Today’s Muslims aren’t prepared to ignore injustice. So says Dilpazier Aslam in “We rock the boat,” a piece published in the Guardian (thanks to Scott Burgess, who blogs superbly on this here).
The Guardian is hanging with an interesting crowd these days. Aslam apparently also writes for the Hizb-ut-Tahrir pro-Sharia, pro-caliphate site Khilafah.com. In this piece, he says the British shouldn’t be shocked by the bombings: they’re all their fault:
If I’m asked about 7/7, I – a Yorkshire lad, born and bred – will respond first by giving an out-clause to being labelled a terrorist lover. I think what happened in London was a sad day and not the way to express your political anger.
Then there’s the “but”. If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.
Shocked would be to imply that we were unaware of the imminent danger, when in fact Sir John Stevens, the then Metropolitan police commissioner, warned us last year that an attack was inevitable.
Shocked would be to suggest we didn’t appreciate that when Falluja was
flattened, the people under it were dead but not forgotten – long after we had moved on to reading more interesting headlines about the Olympics. It is not the done thing to make such comparisons, but Muslims on the street do. Some 2,749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover the cost of “liberating” Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight, and still you will fall short of the estimated minimum of 22,787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date. But it’s not cool to say this, now that London’s skyline has also has plumed grey.Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no
responsibility of our own. OK, the streets of London were filled with
anti-war marchers, so why punish the average Londoner? But the argument that this was an essentially US-led war does not pass muster. In the Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one. And the same cry – why punish us? – is often heard from Iraqi mothers as the “collateral damage” increases daily.Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this.
The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common
features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the
don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.
Consider the British boat rocked, you sassy suicide bombers.