It is indeed the time of the assassins, and they are, for now, unopposed by their own people.
Fairly controversial, though it won’t get you attacked like Charlie Hebdo (though maybe by the PC police). That’s Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, taking his fellow Muslims to task in his latest piece for Politico magazine. (Equally harsh on his fellow Muslims was his previous Politico magazine piece, in September of last year: The Barbarians Within Our Gates: Arab civilization has collapsed. Subhead: It won’t recover in my lifetime.)
Melhem writes:
… there is something malignant in the brittle world the Arab peoples inhabit. A murderous, fanatical, atavistic Islamist ideology espoused by Salafi Jihadist killers is sweeping that world and shaking it to its foundations, and the reverberations are felt in faraway continents. On the day the globalized wrath of these assassins claimed the lives of the Charlie Hebdo twelve in Paris, it almost simultaneously claimed the lives of 38 Yemenis in their capital Sana’a, and an undetermined number of victims in Syria and Iraq. Like the Hydra beast of ancient Greece this malignancy has many heads: al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Sunni Salafists and Shiite fanatics, armies and parties of God and militias of the Mahdi. This monstrous ideology has been terrorizing Arab lands long before it visited New York on 9/11.
Though it bears mentioning that the U.S. invasion of Iraq exponentially advanced the spread of this ideology and its attendant violence. Melhem continues:
The time of the assassins is upon us. And the true tragedy of the Arab and Muslim world today is that there is no organized, legitimate counterforce to oppose these murderers—neither one of governments nor of “moderate” Islam. Nor is there any refuge for those who want to escape the assassins.
He’s repeating a theme often heard in the West: Why don’t more moderate Muslims don’t take a strong stand against Islamist extremist violence? But, a few years ago, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Violence wrote:
A common complaint among non-Muslims is that Muslim religious authorities do not condemn terrorist attacks. The complaints often surface in letters to the editors of newspapers, on phone-in radio shows, in Internet mailing lists, forums, etc. A leader of an evangelical Christian para-church group, broadcasting over Sirius Family Net radio, stated that he had done a thorough search on the Internet for a Muslim statement condemning terrorism, without finding a single item.
Actually, there are lots of fatwas and other statements issued which condemn attacks on innocent civilians. Unfortunately, they are largely ignored by newspapers, television news, radio news and other media outlets.
Also, as a colleague pointed out to me, Islamic condemnations of extremist violence are, arguably, more full-throated in Europe than in the Middle East. For instance, the million-strong march in Paris against terrorism Sunday. More from Melhem:
The initial reaction in the Arab world after the Paris killings was varied with official condemnations from governments and religious institutions like Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and from commentators who denounced it and expressed fear that it could worsen the conditions of Muslim communities in Europe and strengthen the extreme right and Islamophobia in France and the rest of the continent. Ironically, the condemnations of Arab states and Al-Azhar and the League of Arab States of the Paris massacre were swift, compared with the way some of them took their sweet time last summer to denounce the mass killings and the expulsion of the Christian and Yezidi communities in Iraq at the hands of the Islamic State.
However, there were also the usual “we condemn, but…” kind of commentaries expressed on television and written by columnists. France’s (and not surprisingly America’s) policies in the Middle East—including strangely the International coalition’s war on the Islamic State—are in part responsible for the attack.
After providing a couple more examples, Melhem concludes:
The problem with condemnations by “moderate” governments and institutions is that they rarely go beyond words, and they never go to address old stereotypes and long-held negative attitudes towards Western countries or non-Muslim groups.
Alas
… there are many modern, moderate Arabs who are usually genuinely shocked by these acts of terror, but their expressions of sympathy can do little to change cultural and societal attitudes and assumptions. That is because, once again, these moderate voices do not constitute organized groups, parties or movements capable of engaging in meaningful political activities.