Female Arab Journalist: Muslims Who Say Extremists 'Do Not Represent Islam' Are 'Hypocrites'
A liberal female Saudi television news anchor recently interrupted her own broadcast to criticize Muslims who claim that radical Islamic extremism doesn't represent the religion of Islam, urging Muslims to "feel shame" over deadly terrorist attacks like the one in Brussels in March.
The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that columnist and television host Nadine Al-Budair took a few minutes out of her broadcast on Saudi Rotana Khalijiyah TV on April 3 to refute a claim commonly made by Muslims and others across the world whenever a terrorist attack occurs.
The claim being that radical Islamic terrorist attacks like the ones in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and Pakistan carried out by extremists affiliated with known Islamic terrorist organizations don't represent the religion of Islam.
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Muslims that argue that radical extremists "do not represent Islam or the Muslims" are nothing more than "hypocrites" and "smart alecks," Al-Budair argued, according to translation done by MEMRI.
"We witness people competing in an attempt to be the first to prove that everything that is happening has nothing to do with the Muslims, and that the terrorists are highway robbers and homeless alcoholics and drug addicts," Al-Budair explained. "We all know that the number of the homeless in Europe is very high. They sleep in the streets and beg for alms, and some of them are alcoholics or drug addicts, but we do not expect these addicts or criminals to even consider coming here and blowing up a mosque or a street in our city. It is we [Muslims] who blow ourselves up. It is we who blow up others."
Al-Budair continued by asking Muslims why they "shed" their "own conscience" when self-professed Muslims are increasingly carrying out deadly attacks in the name of Allah.
"Why do the sheikhs, the pundits, the journalists, and all the Arab officials insist upon [not] using their conscience when they point to the perpetrators?" she asked. "Don't these perpetrators emerge from our environment? Don't their families belong to our society? Didn't anyone you know — someone from your city, a neighbor, someone from your street, a relative, a nephew, a grandson, a father, or a mother — go to Syria or Iraq to wage Jihad?"
Al-Budair asserts that despite the claims of moderate Muslims, radical extremists are indeed following the religion of Islam.
"After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity," she stated. "We must admit that they are present everywhere, that their nationality is Arab, and that they adhere to the religion of Islam."
She continued by putting some of the blame on the Saudi Arabian education system for forcing children to "memorize" fundamentalist Salafi books that teach that non-Muslims are nothing more than "infidels."
"We must acknowledge that we are the ones who gave birth to them, and who have made them memorize the teachings of all the Salafi books," she explained. "We must admit that it is the schools and universities that we established that told them the others are infidels."
"We should acknowledge that it is our religious upbringing that has driven these youth away from the Quran, and has drawn them closer to its interpreters, to the point that a Muslim now has 1,000 holy books, from which he draws fatwas and information, whereas the Quran has been made intellectually inaccessible," Al-Budair continued. "The people who encouraged the terrorists, invented fatwas for them, and called to support their false rights in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, in Morocco, in America, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, in Africa — and the list is endless, with the last incident taking place in Europe."
Al-Budair now wonders what happened to the "sheikhs of yesterday" who encouraged terrorists to wage war against infidels.
"Why don't they have the courage to declare that they are the ones who said that Jihad is obligatory, and who legalized political wars, using futile and disgraceful exegeses, which permit killing, enslavement, and destruction?" She asked.
In February, Al-Budair wrote an op-ed asking how Muslims would react if Christians suicide bombers and terrorists killed Muslims in public squares and forced Muslims to convert to Christianity.
"Imagine being in Amsterdam, London, or New York and knowing that students [there] learn as part of their curricula that you are an infidel, and that killing you is jihad that leads to the virgins of paradise," Al-Budair wrote. "Would you extend your stay there to the end of the summer, or stay away?"
Also in her op-ed, Al-Budair stressed that Muslims try to claim that radical Islamists "do not represent Islam" because all they "know how to do" is "absolve" themselves of guilt.
