It seems we Muslims have developed an entirely new doctrine that determines who is friend or foe and have added it as a new tenet of our faith.
A country could ride roughshod over its Muslim population, jail us, ban our language and religious practices, send tanks to crush our fight for fundamental human rights. Yet, such a nation could escape any criticism from the world's one billion Muslims if it met one condition: It should be seen as anti-American. All sins seem to be forgiven and forgotten if our oppressor hates the USA.
On the other hand, no matter how Muslim-friendly a power, no matter how much it tries to accomodate its Muslim population, if it happens to be a U.S. ally, e.g., Canada, it'll be seen as an adversary, if not an enemy.
China
Take for instance China. It has a history of crushing the rights of its Muslim Uighur population. Hundreds have died over decades. Their country, Kashgaria, remains occupied by the Chinese with impunity, but there is nary a word of protest anywhere in the Muslim majority countries.
As long as China postures as a nation standing up to the USA, my Muslim co-religionists, especially the Islamist variety thriving in the West, couldn't care less what China does to its Muslim citizens.
In May 2010, 140 Chinese Muslims died in clashes with the Chinese security forces.
However, next door in Pakistan, Islamists as well as the government didn't utter a word of protest. Imagine if 140 Gazans or even 14 had died in an Israeli incursion. Just imagine the reaction. However, in the Arab World, Iran, Pakistan or Turkey, the hundred dead Chinese Muslims didn't create as much as a ripple. After all, China was an ally against the Great Satan, America.
It is not just Muslim Kashgaria. China has occupied Tibet for the last over 50 years, but this occupation does not bother the conscience of any American Islamic organisation when they obsessively talk about other occupations.
This year, as millions of Muslims worldwide went to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage of Hajj, guess which country placed hurdles in the way of its Muslim citizens. The hated USA? Not. It was China. Beijing barred its Uighur Muslims from Hajj by denying them passports to travel.
"We cannot get a passport," the father of Mehmet Ali, not his real name, told the Indian newspaper, The Hindu. "If we want to go on a government trip, we will have to pay 70,000 Yuan. Even we can afford it, it's difficult to get the approval."
Russia
Then there is Russia, where Russian nationalists have often marched in Nazi uniforms demanding an end to Muslim presence in Moscow. It is not uncommon for Russian Muslims to be beaten or harassed in Russia's major metropolitan areas.
On the eve of the anniversary of the Bolsehvik Revolution this year, 5,000 young men chanting "Russia for Russians" and "Migrants today, occupiers tomorrow," marched through a working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital where Russian Muslims from the Caucasus live.
The Associated Press reports that violently xenophobic groups kill and beat non-Slavs and crudely denounce the influx of Muslims from the Caucasus and from Central Asian Muslim countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Among the banners carried during one demonstration was, "Stop feeding the Caucasus."
None of this blatant anti-Muslim hysteria is ever condemned at the UN or by the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Countries. If governments of Muslim majority countries were silent, so are the ordinary Muslims living in the West.
So brainwashed are we Muslims about our supposed victimhood and the rise of "Islamophobia" in the USA that we overlook what is happening to our co-religionists in Russia or China. The lingering hatred of the West and its values that seek to end gender apartheid among Muslims, is so ubiquitous that both Russia and China's crimes against Muslims are set aside as long as both countries undermine American policies.
America
Are Muslims who live in the West blind to the democratic rights and equal citizenship we enjoy? Sure, we Muslims have faced obstacles, but they are dwarfed when when compared to the struggles of Christian African-American or the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Today we Muslims are part of the fabric of Western civilization, even if many of us come to these shores as tired masses from the East--Pakistan, Egypt, Iran or Indonesia. In fact, one son of a Muslim immigrant from Kenya rose to become the president of the USA.
Can we ever imagine a Fareed Zakaria or an Ali Velshi on Moscow or Beijing Television network? Could Khaled Hosseini ever be a best-selling author in Russia? Where else but in the West could a Muslim woman become a baroness and head the ruling Conservative Party in the UK. Could my friend the Danish parliamentarian Naser Khadr ever get elected in China, or French feminist Rachida Dati become an MP in Moscow? Impossible.
But it is Russia and China that are eulogized in the Muslim media while America, France, Canada and the UK are derided as the evil empire out to destroy Islam.
It used to be said that to become a Muslim one had to make a single declaration affirming the oneness of God. Today, however, it seems Islam has been reduced to a single declaration: Death to America.
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