Baroud in Al Jazeera: What Exactly Are American Muslims Apologizing For?
Native American activists taking a stand in support of Palestinian rights. (Photo: via Counter Currents)
By Ramzy Baroud – Al Jazeera
Excerpts ..
In a landmark study released in March 2015, the Washington-based group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, showed that the US self-styled “war on terror” has killed anywhere between 1.3 million to two million Muslims in the first 10 years since the September 11 attacks.
Award-winning investigative journalist, Nafeez Ahmed, concluded that at least four million Muslims have been killed by the US since 1990.
This does not take into account all the killings that have taken place in the last two years.
Yet, we are meant to ignore all of this, to pretend that the issue is merely that of a racist, obnoxious president and that the pinnacle of American violence against Muslims can be reduced to a 90-day travel ban on seven Muslim countries.
Subscribing to this mischaracterisation does not only reflect ignorance, but also complete disregard for the millions of innocent lives that have been lost so that the US may get another chance at preserving its vastly dwindling empire.
At the Democratic Party National Convention (DNC) last July, former President Bill Clinton took the stage to articulate a retort to the Republican party convention’s hate-fest of Muslims, blacks, Latinos and everyone else who did not subscribe to their skewed view of the world.
But Clinton’s words were a mere liberal spin on the same chauvinistic, racist and exclusionist culture that drives the political discourse of the right. “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together; we want you,” Clinton said, before a large audience, which roared in cheerful applause.
Nothing is as dehumanizing for Muslims as to feel that their inclusion, their citizenship and their humanity is conditioned by a set of condescending rules, articulated by the white, Christian elite.
What Clinton has wished to forget is that an estimated third of the slaves who built his country were, in fact, Muslims – shackled and dragged against their will to assemble the US, field by field and brick by brick.
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