To PCMadness again...

Submitted by Nabil Ahmad (United States), Aug 18, 2006 at 18:48

As far as your response to my last post, I wasn't addressing you directly. I would guess that you're British.

Listen, when Muslims or people from any other religious background are allowed to seek asylum in your country, they need to follow certain rules and meet certain obligations.

It's not just your problem. It's our problem, too. We need to root out the extremists from amongst us before they overwhelm us. But we need to co-operate with one another in this regard.

The idiot mullah who was preaching hatred at Finsbury should have been deported a long time ago. Why wasn't he? And all of his followers should have been thrown out of Great Britain as well. As for those stupid marchers in your streets, were any of them deported by your government? If not, why not?

If your government with all its firepower is unable and/or unwilling to take on these extremists within its borders, what kind of signal does that send to the Muslim communities within your borders? To me, it's seen as a sign of weakness by all sides and will only contribute to the spread of the notion that the Western world is weak and unable and/or unwilling to support itself. Keeping these clowns in the country sends a mixed message to the Muslim communities in your country:

That the government can fight Muslim extremists only if they happen to be outside the country. But if they happen to be in the country, they can go ahead and do what they want and preach what they want to preach, because they have some sort of "constitutional right" to do so and, at the same time, use their henchmen to terrorize and intimidate those among Muslims who seek to oppose them.

The extremists should not be expected to follow the "rules" that they so adamantly demand that their non-Muslim hosts adhere to. This is a war, perhaps a worl war, and so we must all fight it like one. The extremists realize this full well, and know that they can easily scare the Muslim masses into silence and brainwash their youth without much difficulty. The government needs to step in and deal with these people harshly and show them once and for all who's boss. And I don't ever want to see another protest against the "Muhammad cartoons" or against the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It is true that I see myself as a Muslim first. But there's nothing wrong with this. As a Muslim, I am also obliged to stand by the people in my community, whether they are Muslims or not. I have a duty as a Muslim to help and protect my neighbors in the event of a crisis. I can see how, as a Muslim living freely and legally in the USA, it would be my duty to stand loyal to the USA against a foreign enemy, even if it is a Muslim country, as long as the USA doesn't declare war on Islam, which it obviously hasn't, contrary to the shrieking of many extremist Mullahs and their America-hating sympathizers in the leftist-dominated world press and various political establishments and groups. I see the USA as Islam's strongest ally and friend and NOT as an enemy of Islam. But the USA is an enemy of Islamic extremism, and then again, has been so only within the last 5 years...better late than never.

As far as the situation goes with regard to the "Muslim" extremists in the world today, the Western world has sided with Muslim extemists and despotic rulers against Muslim moderates and democratic forces many times over the last 300-400 years. The British Imperialists stood by and even supported the Wahabis of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1700s because both parties wanted to overthrow the Ottoman Empire. This sad performance was repeated between WWI and WWII when the Wahabis regained control of the Arabian Peninsula.

The British government supported Husseini's leadership and even propped him up against the wishes of the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, in spite of the fact that he was a violent anti-Jewish bigot and later became a Nazi agent. They propped up the Shah of Iran in 1956 against the wishes of the Iranian people. The Nixon Administration stood by the Yahya Khan regime of Pakistan in 1971 as it annuled the results of an election and slaughtered the people of what became Bangladesh, and was helped in this regard by fundamentalists in what was then East Pakistan. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, no-one bothered to try to distinguish between genuine Afghan freedom fighters and fundamentalist outsiders and adventurists, the result of which was Taliban rule in the 1990s.

What was even more idiotic was that Bill Clinton even gave the Taliban monetary aid! And in 1999, a group of Syrian army officers sought US help in overthrowing the tyrant Assad of Syria and establishing democracy there, only to be ratted out by...can you guess? As a result of all of this, how would you expect moderate Muslims to trust the West when it comes to fighting the extremists that live among them? Fortunately, I've lived long enough in the USA to realize that there's nothing that can come out of pointing fingers of blame. We can't change the past. So the next question is: What can be done about the current situation?

If Christians and Jews are unable and/or unwilling to uphold Western Civilizaton, it may be up to Muslims like myself to at least try to save it and perhaps make it greater than it has ever been before. I didn't come here to the USA to be under the thumb of ignorant mullahs who thinks that the Sharia should replace the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. The freedoms that exist in the USA tend to bring out the best as well as the worst qualities out of a human being coming from the East, and I know this from my own experience over the last 16 years. But one thing is for sure: I am better and stronger as a Muslim today as a result of my living in the USA, which means to me that the American system of government, with all of its faults and imperfections, is a lot closer to being an "ideal" form of government than any other form of government out there today.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".