Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Many ask if it is fair to ask Muslims to condemn the terrorist acts of ISIS. No, says Dalia Mogahed : “Condoning the killing of civilians is, to me, about the most monstrous thing you can to do. And to be suspected of doing something so monstrous, simply because of your faith, seems very unfair....(But when white, male Christians carry out terrorist attacks in the US) we don't suspect other people who share their faith and ethnicity of condoning them. We assume that these things outrage them just as much as they do anyone else. And we have to afford this same assumption of innocence to Muslims.” But every other terrorist doesn’t cite his religion as the reason for his act. Therein lies the difference. Do the likes of Mogahed really not get that?! Now that New York, London, Barcelona and Paris have joined the list of India and Israel as victims of terrorism, it’s harder for most people to pretend not to see the common denominator everywhere. If the “non-terrorist majority”...

Many say that ISIS is not Islamic. Dalia Mogahed, for example, tries to “prove” that by suggesting a thought experiment : “If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?” She feels the answer to that hypothetical question is a “resounding yes”. In essence, she says: “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts.” I am sure there are many out there who would agree with Mogahed’s reasoning. Next, consider why ISIS seems to have very few Indians. The reason cited in a report created by MI6, CIA and a few Arab countries is that ISIS considers Indians (and those from neighbouring countries) “inferior to Arab fighters” and less motivated; pays them less and uses them mostly as cannon fodder who are “forced to fight in the frontline”. Most people who agree with Mogahed’s line of thought are unlikely to believe the rea...

As Iraq continues to fall into the hands of the group called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in the US, one set blames it on the original Bush-Blair invasion while the other set blames it on the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. Regardless of their internal politics, the US cannot and will not walk away from this entirely because of, duh, the oil. So with hindsight, was Saddam a necessary evil who, if nothing else, held the country together? Even Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations from 2004-2007, who bristles at the question seems to agree that things have spun totally out of control after Saddam’s fall: “Let me first address the first part of your remark about, ‘well, [Saddam] may have been unpleasant, but …’ This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no ‘he may have been a brutal tyrant’ … there is no ‘but’ after that, there’s no comma after that phrase. It’s ...