This piece was published by the website of the Leeds University Islamic society.  It was written about a week or so after the Islamic murder of Fusileer Lee Rigby.  It is interesting to see a Muslim acknowledging that there is a double-standard at play here.

Hat Tip for this one goes to the Tweeter ‘Mohammed The Pig’  @MuhammadThePig 

“It’s been just over a week since the Woolwich killing. If you hadn’t heard about it until just now, you’re probably not going to be interested in the rest of this post.

The British Muslim reaction to the killing started off well, with unanimous condemnation of the attacks, disowning of the attackers, and us making it pretty clear that we were as horrified by it as the rest of the country.

‘Great!’ I thought. ‘We’re finally starting to get it.’

That feeling didn’t last.

It all started going downhill a couple of hours later, with the following quote, ‘only savage fanatics use machetes; civilised people kill with drones and cruise missiles.’ The little Internet research I did on this quote suggests it originated from Ben White who isn’t Muslim, but it was widely posted by lots of Muslims on various social networks. Yes, the sentiment behind the statement may be true^[1], but was it really necessary to post it everywhere? A lot of people reading it would have sighed and thought,

″Oh, there go the Muslims again. They’ve managed to spin even this story into a ‘we are the victims’ cry.″

Then you had the argument about semantics – “Why call it terrorism, when it’s really murder / a hate crime?” Again, is arguing semanticsreally necessary? Does it being labelled a hate crime make it any less horrific? All this from the outside looks like desperate gesturing to detract attention from what happened.

Then finally, you got the complaints about Muslims being targeted; by the government who want to intervene more extensively in our activities (especially at universities), and by parts of the public who say they are sick of Muslims. Well, duh! These people claimed to carry out the attacks on behalf of the Muslim Ummah.

Yes, every religion has its fair share of extremists but there’s no denying that we’re over-represented in the crazy department, and we havealmost a total monopoly on the violent types.

These attackers were converts to Islam, which means they were taught Islam by members of our own community. Terrorists don’t wake up one day and decide they want to kill lots of non-Muslims – their journey to violence starts with the very way they (and we) are taught about Islam and the world around us.

Our whole world is split into Muslim and non-Muslim. We’re quick to raise money for Muslim-majority countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but raising money for non-Muslim majority states? Meh^[2] – unless of course, something really bad happens like the Haiti earthquake.

Secondly, we (Muslims in the west) have become adept at tying everything wrong with the Muslim world back to Western colonialism / imperialism:

• Lack of democracy in the Middle East? Western-backed dictators
• Any crazy story from Saudi Arabia? American support for the regime
• Al-Qaeda / The Taliban? Funded by the CIA in the 1980s
• The Iraq body count? The Allied invasion of 2003
• Palestine? Western support for Israel

This world-view is the first step on a conveyor belt that quickly turns into hatred for Western governments, then anything Western, and before you know it, you’ve got a violent Jihadi on your hands. It’s easy for people to think that way when we’ve been conditioned to see the world as them vs. us.

The idea that ‘the West’ is to blame for all the ills of the Ummah is convenient because it absolves Muslims around the world of any responsibility for it. We were quite happy with the authoritarian regimes in Iraq, Syria and Libya because they opposed the West and we only turned on them when they started killing their own people (how is that any better than what Western governments did with their own favoured dictators?). We like to point back to the 1980s but conveniently turn a blind eye to the implicit support the Taliban gets from our heroes like Imran Khan. We like to blame the US for Iraq but the vast majority of deaths were as a result of Muslims killing other Muslims. And whilst terrorism in the UK is bad, terrorism against Israelis is secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) supported^[3].

‘The West’ is a convenient bogeyman but the reality is, WE are responsible for the bulk of the bad stuff that happens to ‘the Ummah’ we claim to care so much about. We indulge in this delusion even though it’s resulting in so much harm on our community.

So back to the original point – YES, we are partly responsible for the likes of Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo.”

Read the rest from here:  http://leedsisoc.com/blog/201305/why-we-muslims-just-dont-get

It is an interesting and thoughtful piece and I’m thankful for Mohammed The Pig for highlighting it.