not. This is an external demand from a person who is not even directly involved with the conflict nor understands fully the lifestyle of these persons, making it irrelevant and judgmental, being it based mostly on ignorance.’
And, one other: ‘In fact, I could say that, because you're being quiet about how the media portrays actual Muslims, oppressing them and making them all into villains, that you are therefore also an oppressor.’
To bring this back to my own religion, I wonder how many Christians vocally opposed the KKK—a Christian organization, according to its current leadership—when it was lynching blacks in the United States. The fact that that continued for decades suggests not much was done, and segregation remained legal till our parents’ generation. Does it make all those silent Christians aggressors?
The social, economic and technological situations are different but it doesn’t take a massive leap to imagine any other faith doing what terrorists are doing in the name of Islam. If air travel had been more convenient in an earlier era, could we have seen Buddhist terrorists? If the US had been less prosperous, could the Civil Rights movement have turned into more of a bloodbath, both sides proclaiming that they were doing it in the name of Jesus? And that certainly was the case in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics during the Troubles. We’re lucky to be able to comment from relative comfort in the first and second worlds, and the fact Muslims are the bogeyman for some occidentals comes down to when their terror takes place: in an era of the internet, ease of movement, and mass media. The rest of us got lucky.
