Prof Ali Al Hail
A day after the Charlie Hebdo incident in France, Dominique De Villepin, a former French prime minister who is also a poet and writer, said while rejecting the argument of an Arab president that the Quran and the sayings of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) fuel violence and terrorism: “The wrong policies of the West in the Middle East is what fuelled violence and terrorism and not the sacred texts of the Muslims.” I like and appreciate his statement.
I also like the logic of the German scientist Pierre Vogel amid increasing Islamophobia in Europe and America following media coverage of what happened at Charlie Hebdo’s office and a Jewish store east of Paris, which focused on the word “jihadists”, which symbolises “Islamic terrorist” in the West, without making Europeans and Americans aware of the background of the attack and the causes mentioned by De Villepin.
Vogel further said, of the murderers of Jews in Nazi Europe during the Holocaust: Were they Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims? So why did the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have to pay the price for someone else’s mistake and be punished by the imposition of a Zionist and Jewish state in Palestine, which wreaked havoc on the sacred sites of Muslims, especially Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, from where Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) ascended to heaven?
According to Unicef, Israel killed in cold blood more than 30,000 Palestinian children in random raids; remember, for example, the way they killed the child Muhammed Jamal Al Durrah. In addition, more than 40,000 children have been wounded, disabled or paralysed since Israel illegally occupied Palestinian lands in 1948. This is apart from Israeli massacres in schools in Egypt and the incineration of the first and second Qana villages in Lebanon in 1996 and 2006.
De Villepin, Vogel, US political commentator Noam Chomsky, American martyr Rachel Corrie, English martyr James Miller and many others in Europe and America remind me of what Imam Mohammed Abdo said almost 100 years ago when he lived in France before returning to Egypt: “I went to France, where I found Muslims but no Islam, then returned to Egypt to find Islam but no Muslims.”
The words of such honourable men of the past are soothing to oppressed Arabs and Muslims at a time when their own people are plotting against them in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen for the benefit of their enemies.
