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East Valley Tribune – July 3, 2004
Muslims speaking against terrorism
- but are you listening?
Non-Muslims must join peaceful believers of Islam to battle extremists who endanger lives, liberty
By Deedra Abboud
We’ve heard over and over requests for moderate American Muslims to speak up and condemn terrorism. What we have not heard about are the large number of rallies, published opinions, newspaper ads, public service announcements, press releases, and conferences initiated by Muslims and Muslim organizations across the country doing just that.
Though many of us are speaking until our throats are hoarse, our messages do not seem to carry.
By all accounts, there are over 1 billion Muslims in the world. In other words, at least one in every five people on earth is a Muslim. Recent Bombings in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq indicate that these terrorists will not discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims to promote their extremist ideology.
The recent abductions of Wassef Ali Hassoun, a U.S. Marine and Lebanese Muslim, and Yusuf Amjad, a Pakistani Muslim employee of U.S. contractor Kellogg Brown and Root, are further examples of this.
We’ve also heard that only Muslims can stop the extremists murdering and terrorizing the world in the name of Islam. In theory, this sounds plausible.
However, in reality such is not the case.
If all it took to stop bad, evil, or sadistic behavior was a majority condemning such actions, then child-sex tourism, child molestation, domestic violence, discrimination, gangs and drug lords would be a thing of the past in the United States. A vast majority of Americans condemn these ills of our society.
Yet, despite the work of several organizations (many in which I am personally involved), these illnesses persist in our country.
The fight against terrorism will take all of us working together, just as the fight against anything which threatens our freedoms, security and the foundations of our country. No longer can we have the attitude of "It’s none of my business" or "I don’t want to get involved." Those days are long gone.
To protect our way of life, all Americans should be vigilant for suspicious activity-regardless of faith or ethnicity.
Not only might our watchfulness stop terrorism, it might also save an abducted child, a battered wife or a community living in fear of gang violence. We cannot accomplish these great tasks by demonizing or making broad generalizations about any people and their beliefs. British Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell once said, "The degree of one’s emotions varies with one’s knowledge of the facts; the less you know the hotter you get."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic organizations, as well as mosques around the country and world, have always condemned the injustice being done in the name of Islam. CAIR has set up an online petition called "Not in the Name of Islam," to separate those acts from true Islam www.cair-net.org Will the media continue to ignore our voices while we continue to speak up against terrorism or will they come to our aid?
In truth, change does not occur overnight. Together, though, all of us need to build on our future and the future of our children to insure it will be better than the present. This can be done with the sincere efforts and honest labor of many, as our history indicates through the American spirit, a spirit which joins people side by side with the will to succeed.
Deedra Abboud is executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Arizona.
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