‘Europe Sleepwalking into Era of Hatred for Muslims’: Activist
Masoud Shajareh, Chairman of Islamic Human Rights Commission, made the remarks on Wednesday while addressing a webinar titled “Strategy of Modern Jahiliyyah to Counter Liberating Rationality of Monotheism” which was held in the wake of recent desecration of the Quran in few European countries.
“This level of hypocrisy this level of demonization, this level of otherization is very dangerous because Europe is sleep walking into an era of hatred for Muslims and creating Muslims into a second class citizens,” he said.
What follows is the full text and video of his speech:
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I am very honored to be asked to speak on this current issue of double standard and hypocrisy manifesting itself on the pretends of freedom of expression and this abusive action of burning and desecrating the Quran in Sweden and Denmark and the support for such action by the international community and the governments.
They pretend that this is allowed and this is indeed part of their culture of promoting individual rights and freedom of speech, and freedom of expression which needs to be preserved under Western and European culture and principles and laws.
First of all, let me be very clear that this is not about freedom of expression and freedom of speech. This is an action by a group of people who are well known to be Islamophobes who are committed under their own manifestos of their parties and when you look at their actions in past, they are committed to exclude Muslims from European society and part of their collective belief is that Muslims have got no right to be in Europe, and European nations have to cleanse Islam and Muslims from their societies.
So this is indeed an Islamophobic action to create demonization and otherisation of Muslims. One of the tools is the so-called freedom of expression and this is very clear when you look at their history when you look at what their actual goal is. They want to create a Europe without Islam and a Europe without Muslims.
Can you imagine if you wanted to do the same thing to create Europe without Jews and the Jewish community or if they wanted to create a Europe without Blacks and the Black community?
It would not have been allowed to use these tools in achieving that goal. That goal is the one that needs to be opposed by the governments and the powers in the West and they know it. Look why is it that at the time of Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses when Muslims were burning Satanic Verses European powers and intellectuals collectively were saying that in Europe to burn a book is a resemblance of Nazism and Nazis when they burned libraries and has got a special impact on the psychological position of Europeans when books are burnt.
So burning Satanic Verses was against the freedom of expression and freedom of speech now burning Quran is for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. This level of hypocrisy this level of demonization, this level of otherization is very dangerous because Europe is sleepwalking into an era of hatred for Muslims and creating Muslims into second-class citizens where other standards and other protections are denied to the Muslim community and this level of otherization and this level of demonization it has always led to genocide or ethnic cleansing; what happened in Nazi Germany, what happened in Bosnia what is happening in Myanmar.
This demonization this otherization always has been the basis that any genocide any ethnic cleansing has needed to be justified and promoted. That sort of level was in Bosnia where neighbors were raping neighbors and killing their children, in Myanmar Muslim children and infants were being thrown into the fire alive in front of their parents.
What sort of barbaric individuals will do such a thing? I will put it to you. Once you demonize a community, once you show that they are not part of you, they are dehumanized to the extent that this sort of action becomes norm.
So really we need to remind the powers of their hypocrisy. We need to remind them that the reason that they are doing anything about this issue is because in their psyche already this demonization has set in, so you are treating the Muslims in a way that you wouldn’t treat other minorities others be it the Jewish community, be the Black community, and the Hindu community.
This sort of bad behavior and otherisation and demonization has already become part of the European and Western psyche and we need to challenge it and challenge it now before it becomes a much bigger situation before the genocidal act begin to take place.
Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.
