Muslim double standards abound

Tarek Fatah in The Toronto Sun

If there is a God, he has some explaining to do.

On the one hand he tells us Muslims in the Qur’an that we are “the best of peoples, evolved for mankind”, but then showers us with leaders who bring out the worst in the human soul.

If the murderous spree some of my fellow Muslims have embraced is not enough, their hypocrisy of playing the victim card makes the rest of the world cringe in anger, if not outrage.

As I write, Muslims around the world have taken to the streets and social media to protest Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, that has resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 Palestinians.

Undoubtedly the death of 200 Arabs, many of them civilian women and children, is tragic and worthy of condemnation.

However, just next door to Israel almost 200,000 Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs in Syria, but that tragedy has triggered no public demonstrations of anger in Islamic capitals, let alone in Toronto.

Let us examine two military operations by two countries against what they describe as Islamic terrorists belonging to radical jihadi movements.

While Israel’s Operation Protective Edge is making the lead story around the world, few are aware of Pakistan’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb (Strike of Prophet Muhammad’s Sword) underway against the Taliban inside Pakistan.

Israel’s military operations have killed about 200 and displaced about 17,000 Palestinians from their homes in Gaza.

Pakistan’s military operations, on the other hand, have killed over 400 and made over 900,000 Pashtun Pakistanis homeless and destitute in their own country.

While the 17,000 Palestinians are finding shelter in United Nations Relief and Works Agency structures, nearly one million Pakistanis are facing a catastrophe that has triggered neither media coverage, nor international aid or protest.

On Monday, a day after an Israeli missile killed 18 family members of the Hamas police chief in Gaza, Iraqi men in Baghdad slaughtered 28 Iraqi women.

There was plenty of fury over the dead family, almost none for the women, for they were alleged to be residents of a brothel, as if that mattered.

Allah’s “best of peoples, evolved for mankind”, clearly live by a double standard, the one that triggers mammoth support for Palestinians but absolutely none for Pashtuns.

Here’s why. It is not the race or religion of the victim that counts, but the identity of their tormentor.

As long as it’s an Arab army annihilating fellow Arabs or a Muslim military murdering fellow Muslims, too many Muslims simply shrug away our responsibility and say, “leave it to Allah” as the Qur’an supposedly commands.

However, if the Muslim falls victim to the “kuffar” — meaning the Jew, Christian or Hindu — then many of our clerics take to the pulpit and deliver fiery, end-of-times lectures, using the tragedy as a reason to ignite hatred against the other, in most cases “The Jew”.

I wonder if God has heard this mosque sermon by a prominent Pakistani cleric.

“And a time is about to come when Allah would bestow such a success on Islam that there would not be a single Jew left on the face of the earth. … And when the last Jew will be killed from this world, then peace would be established in the world …”

It would appear the depth of hatred many of God’s “best of people” disseminate, needs his attention.

That is, if he is listening at all.​