Introspection in the Arab world

While religion is something which you use to attain inner peace, Islamic terrorists have hijacked it to justify their barbaric activities. Mosques are used to preach hatred as seen in Tom Friedman’s program on the Roots of 9/11. In one segment he sits through the Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar mosque in Egypt, where thousands of common people are involved in a personal communion with their God. But once the prayers are over, some people take over and start preaching hatred filled words against America and there is no one stopping them. But now with the barbaric masscre in Beslan, there has been some introspection in the Arab world.

“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,” wrote Abdul Rahman Rashed, general manager of the popular Al Arabiya television channel. In a blunt column in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al Awsat, Rashed listed attacks carried out by Muslims in Iraq, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. “Our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture,” he wrote. “The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.”

The Saudi daily Arab News blasted Putin as “a servant of state dictatorship and control,” a man who could not afford to lose his “tough-man image.” But the editorial saved its harshest condemnation for the guerrillas, “who had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips.”

An editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star called for “better governance systems and socioeconomic opportunities in those countries and regions, including our Middle East, that seem to generate so many terrorists.” “Terror emanates largely from despair, hopelessness and humiliation,” the editorial said. “And these are sentiments whose causes can be identified, tracked, grasped and addressed.”[Russian School Takeover Stirs Self-Criticism Among Arabs]