It is only zealots who promote hate

SINCE 2000, the majority of terror attacks have occurred in five countries – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria, all Muslim-majority countries. Close to 90% of the victims of Isis are Muslims.

Muslims across the globe are not threats. They are threatened. Sadly, as Muslims, we contribute to our own harassment by incorrectly believing that if we just apologise, then the anti-Muslim rhetoric will end. And it never does.

Condemnation becomes our admission of guilt, and we indirectly accept that terror is borne of us, and, therefore, we must make up and condone policies that criminalise us to prove “we have nothing to hide”.

But these calls for condemnation serve only zealots, who will never be satisfied. They thrive and profit off the fear-mongering and hate.

I am horrified by these attacks, but not because I am Muslim. I am horrified because I am human.

Terrorism is not mine. I will not claim it, not even through an apology.

By constantly apologising and denouncing these attacks, Muslims reinforce the misguided public perception that they are connected to Isis through the same basic ideology, when in fact they have nothing in common at all.

Would it seem equally sound and legitimate to ask every Christian, more than 2.2 billion of them, to denounce the brutalities committed in the Iraq War and the subsequent occupation of Iraq by US forces led by George W Bush, launched on the false premise of the existence of weapons of mass destruction?

This eventually led to the rise of Isis – a fact that has been quite candidly admitted by former British premier Tony Blair, who allied with Bush.

Would it not be appropriate to ask why every Christian should not apologise for the mass murder of 6 million Jews in a predominantly Christian and anti-Semitic Europe of the 1930s, and the killing of thousands by the Lord’s Resistance Army in East Africa?

Would it also be valid to ask every Hindu to apologise for the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the riots that ensued thereafter, and the killing of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984? Maybe not.

This is a double standard meant to be applied only to Muslims. Shaista Mia Morningside, Durban