I wish to treasure this piece in my blog. It expresses in not so many words what we all feel to be true; the perplexity and the anger that is burning if not building like a volcano inside of us all. Most of us suffer in silence. ISLAM is like one body that hurt whenever and wherever another Muslim suffers injustice. We endure helplessly against insurmountable odds and pray that those endowed with the gift of martyrdom will find eternal bliss; amen.
By Tarek Mehanna
From a statement read in court by Tarek Mehanna, a twenty-nine-year-old Massachusetts man who in April was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison on charges including materially supporting terrorism, for offenses such as translating and posting Al Qaeda propaganda online.
July 01, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- -- I was born and raised right here in America. This angers many people: How can an American believe the things I believe, take the positions I take? In more ways than one, it’s because of America that I am who I am.
When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. Throughout my childhood, I gravitated toward any book that reflected that paradigm—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, even The Catcher in the Rye.
SNIP
Malcolm’s life taught me that Islam is not something inherited; it’s not a culture or ethnicity. It’s a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no matter where he comes from or how he was raised. Since there’s no priesthood, I could directly and immediately begin digging into the texts of the Koran and the teachings of Prophet Mohammed. The more I learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold.
I watched as America attacked and invaded Iraq. I saw the effects of “shock and awe” in the opening days of the invasion—the children in hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of their foreheads. I learned about the town of Haditha, where twenty-four Muslims—including a seventy-six-year-old man in a wheelchair, women, and even toddlers—were shot up by U.S. Marines. I learned about Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl gang raped by five American soldiers, who then shot her and her family and set fire to the corpses. These are just the stories that make it to the headlines.
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