MEMRI: Arab Criticism of Muslim Extremist Activities in the West

Whenever the Middle East Media Research Institute sees any articles in the Arab media that actually talk sense, they put those all the way to the top. While this tends to skew their coverage in the direction of kindness, it also amplifies those few reform-minded voices in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

The following story is especially interesting, in light of all the negative coverage of American-Muslim relations in our own press:

An American friend of Arab origin told me that he went with his 13-year-old son to a demonstration for the Palestinian cause, held in a U.S. city. Everything went well until one of the demonstrators, in the grip of enthusiasm, took the U.S. flag and set it alight. My friend said to me: This instance saddened me, but I intentionally turned a blind eye – while my son commented that it was not fitting to thus treat the flag whose citizens we are…

As soon as I heard the story I remembered the imam of the mosque where I attended Friday prayers when I studied in the northwestern U.S. The imam was an American of Palestinian origin, and it seemed to me that he thought a sermon was pointless unless he cursed the Jews and Christians every week.

I saw [in the congregation] native-born Americans who had joined Islam not long ago, and mused at the curse applying to them, harming their parents and sometimes their wives, and their friends and co-workers.

A few months later came the catastrophic events of 9/11. I met with a group of students from the Gulf states in the [U.S.] city where we were studying, and we discussed what we could do regarding our apprehensions about American reactions… We agreed that we would not go anywhere alone and would wait [to go together to the mosque] until the coming Friday – the first after the events.

[That Friday], when the young Arabs reached the street where the mosque was, their hearts were beating like that of a sprinter. Their pulses quickened when they saw groups of Americans surrounding the mosque. They drew closer in dread – to discover that the groups were Christian organizations and 'hippies' who wanted to protect the Arab and Muslim worshipers from any attack that might occur as a reaction by Americans to [the Al-Qa'ida] raid on Manhattan.

The sight was melodramatic. Those same people whom our imam customarily cursed every Friday and whom he asked Allah to exterminate, orphan their children, and widow their wives – and, when he was really fired up, whose blood he would also ask Allah to dry up in their veins – these same people came to serve as a human shield for our prayers.

I remember that most of the worshipers believed, like parrots, the calls of the imam who angered me. I confess that I was too cowardly to oppose them in public, settling for conversations in closed rooms with some of my colleagues.

But I thanked Allah greatly that he did not answer the calls of our imam… The American presence [near our mosque] continued every Friday for the next five or six weeks, and the governor joined them.

Allah treated us mercifully when he did not stop the blood in the veins [of these Jews and Christians], and did not curse them or orphan their children

You can read the original of this here.

Other articles speak directly to the spectacle of Muslims in Europe stirring up trouble, and Muslims in both Europe and America fostering hatred of the West in Muslim immigrant children.