“Go to Damascus and the areas which support Bashar al-Assad, and curse his father … and [exterminate] those areas” … those were the words of one television presenter this September.
“Why don’t you go displace them all and curse the ones who gave birth to them and [exterminate] them all?” Those were the questions an Al-Jazeera’s presenter asked his guest during a live show, de facto rationalising the very narrative used by Terror.
I ought to warn readers that what will follow offers an insight into the dystopian and warped reality of Wahhabism – this dogma Western powers have insisted on calling Islamic, for its leaders have claimed religious legitimacy through violent appropriation.
Born in the mind of a pseudo-scholar: Muhammad ibn Abdel-Wahhab, himself the follower of another religious sociopath: Ibn Taymiyyah, Wahhabism has long been a plague on the Islamic world, a cancer made dangerous and powerful by the billions that the house of Saud has thrown at its feet, so that its power would be cemented in theocratic absolutism.
Wahhabism it needs to be said has already been debunked and rejected by prominent Muslim scholars from various schools of thoughts, across several centuries – only few have been reporting on such realities.
The prominent Hanafi scholar Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari[2] wrote on Ibn Taymiyyah "Whoever thinks that all the scholars of his time joined in a single conspiracy against him from personal envy should rather impugn their own intelligence and understanding, after studying the repugnance of his deviations in beliefs and works, for which he was asked to repent time after time and moved from prison to prison until he passed on to what he’d sent ahead."
Media today have allowed for Wahhabism to stretch its wings and invade the narrative – polluting the air with its vengeful and genocidal rhetoric. Media today I will argue, have aided and abated dangerous personalities for their desire to bank a profit which has superseded their moral obligations …one might even say their humanity.
How far have we fallen that television networks feel as bold as to not only encourage genocide, but promote it as well?
How far indeed … Don’t answer that, my question was of course rhetorical.
What will it take for the world, and more particularly the Western world, to finally open its eyes to the fury it has welcomed into its fold and dared to call friend?
Will Saudi Arabia’s Imam call for a grand religious cleansing unnerve you?
What about a television presenter’s promotion of genocide? Would that shock you enough to ponder over those friendships our governments insist on cultivating, even though they fly in the face of sanity and logic?
Wahhabism is no longer a faraway concept. Wahhabism I’ll have you know is quite literally barking on our doorsteps, and still we look towards Wahhabis’ victims to lay our blame and our fears.
Not all Wahhabis are clad in the Black Flag Army. Not all Wahhabi sympathisers wear a T-Shirt reading insanity … many have posed as experts, analysts, and activists, playing into a system which favours money over ethic, fabrications over truths.
Al Jazeera should know better than any other media organizations since it is in its offices and studios that Wahhabism venom has flowed unchallenged.
I offer you Al-Jazeera’s very own star presenter: Faisal al-Qasem - a despicable character whose villainy is only matched by his propensity to wish ill on religious communities outside his own.
A political hate-preacher with a long track record, al-Qasem has been Al Jazeera’s darling, the joy of Qatar … Did I mention that Al-Jazeera is Muslim Brotherhood’s mouthpiece? You know the same Muslim Brotherhood which was labelled a terrorist organization on the back of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
Interestingly enough Al-Jazeera was never challenged for its radical and Wahhabist narrative. But then again “terror” labels are only used on those who cannot afford immunity.
But back to our media atrocity: Mr Faisal al-Qasem.
Faisal al-Qasem would like to see all Shia Muslims, Alawites and other pesky religious minorities gone. By gone I mean dead. By gone al-Qasem means massacred in the most vicious and barbaric manner possible.
For those of you still unclear on what al-Qasem is championing allow me to put it to you in a more direct way. Al-Qasem is promoting Daesh’s very agenda, only wearing nicer clothes and from behind a veneer of respectability.
He could not possibly have said that on live television right? I must be mistaken … surely we would have heard of it by now! And yet he did! Mind you, he did it in Arabic, confident most likely that his hate would not reach Westerner’s ears and reveal the agenda behind Al Jazeera glossy smile.
So there you have it, Wahhabism in all its disgusting glory!
Allow me to remind you that while Faisal al-Qasem’s comments might not directly affect you in that your particular religious community, or even sensibility, was not targeted, any call for a genocide constitutes a crime.
The second we quiet our ears to the call of the oppressed we become ourselves the oppressors.
If not out of disgust, we ought to address such hate mongering out of self-preservation. If we don’t, we will soon live another dark hour of our history.
The video was made available courtesy of The Middle East Observer.
[2] Muhammad Zahid ibn Hasan al-Kawthari al-Hanafi al-Ash‘ari (1296-1371), the adjunct to the last Sheikh al-Islam of the Ottoman Caliphate and a major (mujaddid) of the fourteenth Islamic century.