December 15 , 2023
Genocide
(Dr Mahjabeen Islam, vice-president of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo (ICGT), gave this speech at Governor Mike Dewine’s visit to the ICGT on December 1, 2023.)
15,000 Palestinians killed. Over 5,000 children dead and the world let it happen. How did the descendants of Holocaust victims commit such horrendous atrocities?
Hitler’s information minister Joseph Goebbels had a philosophy, that if you repeat a lie often enough, people believe it to be the truth and after a while you yourself believe it to be the truth. And this is the power of propaganda.
In 2012, Randy Linn was continually listening to Fox News and one day, overcome, intoxicated, and armed he entered the Islamic Center and set fire to the prayer area. Ten minutes before he entered, three ladies had just left the Center. He said in court that he had never known a Muslim and was angry with what he had heard on Fox News.
Political scientist and son of Holocaust survivors, Prof Norman Finkelstein was asked about what happened on October 7 th and he said it was a slave revolt. When you steal the land of a people and imprison them in the largest open-air prison in the world for 75 years, you get a slave revolt.
What is happening in the war on Gaza, is savage power hunger using the two methods of supremacy and dehumanization.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the missing White woman syndrome, in which disappearance of young, attractive White women gets a lot of attention, but the disappearance of Brown or Black women does not. This is White supremacy in action.
This supremacy premise was in full action when President Biden said about hostage Abigail Edan that “what she had endured was unthinkable”.
I want to ask President Biden why Palestinian children half-alive under the rubble of Israeli savagery, funded by the American taxpayer, don’t classify as enduring the unthinkable.
I don’t have to ask because I know. He and his ilk believe that an Israeli life is more precious than a Palestinian one. They want to wallow in the Chosen People premise, when the major world religions, and even secular democracies recognize that all people are created equal.
The world was in an uproar at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the loss of civilian life. But more women and children have been killed in Gaza in 50 days than were killed in Ukraine in two years. But the supremacy premise preaches that White Ukrainian life is more precious than brown Palestinian life.
The image of a hand waving under the rubble in Gaza is etched in my mind and stops me from sleeping at night. So how do you unleash the barbarity of killing 15,000 innocents? By dehumanizing them, calling them vermin, calling them human animals.
Israel, with the United States in faithful tow, does not get to making the rules. The world must not let the political ambition of Netanyahu continue the genocide in Gaza.
Chapter 4, verse 135 in the Qur’an is my favorite: Stand firmly for justice and testify to the truth, even if it goes against yourselves, your parents, or your relatives. The great monotheistic faiths are embedded in justice.
My request: don’t side with the oppressor and injustice. Be faithful to your faith.
