CLAIMS MADE BY DR. QAZI ARE DEVOID OF ANY LOGIC

A fews days ago I posted my response to Dr. Qazi’s “Islam and Hijab-Murder in Canada” and he replied without referring to my comments. Unfortunately, Dr. Qazi is using Aqsa’s tragic death, just as the pro-Zionist and neo-conservative media is, to promote his views and make unreasonable statements against a whole religion. His arguments are superficial as is evident from his remarks to my response.  

1. “I am keenly aware of this defense technique called – generalization” Dr. Qazi 

I am also keenly aware of the offensive technique called “generalization”. Perhaps Dr. Qazi has taken a leaf from the western media by cleverly loading Islam and the entire Muslim community for the crime of a single Muslim perpetrator. 

2.“Bewildered I ask a broader question, but why does moral-violence happen more often among Muslims than their counterpart Catholics in Canada? “ (Dr. Qazi )

“Islamic ideology is a reflection of its agents - the Muslims” (Dr. Qazi )

In the first statement Dr Qazi claims that Muslims happen to be more violent then Catholics and in the second one he implies that Muslims are “inspired” by a violent religion.  

When I argued that violence is an unfortunate aspect of the human trait and provided examples of violence perpertarated by non-Muslims he turned around and said: “--- two wrongs never add up to one right”.  Does Dr. Qazi judge Muslims and non-Muslims by different standards?  

3. “---brutal murder of that little teen-age girl” (Dr. Qazi) 

    “---death of poor little girl who should not have died” (Dr. Qazi)

     “Gruesome murder of playful Pakistani Canadian kid---” (Dr. Qazi) 

Some people claim to be humanists but strangely their hearts bleed selectively, only when they can capitalize an incident to prove that the Islam is a violent religion; an echo of Bush’s war on terror. Aqsa’s tragic as gruesome murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl called Abeer Qasim Hamza who was gang raped and then killed, along with her parents and five year old sister, by American soldiers in Mahmoudiya. Here, neither Christianity nor Christians in general were on trial. We were told by the US media that people should understand the pressures these poor young soldiers were under, reminding the world that they were innocent until proven guilty. However, a Muslim is always considered guilty unless proven innocent.

(Facts: In March 2006, a group of American soldiers entered the home of Abeer Qasim Hamza, a 15 years Iraqi teenager in a village called Mahmoudiya. The girl was gang raped by the soldiers; her mother, her father and her five-year-old sister were killed and then the corpses were burned to hide the crime.)

4. “---irrationality of dogmatic thinking”

“---they wish to preserve religious-irrationality”

By making the above statements, Dr. Qazi is posing as a rational thinker as opposed to the irrational people making counter-arguments.

However, Dr. Qazi, the rational thinker, was carried away in his revulsion for Islam and made wild predictions that somehow 1.5 billion Muslims will “perish” or be “trampled over” if they would not heed his warnings and abandon their “worthless values”.  Islam did not arise yesterday and will not disappear due to the onslaught of rational thinkers or a “war on terrorism” (terrorism is used as a code word for Islam by Zionists and Neo-conservatives). They openly express their intentions to wipe out Islam as Communism was consigned to history after 70 years of Cold War. Here, I am referring to the following prophesies of Dr. Qazi:

“Muslim will perish upholding Hijab and other worthless values”  

“The time for change has arrived for Muslims in Canada before they are trampled over by the forces of change” 

(Note: Contrary to Dr. Qazi’s wishful thinking Islam is nowhere close extinction. Please read: 

“The Christians entered the 21st century with a big head start. There are 2 billion of them in the world compared with 1.5 billion Muslims. But Islam had a better 20th century than Christianity. The world's Muslim population grew from 200m in 1900 to its current levels. Christianity has shriveled in Christendom's European heart. Islam is resurgent across the Arab world. Many Christian scholars predict that Islam will overtake Christianity as the world's largest religion by 2050.” 

The Economist - Christmas Specials ---December 19, 2007

The Battle of The Books

The Bible vs The Koran) 

5. If Dr. Qazi believes that religions, in general, are a source of violence, then it is a completely different topic of discussion but it is irrational to isolate Islam and equate it with violence (as Zionists and neo-conservatives allege in the name of the war against terror).   

 Dr. Qazi tends to focus on violence committed by Muslims to prove that they are     “inspired” by a violent ideology. However to highlight atrocities committed against Muslims, as I did in my previous rejoinder, is for him a futile exercise of “going back to history”. He says and I quote: 

     “----historic accounts of crimes during times gone-by “ (Dr. Qazi) 

      “----some friends who narrate history” (Dr. Qazi) 

     “----cold-history to inflamed-emotionality” (Dr. Qazi) 

     “There is no point in going back to history” (Dr. Qazi) 

• If the occupation of Palestine is cold-history then I am wrong.
• If the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the displacement of four million Muslims within and outside Iraq is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the almost routine killing of Muslims by Israeli & western forces by means of aerial bombing as if hunting wild beasts is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the 1995 carnage carried out by Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the 1999 ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo by Serb forces is cold- history then I am wrong
• If the current domination of the Middle East through proxy regimes is cold-history then I am wrong
• If extraordinary rendition and the outsourcing of torture of suspected Muslim “terrorists” by the US is cold-history then I am wrong
• If Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are cold-history then I am wrong
• If holding currently over 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the July 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and 34 days of consistent bombardment of villages and cities  causing over 1,000 civilian deaths  is cold-history then I am wrong
• If inflicting collective punishment on 1.4 million residents of Gaza for  democratically electing a “wrong” party is cold-history then I am wrong
• If the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India, is cold-history then I am wrong

In the interests of brevity, I will stop here, though it would be possible for me to go on and on. What an irony that Muslims are being subjected to violence and then called violent by rational thinkers like Dr. Qazi.  

I conclude by repeating my earlier contention; it is not religion but people who kill people.  Accusing religion for violence is like putting a knife or a gun --- used as a murder instrument --- on trial for murder. It makes no sense to blame Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism for crimes committed by followers of those religions. 

A good example of exploitation of religion close to home:

I pose a question to the participants of T.F.O.H, who mostly hail from the Subcontinent of India and are aware of the background of partition: was Islam to be blamed for the partition of India?  Major pre-partition Muslim religious parties were opposing partition while the secular leadership of the Muslim League was busy exploiting Islam.  Could this not be taken as a perfect example of how religion is exploited and misused by clever politicians to achieve their desired objectives?  

Note: In my view, both Dr. Qazi’s write up and my response are irrelevant to the tragic death of Aqsa’s.  But unfortunately it has become a past time for a group of Muslim sounding names to use every opportunity to make uncalled for remarks about Islam and Muslims.