By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 18, 2012
Thomas Friedman is senior NYT columnist and frequently writes about Muslims and Israel. He is very critical of Israel’s present policies. His columns are read widely and also by many Muslims. He is responding to present violent protests in Muslim countries and writes:
“On Monday, David D. Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The Times, quoted one of the Egyptian demonstrators outside the American Embassy, Khaled Ali, as justifying last week’s violent protests by declaring: “We never insult any prophet — not Moses, not Jesus — so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” Mr. Ali, a 39-year-old textile worker, was holding up a handwritten sign in English that read: “Shut Up America.” “Obama is the president, so he should have to apologize!”
“I read several such comments from the rioters in the press last week, and I have a big problem with them. I don’t like to see anyone’s faith insulted, but we need to make two things very clear — more clear than President Obama’s team has made them. One is that an insult — even one as stupid and ugly as the anti-Islam video on YouTube that started all of this — does not entitle people to go out and attack embassies and kill innocent diplomats. That is not how a proper self-governing people behave. There is no excuse for it. It is shameful. And, second, before demanding an apology from our president, Mr. Ali and the young Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Sudanese who have been taking to the streets might want to look in the mirror — or just turn on their own televisions. They might want to look at the chauvinistic bile that is pumped out by some of their own media — on satellite television stations and Web sites or sold in sidewalk bookstores outside of mosques — insulting Shiites, Jews, Christians, Sufis and anyone else who is not a Sunni, or fundamentalist, Muslim. There are people in their countries for whom hating “the other” has become a source of identity and a collective excuse for failing to realize their own potential.”
Click on the link below to read full article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/friedman-look-in-your-mirror.html?_r=0
There is a famous saying by the Persian sage Saadi Sherazi, “qehr-e-dervaish ber jan-e-dervaish,” that the wrath of a devastated and poor person falls on his own self. Muslims are today helpless and their wrath falls upon themselves. The protests in the Muslim world are an expression of the reaction to Western power’s destructive role throughout the Muslim World.
However, the Westerners should not forget that the mirror being shown to the Muslims is incumbent upon them to first look their own blood smeared faces in the mirror of past as well as today’s history. From the early period of Christianity until today’s secular rule, how much killing–sectarian, religious and secular–has been done by the Euro-American’s so called civilized savagery. The World History proves that the Euro-American’s killings and destruction is many time more than the savage Mongols of 13th century.