A female Arab journalist who lives in Qatar has penned a bold article that asks Muslims in the Middle East how they would respond if Christian suicide bombers struck their public markets, collapsed their tall buildings or tried to force Muslims to convert to Christianity.
Liberal Saudi
journalist, Nadine Al-Budair, writes in Kuwait’s Al-Rai newspaper that Arab
countries have refused to address the problem of terrorism and have yet to
create a climate that matches the liberal, humanitarian climate of the West.
She asked Muslims to consider what their world would be like if Christians the
world over had responded to Muslims the way terrorists have spread radical
Islam.
“Imagine a Western youth
coming here and carrying out a suicide mission in one of our public squares in
the name of the Cross. Imagine that two skyscrapers had collapsed in some Arab
capital, and that an extremist Christian group, donning millennium-old garb,
had emerged to take responsibility for the event, while stressing its
determination to revive Christian teachings or some Christian rulings,
according to its understanding, to live like in the time (of Jesus) and his
disciples, and to implement certain edicts of Christian scholars,” Al-Budair
writes in a translation of the editorial provided by the Middle East Media
Research Institute (MEMRI).
Al-Budair asks her
readers to imagine Christian priests calling Muslims infidels over loudspeakers
and chanting that God has demanded their deaths. She also writes they should
also consider what would happen if Arab countries had provided Westerners with
entry visas, benefits, modern healthcare only to have them turn on their hosts
to kill them in the name of religion – likely a reference to the San Bernardino
attacks carried out in December 2015.
“These images are far
from the mind of the Arab or Muslim terrorist because he is certain, or used to
be certain, that the West is humanitarian and that the Western citizen would
refuse to respond (in this manner) to the barbaric crimes (of the Muslim
terrorists),” Al-Budair writes. “Despite the terrorist acts of Al-Qaeda and
ISIS, we (Muslims) have been on (Western) soil for years without any fear or
worry. Millions of Muslim tourists, immigrants, students, and job seekers
(travel to the West) with the doors open (to them), and the streets safe (for
them).”
She writes, however,
that tolerance for Muslims is fading in the West because Muslims refuse to
confront the problem of Islamic extremism. As evidence of this, she points to
the presidential campaign of New York billionaire Donald Trump, who in a “scary
declaration,” she writes, “demanded to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.”
Al-Budair wrote that Muslims do not have the right to condemn statements like
those made by Trump without addressing the failures of Arab educational systems
which teach jihad and hatred of the West in madrassas (Islamic schools) around
the world. Al-Budair claims Muslim nations should apologize to the rest of the
world.
Much of what she said
about education in the Middle East was voiced a year ago by Jordan’s Queen
Rania in addressing the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Government Summit in Dubai.
Al-Budair isn’t
confident, however, that anyone will heed her call for tolerance.
“After all these farces,
some Arab analyst comes out touting a pathetic message, and reciting the same
words in his friend’s ear that he has repeated millions of times: ‘Those
(Muslims who commit terrorism) do not represent Islam, but only themselves.’
“This is all we (know
how to do) – absolve (ourselves) of guilt,” she wrote.
Al-Budair, who describes
herself, as a feminist, last year encouraged Muslim women to flee their
“benighted countries” for the safety, security and opportunity of the West.
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