“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”

On yourselves more than the Palestinians

Callous, brutalised, dehumanised. This is what Muslim rulers have become. Muslims too are culpable for electing and tolerating such rulers. “Choose the best amongst you” forsooth, we have declared war on God by choosing the worst amongst us. This, my friends, is abdication of intellect, arrest of free will. Still wonder why fire and brimstone are raining down upon Muslims?

Any wonder then that only self-serving pathetic squeaks have come from a few of the governments of the 57 Muslim majority states over the latest ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza? While Pakistan tries to fool God by hypocritically calling itself an Islamic state it can only make a symbolic statement for the Palestinians, declare a day of mourning and lower its flag to half-mast. Yet it can send detachments of its army and air force (for a price, of course) to protect fat, doddering Arab potentates from their own people’s coming wrath. And we are expected to believe that impotence has become potent. Yet when a political party protests peacefully against Israel, Pakistani police thrashes and arrests its people. Are they trying to beat Israel at its own game? Shame and shamelessness born of fright over losing the legless throne.

Muslims will soon celebrate Eid and eat sweet vermicelli while the Palestinians will eat vermicelli soaked in their blood and tears. Time to stop hypocritically calling them ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. They are just statistics. We should fear the day when we too become statistics. The impotent OIC is mute. Potentiates and ballot rigging rulers are counting pennies and eating bread and honey. Their prime concern is that America should trust them. Instead, what they get from America is contempt and rightly so. Only a few individuals and civil society lament this genocide and not all are Muslims. Those who have ‘made it’ by worshiping the Golden Calf call the lamenters ‘stupid’ because they haven’t ‘made it’ during their fleeting transit on earth in the infinite journey of eternal life. Our laments are called – sorry to use such language – intellectual masturbation. It is all we are good at. It is all that remains of our collective belief, our conscience and our spine. Behold our lot and learn, what happens to a people who lose their compass and stray from the Correct Path because they have lost the true meaning of their Faith. So while a few trash the many the world looks mutely on.

Lest we forget, there are human beings on both sides of the divide. The problem is that Israelis have become more human than Muslims, Palestinians sub-human. The Jews are people of the Book too, people of the first Abrahamic faith, Christians of the second. None applies to be born into a particular family. We become what we are born into. If the peoples of all religions learned to share the cake instead of insisting on eating it all there would be few problems. Sadly, our natural survival instinct has made forget our holy scriptures, so everyone eventually ends up getting no cake at all.

As our stupidity and lack of faith has made us hostage to western colonialism, so has the west’s guilt over the Nazi genocide of Jews made it hostage to Zionism. Americans too are not a free people but enslaved to Zionism’s design for a Greater Israel. Bear in mind that Zionism is not pristine Judaism just as Muslim extremism is not pristine Islam. America’s media, banks, the Federal Reserve and the dollar are bound by Zionist chains, as are its universities and think tanks. At the risk of upsetting the real Jews and Muslims who are many more than their extremists, the bald truth has to be stated without niceties for it to be rammed home. What ISIS is doing in Iraq is no less criminal than what Israel is doing in Palestine. I fear for Muslims and Christians, but I fear most for Jews who are thumbing their nose up at the world and sadly inviting yet another genocide because of Israel’s arrogance and the blackmail of its pressure groups. The Jews may be the most intelligent people on earth, yet they somehow bring periodic destruction upon themselves. Were it to happen again, and one hopes it doesn’t, I hope that peoples of all faiths behave like human beings for once and help the Jews to find their compass lost in the desert of arrogance.

This is the sad story of Muslims and what they have made themselves. Muslims in name only because of accident of birth, unlettered in their faith and God’s word, at the mercy of clerics masquerading as scholars. Muslims and their leaders have become not schizophrenic, not bipolar, but multipolar, divided and utterly confused, mentally and emotionally torn between their faith, their myriad organised religions, their static cultures made of dogmas, customs and rituals, many of them un-Islamic or pre-Islamic, enamoured of the west and its ways. They are confused between secular and spiritual not knowing the meaning of either. Muslim leaders are stooges of superpowers, even those whom God has endowed with incredible resources. They follow not God’s word and his Quranic sharia but the many manmade sharias. They belong to sects, movements and schools of thought, not to God’s word undiluted and pristine. They use Islam as a political tool to grab power for pelf. In dividing God’s intent into myriad schools, movements and sects they have essentially divided God the indivisible. When Muslims worship the Golden Calf, they essentially ascribe partners to God, the greatest sin of all – ‘shirk’ – not realising that they are worshiping the devil because that is what worshiping wealth is akin to. I don’t write this in anger but with a very heavy heart, a heart not becoming lighter because with my limited knowledge and vision I don’t see any light in this darkness at least in what remains of my lifetime. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now, more for yourselves than for the Palestinians.

If there is any civilisation left in human beings regardless of caste, colour or creed, they would be genuinely ashamed and make their useless governments do everything possible to curtail Israel’s genocide. It is behaviour such as this that forces the most moderate to call Israel a rogue, expansionist, terrorist state. It commits crimes against humanity only because the world allows it to. There is no civilisation, only the insistence of it. Cuisine, art, dance, music, architecture, laws that apply one way to some and another way to others do not a civilisation make. These are parts that do not add up to the whole. Civilisation cannot exist unless there is national and global egalitarianism in which the law applies equally to all regardless of size, strength and location. You don’t become important because of your nuisance value; you become a boil on the bum of the world that is lanced sooner or later. This applies not just to Israel. What we think is civilisation today is only a colonial hangover with American inebriation the dog’s hair. Organised religion, philosophy and the arts use the human being as a symbol, not as the beloved, the subject not the object. Collectively all these forms of expression do not add up to civilisation. If there had been civilisation there would have been at least one major breakthrough in medicine (not to be confused with surgery) in the last century, but there was none because the human being is secondary and his destruction primary. Thus more monetary and mental resources are spent on creating weapons of mass destruction than on finding cures to protect life. While no cures have been found for any major disease in over a century, there have been stunning breakthroughs in making weaponry to destroy human life. This betrays wonky priorities and starkly brings into sharp focus the absence of civilisation.

Not surprising then that in civilisation’s absence there has not been any meaningful action against Israel’s festival of blood, with Muslims more conspicuous than others by their absence because of their impotence born of infidelity. The Organisation of Islamic Countries is a ‘Gaggle of the Impotent’ in which burned out fat cats are put to pasture and given pompous titles. Any wonder the OIC is called ‘Oh I see’? Wobbly Arab potentiates secretly side with Israel while Palestinians die. They have lost their tongues because of their morbidly unconscionable wealth stashed away in the west. Having sunk their stakes in the Golden Calf, such people cannot be expected to behave like God wanted Muslims to. The states that adhere closely to ‘Islamicity’ are non-Muslim and western, with Ireland topping the list. This reflects our ugly, un-Islamic face. You don’t become a Muslim just by praying, fasting, giving alms, performing pilgrimage, and repeating that there is only One God. You don’t become a Muslim with the mark of piety on your forehead, wearing a beard, your trousers above your ankles and cleaning your teeth with a stick. You become a Muslim by your actions and your intentions behind those actions, by how much you have helped God’s creation, discharged your duties as a parent and spouse and cared for your parents as they once cared for you. You become Muslims by not speaking with forked tongues, with kindness, moderation, enlightenment, justice and balance, by building a good character rather than great wealth. You take with you your knowledge, deeds and intentions; all worldly wealth you leave behind. Truthfully, rising above material obsession is much easier than wearing the kit of piety while being a jerk inside.

I translated this simple poem on the Holy Quran written some 36 years ago by a former Indian President Dr Pandit Shankar Dayal Sharma. It bears repetition. Here is my improved translation.

“God’s Book was a Command for action. You turned it into a book of prayer.

“It was a Book for understanding. You read it without understanding.

“It was a code for the living. You turned it into a manifesto of the dead.

“It was a Book of knowledge. You abdicated to the ignoramus.

“It came to give knowledge of Creation. You abandoned it to the rote of seminaries.

“It came to give life to dead nations. You used it for seeking mercy for the dead.

“O’ Muslims! What have you done?”