The gist of his pompous article (titled: “No One Wants to See ISIS Defeated More Than Muslims”) is the prosaic and jejune (intellectually feeble) sole contention to the effect that ‘truth lies in the dead body count’. His entire headline and article is based on a single observation: Muslims kill Muslims in sizeable numbers, and ISIS among Muslims is somehow not Muslim because this Muslim organization kills more Muslims than Westerners (according to his shallow body count)!? Therefore, he says, Muslims naturally are the first to wish for ISIS to go away. I am sure that some Muslims wish to get rid of ISIS, but that doesn’t make the opponents of ISIS much better than the ISIS people. Muslims can kill other Muslims in the name of Islamic ideas. This is a very important realization that the Left and Muslim apologists like Obeidallah do not want you to know! Besides, in his count of the dead, this Huffington Post columnist forgot to include all the Arab Christian and Yazidi minority (non-Muslim) victims of ISIS, whose high tally of deaths is not fully known. He merely compared the dead body count of ISIS-killed Muslims with a handful of helpless Western captives slain for the cameras (in his article, his picayune body count isn’t even compared to the body count of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, Australians, Canadians and Americans who were killed near their homes by ISIS and/or ISIS-like Muslim terrorists operating as sleepers inside the West!). Columnist Obeidallah also relies on data about killings that is “reportedly” provided by anonymous sources. This is comical because it’s not based on verified information. As CNN teaches us through its fiasco, journalism with integrity does not report on the basis of hearsay (or anonymous sources) leaked by unknown sources.
Are Englishmen who honorably killed other Englishmen in the name of Puritan religious reformation opposing the Anglican church during the English Civil War any less English or any less Christian because of it? Was an English knight, Sir Ralph Percy, any less European or English because he betrayed his oath of loyalty to Lord Montague of the York faction in the War of the Roses only to die like a man, not retreating from the field of battle at Hedgeley Moor? Ideas are always tested on followers first. In the French Revolution, revolutionaries went on to kill other revolutionaries after they were done killing their conservative opponents.
Over and above Obeidallah’s contention (with his naive numbers of ISIS victims that don’t tell the whole story) there is the fact of a very poor perspective behind it. Namely, can there be a more ignorant argument than his? Are we to believe that people who stand for ideas don’t kill other people who seem to stand by similar or related ideas? Ideas have power. People cannot have power without ideas. And in obtaining power through ideas they become their servants. Moreover, there is the problem of ideas versus labels. An Islamist is a man of Islamic ideas, whereas a Muslim is a man labeled by an Islamic identity. Some people passively belong to a group. Others actively belong to the same group with ideas. Many Muslims are passive political pushovers who sway hither and fro on the basis of prevailing political winds, which blow wildly in the Islamic world and frequently change course. I have no doubt that over the course of Muslim history, from Hijrah of Mohammed and the Battle of Badr all the way to the present, more Muslims died at the hands of Muslims than non-Muslims. Moreover, there were monkish imams present in every one of the radical Islamic movement known to history (just as much as in the Iranian Revolution with its ayatollahs who were glorified Islamic preachers and in the style of ascetic monks).
How can a serious historian forget the massive revolt of ultra-fanatical and truly fearsome Moslem Karramiyya (as well as Carmathian) movement of 9th century Islam (compared to whom the ISIS are rowdy backstreet boys of village Islam)? It was inspired by Imam al-Jafar. Just as an example to bring this into perspective, in the 9th century after Christ there was an unimaginably cruel Muslim civil war bloodbath inside the second world-state in history (the Abbasid Caliphate). From these ancient ultra-radical Muslim movements that attacked the royal Muslim state and its conservative bureaucratic champions there emerged the Shi’ite Iran later! In the year AD 871, a fanatical Muslim rebel leader called ‘Ali’ (combination of Spartacus, Hitler, Bin Laden and Arafat wrapped in one) captured the second largest Muslim city in a world state run by Shariah Law which was not good enough for his radical followers (many of whom were risen mad slaves of Arabs for whom a simple warlike appeal of a simplified Islam was sufficient license to kill anyone in their path), sacking the bourgeois city of Basrah in the south of today’s Iraq and famously slaughtering 1,000,000 prosperous Muslims in it. Muslims killing Muslims is an old feature of Islam, going back to the battle of Karbala (an early skirmish between Mohammed’s followers over the question of succession). Even that first battle between Muslims was driven by ideas. None of these facts should mislead us into believing that these killings of Muslims by Muslims were any less done in the name of Islam than the killings of Muslims at the hands of the present-day ISIS are. Islam, in the variety of its currents and undercurrents, teaches Muslims to hate other Muslims (say, as apostates) as well as to inspire hate for non-Muslims. Islam has always produced factions – and killings, because it is more than just a religion, it is a way of life and a political movement. The aim of Islamic ideas, all of them, has always been the seizure of power in any country. And ISIS is just one in a series. Ideas of Islam matter more than the people of Islam. That’s the open secret behind the habits of killing in the Muslim world.
No One Wants to See ISIS Defeated More Than Muslims
By Dean Obeidallah
The so-called Islamic State is the enemy of Islam. In fact, ISIS is the enemy of Judaism, Christianity, Yazidism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, atheism and all others who oppose its evil and barbaric agenda. The difference, however, is that Muslims suffer by far the most from ISIS’ horrific attacks. We saw that again this past week with ISIS’ bloody rampage against Muslims. The most horrific incident was over the weekend in Baghdad where an ISIS suicide car bomb targeted the Karrada shopping area, killing over 175 people including numerous children. One moment Muslim families were shopping and socializing after breaking the Ramadan fast at sundown. The next, entire families were gone in a blink of an ISIS bomb. The blast targeted a primarily, but not exclusively, Shia neighborhood. But if you think ISIS hesitates at slaughtering Sunni Muslims, you simply don’t know what ISIS has been up to the past few years. The group has brutally murdered countless Sunni Muslims, including three women who reportedly refused to treat ISIS fighters and others who refused to pledge allegiance to ISIS. ISIS is not about submitting to Islam. Rather, ISIS is of the persuasion that you must either solely submit to ISIS, or die.
ISIS even reportedly killed three imams “for failing to praise ISIL in their sermons.” This undermines the argument that the terror group only kills Muslims who are not sufficiently devout. ISIS is not about submitting to Islam. Rather, ISIS is of the persuasion that you must either solely submit to ISIS, or die. ISIS worships depravity and inhumanity, not Islam. But the Iraq bombing is far from the only instance in which ISIS massacred Muslims this past week alone. If Turkish intelligence is accurate, ISIS also carried out the recent suicide attack at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Do you think ISIS cared that it slaughtered innocent Muslims in a bombing that occurred in a nation that is 99 percent Sunni Muslim? Of course not. In fact, of the some 43 killed by ISIS in the attack, some 30 were likely Muslim given the demographics of the countries they hailed from — and ISIS presented no sign of remorse. This is not to say that ISIS does not murder Westerners, or that their deaths are in any way less horrific. Last week ISIS also carried out an attack in which Westerners — diplomats and foreigners — appeared to be the target. The incident, however, took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a nation that is 89 percent Muslim. ISIS fighters reportedly asked hostages if they could recite the Quran, and if they didn’t, they were tortured. This tactic is part of ISIS’ agenda to frame this as a holy war, pitting the West against Islam. bangladesh Relatives of Bangladeshi victims of the attack on Holey Artisan Bakery react as people pay tribute to the deceased, at a stadium in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, July 4, 2016. Horribly, 28 people were killed in that attack, many of whom were foreigners. In the same attack, ISIS did kill several Bangladeshis, including two police officers who died fighting the terrorists. The large death toll caused by ISIS this past week gives a good snapshot of what Muslims have endured for years at the hands of ISIS. ISIS murdered approximately 30 Westerners between Bangladesh and Istanbul. In that same time frame, ISIS slaughtered over 200 in Iraq, Turkey and Bangladesh, many of whom were likely Muslim. (Although not clear yet, ISIS may also be responsible for the three bombings in Saudi Arabia that occurred Monday).
Bottom line: ISIS killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim Westerners in the past week. Muslims suffering the brunt of the violence carried out by ISIS, Al Qaeda and other terror groups is nothing new. A 2011 report by the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center found that: “In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.” Bottom line: ISIS killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim Westerners in the past week. And the United Nations, after an extensive study of the civilian deaths in Iraq from January 2014 to October 2015, released a report in January 2016 that was simply jaw dropping. Almost 19,000 civilians were killed in that period, with much of that reportedly due to ISIS. Keep in mind Iraq is 99 percent Muslim. The U.N. report noted that ISIS committed “systematic and widespread violence and abuses of international human rights law and humanitarian law” that may constitute “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.” The killing of Muslims has not let up since. In a two-week period in February/March of this year, ISIS slaughtered over 200 Iraqi civilians. In May, ISIS unleashed a wave of bombs at outdoor markets in Baghdad, killing somewhere close to 70 Muslims. And these numbers don’t even include the Muslims ISIS has murdered in the brutal killing fields of Syria. Reading these numbers though does not give you a sense of the grief and suffering ISIS has caused to Muslims. Countless Muslim families are grieving for their sons and daughters taken by this barbaric terror group. There are now children growing up without a father or mother thanks to ISIS. baghdad People gather at the site of a suicide car bomb in the Karrada shopping area, in Baghdad, Iraq July 3, 2016.
Add to that, Muslims in the West have suffered a backlash caused by ISIS’ immoral and un-Islamic actions that have inaccurately defined Islam in the minds of many and fostered Islamophobia. Over the past week alone, Muslims in the United States have been beaten up or shot in possible hate crimes in Minnesota, Florida, Brooklyn and Houston. ISIS is neither about the tenets of Islam nor helping Muslims. It’s about power: militants will slaughter as many people as possible — especially Muslims — to achieve that which they so desperately crave. So let’s be clear about one thing: No one wants to see ISIS defeated more than the Muslims who bury loved ones daily because of the horror ISIS is waging upon them.
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