Muslim Monopoly on Suffering. A New Way Forward

The horrors of operation “protective edge” and the advent of social media have brought Palestinian suffering front and center on our computer screens.  The latest atrocity is dutifully reported on social media in graphic detail.  Our friends and relatives in cyberspace implore us to like or dislike, support or boycott, share or distribute their perspective.  While I find Israeli occupation and the current siege of Gaza to be morally reprehensible, I find myself at unease in joining Gaza protests.  At a time, when extremists are killing minorities in Iraq, Pakistan and Nigeria, I find the tendency for selective humanity to be insensitive, inconsiderate and biased.  Why is it that we shed tears for the Palestinians but not the Yazidi?  Why do we track the grisly body count in Gaza but not Aleppo?  Why do we feel entitled to liberties for our religion, our dress code, our values in the West yet show little concern for  discrimination against minorities in our own midst?

The Muslim world is by no means a monolith and one must take caution in generalizing.  With that said, many of us show remarkable indifference to the suffering of others.  We cry for Palestinian children, as we should, yet there are no popular protests for the Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram.  In 2002, we were enraged by Gujrat riots but not the victims of Godhra.  We are vocal against Israel Defense Forces regarding civilian casualties but not ISIS.  We are outraged by Israel but have little to say regarding Syria.  The latter has killed more civilians in one year than Israelis have killed in sixty.  We are saddened by atrocities in Indian Kashmir but have little self-introspection vis-à-vis Baluchistan.  We are saddened by the injustices in Palestine but there are no prominent public protests for Christians under attack in Iraq.  We ask for criminal trials for heads of states yet not a single West Pakistani general was taken to task for human rights violation in erstwhile East Pakistan.  We are saddened by Palestinian refugees but we are oblivious to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits.  We admonish Modi for Ahmedabad, Sharon for Sabra and Shatila but we don’t make parallels to General Zia-ul-Haq during Black September in Jordan.  We are outraged by the destruction of Babri Masjid but where is the outrage for an 1800 year old church destroyed by ISIS or Buddhist statues destroyed in Bamiyan by the Taliban?

We fail to recognize the inherent hypocrisy and inconsistency of our causes.  While we fought against the oppression of Kashmir, we oppressed East Pakistan.  While Kashmiris protest Palestine, the Arabs could hardly be bothered by Kashmir.  Arab or Non-Arab, we show little concern for the biggest group of stateless people in the world, the Kurds.  While we chastise India, we hardly utter a word about the beard-and-hijab ban imposed in Xinjiang by all-weather friend China.  We host murderous malcontents from every corner of the Muslim world from Yemen to Uzbekistan in our tribal belt.  When said “guests” pay back our hospitality with international adventurism, we drone on about drones sent by international powers to clean up our mess.  We rightfully lambast the Americans for hundreds of civilians killed along with thousands of militants in our tribal belt.  We are eerily silent on over 40,000 Pakistani civilians killed by TTP.  We fail to see the irony of thousands of Karachiites killed along ethnic and sectarian fault lines.  We are politically active against Israel but there is hardly a pin-drop for a thousand South Asian laborers worked to death in Qatar.  There are no major Facebook protests of note on the inhumane treatment of Non-Arabs in Gulf Sheikdoms.

Our sense of empathy and humanity should not be limited to our co-religionists, sects or baradris.  We must renounce ALL oppressors with extreme prejudice.  Our humanity must feel the pain for Palestinians but also ordinary Jews embroiled in the Arab-Israeli conflict.  We must mourn the death of civilians in Kabul and Karachi but also Mumbai and New York.  One of the most beautiful lines in the Quran can be translated as “whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind.”  Even with divine guidance, nowhere is life as cheap as it is in the Muslim world.  Nobody kills more Mulsims than other Muslims.  At a moment in man’s history when inclusiveness is at its zenith, we have turned inward, supremely confident of our supremacy.  Our knowledge has become incestuous, our perspective insular, our outlook tribal and our conclusions accordingly misinformed.  Justice, empathy and humanity are universal values and must be applied universally.  We will not get out of our current state of affairs if we continue to believe that suffering is something that happens to Muslims only.