A Muslim Cleansing Global Pandemic
A Muslim Cleansing Global Pandemic
A Muslim Cleansing Global Pandemic
The fate of Muslims in their own homeland is not particularly rosier. From
one end of the Muslim world to the next, Muslims - in Iran, Syria, Egypt,
and Saudi Arabia in particular - live under tyrannical regimes, ruthless
dictators, murderous military juntas, with their most basic civil liberties and
human rights denied. In Yemen, they are being slaughtered and subjected to
man-made famine by the Saudis and their partners - and if one journalist
dared to raise his voice he is chopped up to pieces in his own country's
consulate.
Chinese gulag
Let's begin with China. How are we to fathom the criminal, vicious, atrocities
of the Chinese authorities in their Muslim gulags? "If ethnic cleansing takes
place in China and nobody is able to hear it, does it make a sound?" asks Josh
Rogin, in a poignant piece for the Washington Post. " That's what millions of
Muslims inside the People's Republic are asking as they watch the Chinese
government expand a network of internment camps and systematic human
rights abuses designed to stamp out their peoples' religion and culture."
The numbers and the very idea are staggering: the UN reported that more
than one million Uighurs are in detention in "counter-extremism centres" and
at least two million are in "re-education camps".
In another report, we read, "Muslims forced to drink alcohol and eat pork in
China's 're-education' camps." The same reports further add: "The
psychological pressure is enormous when you have to criticize yourself,
denounce your thinking."
These are not just journalistic reports. "British diplomats who visited
Xinjiang," Britain's foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has told parliament ,
"[we] have confirmed that reports of mass internment camps for Uighur
Muslims were 'broadly true'."
Since 2016, Muslim-majority Rohingya in Rakhine State have been the targets
of Myanmar armed forces and police, which have been accused of ethnic
cleansing and genocide by the United Nations, International Criminal Court
officials, human rights groups, journalists, and governments including
the United States.
Now look at Palestine: Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike have been the
subject of systematic ethnic cleansing in their own homeland now under the
occupation of the European colonial enclave of Israel. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son has recently said h e'd "prefer if all the
Muslims leave the land of Israel". Facebook temporarily banned the
despicable thug from his habitual racism and deleted that call for genocide.
But he was just airing what his father and other Zionist warlords have been
practising for decades in Palestine.
Let's move to the other side of the globe: The historic xenophobia of the racist
white supremacists in the US, the chief supporter of the Israeli settler colony,
resulted in two major and many more US-led invasions of Muslim states in
which hundreds of thousands of Muslims were slaughtered. When Americans
freely and openly elected Donald Trump, he unleashed the most hateful
campaign of terror and intimidation against Muslims in the United States. His
infamous Muslim ban, sustained by the US Supreme Court, is the legal
manifestation of this abusive treatment of Muslims.
In Australia too, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison just recognised west
Jerusalem as Israel's capital, anti-Muslim racists enjoy wide-spread support
among xenophobic nationalists. He is in the good league of the notorious
Australian MP Pauline Hansonwho believes her country is about to be
"swamped by Muslims."
Darkening horizons
But Muslims killing Muslims is not any less evident on the global scene. Saudi
Arabia and its sidekick, the United Arab Emirates, have led a coalition of
Muslim states to slaughter tens of thousands of Yemenis and drive millions
more to starvation. Yes, the US and Europe are chiefly responsible for arming
these Arab countries, but it is the Arabs who are pulling the triggers and
dropping the bombs.
In Syria, it is first and foremost Bashar al-Assad (and his Russian and Iranian
backers) who are responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of
Syrians and driving the rest to refugee camps in and out of their devastated
homeland.
Yes, the US, Israel and multiple Arab states are equally guilty of the mayhem
in Syria, but the net result is the massacre of more Muslims in Syria. Turkey's
war with the Kurds amounts to even more Muslims murdering Muslims. In
Egypt and Iran too, the ruling regimes have had no qualms maiming and
murdering their own citizens in prisons or in the streets.
No doubt in each and every one of these circumstances one can come up with
multiple and varied explanations as to what is happening to Muslims. One
must make a distinction between the 're-education' camps in China and the
Muslim massacre in Myanmar and the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen, the
incremental genocide Israel is committing in Palestine, and Bashar al-Assad's
mass killings in Syria.
But the net result is the same, there is a pandemic of Muslim cleansing around
the globe, what amounts to incremental and cumulative genocide, in part
committed by Muslim rulers and despots. That pandemic needs urgent
attention - perhaps even a UN-sponsored conference. There is no single cause
but there is a field of hatred and Islamophobia in which Muslims as Muslims
or Muslims as humans or Muslims as critical thinkers or Muslims as defiant
agents of their own destinies are seen as the enemy that must be neutralised,
pacified, killed, and eradicated.
And this fear and loathing of Muslims is the extension and mutation of the
historic fear and loathing of Jews writ large and rendered global. The
pathological roots of Euro-American Islamophobia are rooted in their
endemic anti-Semitism.
With Islamophobia, however, that European disease has shifted its target and
become global in the age of globalisation. Since medieval European
Christianity, both Jews and Muslims have been sources of fear and hatred in
Europe. With the Holocaust, the European hatred of Jews came to a genocidal
crescendo. With the writing of Samuel Huntington's Clash of
Civilizations (1993), Muslims have almost completely (but not entirely)
replaced Jews as the civilisational other of the thing that calls itself "the West".
To be sure in between that medieval version and the current gestation we have
the agitation of Muslim-Hindu hatred in India during the British colonialism.
In his book titled Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern
India, Nicholas B Dirks has demonstrated how what is globally coded as "the
Indian caste system" was in fact the product of the encounter between India
and British colonialism, when under British rule, the caste system became a
stable term subsuming diverse forms of social formations. Even more so is the
Hindu-Muslim communal violence deliberately exacerbated to serve the
British colonial rule.
That dystopian nightmare is now spreading around the globe with the speed
and in the form of Western-style Chinese Communist party-inspired
capitalism. Communism was not destined to be the end of capitalism.
Capitalism was the end of Communism. That very sentence spells out the
monstrous chimaera our humanity faces today.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.