Pride vs. Martyrdom

A few years ago when I was in the midst of a fully-fledged boycott against Marks & Spencer, Coca Cola, Starbucks, Clinique and the usual suspects alleged to have in some way contributed to the bottom-line of the Israeli death machine, I found Intel on the hit-list. Given my total reliance on their technology, after all, even my beloved Macs have had an “Intel Inside” for years now, I was compromised and like anyone who claims to be acting from ethics, mine were about to be tested. AMD really wasn’t the answer.

I sought counsel from a Muslim friend with legal training. He took a more pragmatic approach. Given the choice, he’d go for the lesser of two evils, but with a limited or impractical choice, he’d go with what he had to. He also pointed out that given I was using the technology to highlight tyranny, I shouldn’t worry so much.

This episode marked the beginning of my lengthy investigation into the boycotting of certain companies, culminating in my abandoning the boycotts of the usual suspects and switching to boycotting goods manufactured or produced in Israel.

Today, there is a group on Facebook whose stated aim is to defend free speech by drawing Muhammad (saw). The Zionaxis (for want of a better word to describe countries that defend the Zionist entity illegally occupying all of historic Palestine) is great at these stated aims. Each “stated aim” comes complete with a Wizard of Oz-style story and vocal support from academia, media and politicians. For example,

For example, the stated aim of the War on Iraq in 2003 was to prevent Iraq from deploying WMDs. The real reason was to secure the interests of multi-national corporations in that part of the world. Large contracts followed to the usual suspects. These usual suspects rewarded the politicians that enabled the plunder, sometimes even while they were in office. There is no crime worse than a War of Aggression, but there are not enough people who care that can make the blindest bit of difference.

The real reasons are glossed over. The hasbara is remorselessly pumped out by the politicans, the media and even academia in support of the most vile actions and sooner or later, the once unsure people are pacified. Go back to your reality TV, go back to your newspaper, go back to your BBC (Minitrue) and go back to your voting booths and do what you’ve been programmed to do. Nothing to see here.

Gradually, those who have lasted the course and are still shouting about the truth are marginalised. Soon, they are labelled radicals, extremists and then terrorists. This is what Naomi Wolf warns us is beginning to happen as free speech gets shut down.

Innocent people are being smeared on a daily basis, their lives ruined and in the meantime, Muslims all over the world are being bombed by drones and shot by Blackwater; their daughters and women raped and their sons sodomoised by the US Army. Meanwhile, you are a traitor if you don’t support the instruments of this ongoing terror. Soldiers do not defend our freedoms. If you buy that, you’re stupider than I feared. Soldiers kill human beings for money at the behest of governments who are servants of godless power interests.

So do I leave Facebook? Is leaving Facebook symbolic, practical, pragmatic, political or just an act of pride?

First, we must ask, what does free speech mean? Is this a right? Is it a privilege? Does it really exist? And answering such questions is totally beyond the scope of this article. I will just say that wherever you see double standards, you can ignore everything else. You can certainly forget about the idea or ideals of free speech when we are so utterly mired in hypocrisy. It’s a wonder we don’t pass out from the damned stench of it.

Some “holocaust denial” groups are removed from Facebook. Others aren’t. Then there are at last count, over 500 groups labelled “Fuck Islam” or similar. These are not removed. Violence against Muslims is advocated every day on these groups. What’s so horrific is that this violence is advocated whilst the corresponding and very real violence is actually being carried out in a long list of Muslim countries, the length of which grows by the year. Then the shameless leaders of the nations-beholden-to-corporate-interests have the damned temerity to bleat on about the, yes, you’ve guessed it, stated aims. The master of the strategy of stated aims as a duplicitous cover for naked aggression is of course, the son of a Muslim, Barack Obama. “We are not at war with Islam” – then he sends drones into Pakistan, reaching a civilian death rate of around 98%. If a Pakistani should want to stay alive in Waziristan, given the above figures, they’d be better off becoming a “terrorist”

There is a de facto war on Islam and a War on Muslims today. It is a war of the mind, and sometimes the odd petrol bomb and headlock in the West, and in the Muslim lands, it is world war of naked aggression and utter hatred. Everything about Islam and Muslims is raped first by the politicians (stand up Jack Straw, Tony Blair, George Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, Binyamin Netanyahu), then by academia (take a bow Horowitz, Dershowitz et. al.) and then by the screaming, rabble-rousing media (almost every paper in the Western World)

Sometimes, we Muslims allow ourselves to get wound up by such groups, especially the youngsters. Their pride in their religion causes them to lend even more energy to such pitiful hate groups. A group with such an obviously hateful title certainly deserves no energy from Muslims. What is clear though, is that hate speech is permitted on Facebook, and right now, most of the hate speech in the world is aimed at Muslims. It’s odd because if you read some of the Zionist or Zionist-aligned commentators who prevail in the political, academic and media discourse today, you’d think the world had been struck by some anti-semitic plague, one that threatens to annihilate the whole Western world. What a load of utter garbage. The sheer weight of numbers belie this atrociously lopsided propaganda. Yet of course over 50,000 (when I last looked) morons have decided that they want to try to drive a dagger into the hearts of a billion and a half Muslims whilst their armies do it for real. What a sick, filthy mindset. What a disease this way of thinking is. What a plague. What a burden on the next generation.

The purpose of this group is not to protect free speech. It is to attack Muslims. It is to deliberately antagonise and provoke them, to needlessly hurt their feelings. To do with the pen what the soldiers and mercenaries do with Apache helicopters and Predator drones. To injure hearts while they bomb weddings. To conflate free speech with shouting “fire” in a theatre whilst they call people “terrorists” because they mention weddings. Their warriors are not just GI Joes and GI Janes, their warriors are Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Mel Phillips and other racist, hateful, murder-inciting ideologues.

So such groups are not like other groups. Anti-semitic groups are populated by some fringe nutters unlikely to target Jews over Muslims. The anti-Muslim groups are salt in the fresh wounds of millions of murdered, displaced and humiliated Muslims the world over. As for us pampered Muslims in the West, well, it’s another reminder of the pain our brothers and sisters elsewhere experience on a daily basis.

Thankfully, there is a strong and decent core of people in the otherwise Islamophobic West who will have no truck with such sensationalist, hateful nonsense, even if they can’t empathise with Muslim deaths the way many sincere Muslims can and do. “The Muslims are like a single body” etc. The bottom line is that this whole campaign is about racial hatred, no matter what the haters say. Their “stated aims” don’t wash. Most Muslims aren’t white. The stereotype of a Muslim in the Islamophobic West is not white. ?

There is an argument that Facebook, with over 350 million members, is hard to police, that it is a utility, not an application and that leaving it would be an act of pride, not martyrdom. What is clear to me is that Facebook is a vehicle for a lot of expression, some of it good, some of it very dark and ugly. That the owners and administrators are so random in their application of rules, that something so disgusting and shameful and utterly disrespectful of other human beings should be allowed where less harmful speech is removed is just another marker of how hypocritical the Zionaxis (the array of powers that back Israel and despise Islam) has become and how far from the most enlightened principles of European thought we’ve drifted. Boycotting Facebook is not an act of love for the Prophet (saw), even if the motives for leaving are pure. Staying is not an act of collusion.

Some people have left, including my friend referred to at the beginning of this piece, some people have not. I’m in no rush to make a decision, but we Muslims have bigger fish to fry than Facebook. The sad thing is that Facebook is just a symptom of the rising tide of disgusting Islamophobia in the West. They said “never again”. They lied.

Tagged as: Facebook, Islamophobia, Racism