Shockingly it seems that lives of Muslims today are simply too cheap to be valued. In the Chapel Hill killings of 3 Muslims, there were no headlines, no breaking news and the killer is deemed “mentally unstable”….not a “terrorist”. One wonders what the reaction would have been if a Muslim had committed this atrocity.
So adamant are the westerners of today in labelling the Muslims as terrorists that they often forget that once these same very Muslims who now they view with dismay, once were the ones who protected them from the horrors of both Nazism and Fascism
No historian in Britain can deny that by the Second World War, Britain had become dependent on the Indian army for fighting. This was an army not based upon conscription as the British army was but consisted of volunteers who had signed up for fighting.
These were the citizens of countries who were under colonial pressure from the very countries that they decided to serve. It was a moral and ethical choice [for them] to look past their agony to serve a higher purpose of defeating the ideologies of hatred and racism (Nazism and Fascism).
It’s a pity that though the West remembers that Bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan, it forgets that when by 1940 Britain had almost lost the war, most of the fresh volunteers who joined the Indian army to protect Britain were Muslims from Pakistan.
Winston Churchill summed up the Muslim contribution in his letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. He wrote, “We must not on any account break with the Moslems, who represent a hundred million people, and the main army elements on which we must rely for the immediate fighting”.
While a few Muslims did support the Axis out of resentment of Western colonialism and hopes that the rise of an alternative power center would aid their quest for independence, they were tiny in their numbers compared to the Muslims who not just supported the Allies (as almost all did if you go back and read the newspapers) but actively fought on their behalf, on the battlefield.
Many German officers, steeped in Nazi racism, were surprised and outraged to have to fight Indian Muslims on European soil. Imagine their further dismay as the British Indian Muslim troops turned out to be in the winning side.
The only question I have is, why it is that while a few Islamic fanatics are so greatly highlighted by the western media yet Muslims’ contribution towards science, technology and even West’s own protection from monsters like Hitler is so easily forgotten?
And we must not forget that it is West’s own policies of the so called Neocolonialism that turned Muslims against them. Before 2003 no Iraqi had ever harmed any American before yet today Iraq is Al-Qaeda’s premium recruitment ground for future Jihadis. Who is to blame here; US or Islam?
Those in the West who like to label Islam as a crazy warrior religion should remember that it were these same very Muslims who had despite your centuries of exploiting and looting them in the past, come out to defend you when you had lost everything during the great wars.
And to find out the reason why many in the Muslim world don’t like you today, you just need to look at your own Countries’ policies in the last few years! Therefore please don’t value the lives of Muslims with such contempt. These same very Muslims once risked all they had for your sake. And please take action against those who commit atrocities against Muslims too!
