SOME WRITINGS DONT PROVE ANY SENSE, IT ONLY EXPOSES IGNORANCE...I PRESENT GIMBA KAKANDA and MUHAMMAD MAHMUD...Read patiently:A Letter to that Nigerian-PalestinianBy Gimba KakandaJuly 25, 2014 My participation in #BringBackOurGirls shows me the hypocrisy of our Muslim brothers and sisters who, dismissing our hashtags as a gimmick, are now loud champions of #FreePalestine.——————————–Dear Friend,Before you accuse me of finding nothing worth praising about you and yours, let me quickly empathise with you, and of course myself, over the killings in Gaza. You, as a humanist, one whose empathy has no border, are a citizen of the world, one of the reasons the earth is still habitable by the sane. It would be morally irresponsible for anyone to frown at your frantic advocacy which seeks an end to the killings in Gaza, only that common sense demands a man whose house is on fire to rush for the extinguisher for his own dwelling first, before attending to a similar fire elsewhere.London stands up for Gaza, because London is not bereaved. New York stands up for Gaza because New York isn’t being threatened by hurricane-at least now. Palestine would not stand up for Chibok girls because they also have a strip of misery in which they are just as worthless: Gaza. And the young Malala Yousafzai who came and roused the conscience of her fathers in Nigeria, was not here as a Pakistani as you have announced in defending your geographically insensitive activism from my “secular advocacy”. She was here as a Birmingham, England-based NGO owner, to stand with the girls of Nigeria in whose education Malala Fund has invested thousands of dollars. She has, as the news says, even “offered to partner with the UN efforts to mitigate the impacts of the abduction and help the girls (whose welfare is a responsibility of her NGO) return to school.”You see, it’s not the way you internationalise your empathies that disturbs me, it’s this seeming pretence that all is well in your backyard while you weep over the blazing fire in faraway Gaza. If you, and others like you, had been half as passionate and emotional in your reaction to local tragedies as you are over the killings in Palestine, the troubles in the northeastern Nigeria wouldn’t have escalated to its present extent. The Palestinians, and their global solidarity soldiers, have gone berserk over the burning of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair, their citizen, and you, amnesiac activist of a burning nation, have also been losing sleep over Khudair, ignoring the tens of Khudairs who die in your backyard every day!It’s not the internationalisation of your empathies that disturbs me, it’s your lack of wisdom to understand that Khudair has his fighters — and he’s fully named, his age too revealed –while all the killed and abducted Dantalas and Asma’us and Johns and Naomis of Yobe and Borno are seen as mere statistics, unworthy of collective advocacy by you.Ours is not a criticism of the northern establishment, but that of its hypocritical allegiance to “brotherhood of faith”, which is what you say in your solidarity with the Palestinians, ignoring that we’re just as bereaved here, and unknowing that Palestine is also a home for non-Muslims. But, wait, what sort of a human being is responsive to the tragedies that fall upon just the people of his faith?Ours is a criticism of the collective, not of a specific group. This is a reminder that we have not done enough, not a declaration that we have not done anything at all. It’s a criticism of me and you who, safe from the bullets of Boko Haram, have not done anything comparable to the emotions shown in the sensitivity of our countrymen to the happening in Gaza. Are you, my dear global citizen, trying to say that we, especially resident northerners, need CNN and Aljazeera to remind us that there are carnages going on in our backyard before we acknowledge them?Haven’t we all lost friends and friends of friends and relatives and relatives of relatives in this madness? What media is more effective than being actually bereaved? The most effective media is our emotions, and on this I dare say that we haven’t shown and done enough. My participation in #BringBackOurGirls shows me the hypocrisy of our Muslim brothers and sisters who, dismissing our hashtags as a gimmick, are now loud champions of #FreePalestine.See, we are as bereaved as the people of Palestine and it’s quite ironic that, instead of gathering our lots to empathise with ourselves first and demand solutions and justice, we pretend as though all’s well in our house. Why are the people of Palestine not empathising with the people of Borno if our “brotherhood of faith” is actually reciprocal? Why? I repeat: why aren’t the people of Palestine extending their “brotherhood of faith” to us in the hours of our bereavements? The Palestinians have never stopped fighting. They have their men up and running against oppression. Who’s up fighting for us, especially for Chibok and the larger northeast? Why leaving these campaigns against Boko Haram’s terrors to just the members of Civilian JTF and #BringBackOurGirls campaigners?You even said that no atrocity is more than that going on in Gaza, and I ask: is there an experience worse than having minors abducted, savagely raped and impregnated by terrorists? Saying that no atrocity is as bad as that in Gaza means that the sanctity of a Palestinian’s life is higher than that of a Nigerian’s. And that, fellow countryman, is an unfortunate and disturbing utterance.Similarly, you have to be really careful in your advocacy. At least get relevant history books to properly understand the religious and political complexity of the territorial conflicts that have turned Gaza into a prison-mortuary. Your alignment with the Palestinians, your brothers-in-faith, may lead you into something called anti-Semitism. And you also need to understand that it’s the peak of such misguided hatred that resulted into the formation of a racist ideology that once sought to promote the “Aryan” German race as the best of humans. Nazism, consequently, championed the killings of the innocent Jews, who were considered threats to proposed German nationalism.In your analyses of the happenings in Gaza, you have, quite sadly, pandered to a way of the Hitler-led Aryan racists who considered the Jewish race abolishable pests.Do have restraint in understanding that the happenings in Israel is not a crime perpetrated, and supported, by the whole of Jews. It’s a crime perpetrated by a monstrous ideology championed by a people of Jewish identity, just the way Nazism was not supported by the whole of Germans, but by a small but powerful National Socialist party clique. If you’re to adopt this form of flawed thinking in portraying ethnic or religious groups, obviously the whole of Muslims should be similarly persecuted for the crimes of Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabbab, the Taliban and even Boko Haram who all pretend to be advocates of rights for the Muslim!Hate the Israelis who, under Zionism, did to Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, but do not go close to hating the whole of Jews. Saying I hate the Jews means I hate some significant figures that shaped me, mine and the larger world. Saying I hate the Jews means I hate Jesus, who in my theology is Isah (AS), needed to authenticate my belief; saying I hate the Jews means I hate Moses (AS), similarly needed; saying I hate the Jews is an ingratitude to Albert Einstein’s contribution to science; saying I hate the Jews is an ingratitude to Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, whose invention has redeemed me in ways I’m incapable of repaying; saying I hate the Jews is also an ingratitude to Mark Zuckerberg whose innovation is the reason you and I are “friends” – even though we’ve never met – sharing thoughts on the ways of the world.As long as you’re on Facebook, and employ Google to aid your quests for knowledge, both creations of inventors of Jewish identity, declaring that you hate the Jews is a contradiction, a joke clearly on you. And, as Muslims, your faith is threatened the moment you withhold your love for Jesus and Moses.Don’t let a criminal be a representative of his race, religion and nationality. This approach, this dangerous stereotyping, has been the reason for these many conflicts we are still unable to resolve in this damned world. We must embrace our humanity, the only thing we all have in common, if we’re indeed interested in resolving our racial, religious, political, regional, territorial and ethnic conflicts!Unlike you, whenever I see a group of people, the first identity that strikes me is the human, not the religious, not the political, not the racial, and obviously not the ethnic. Aside from my immediate family, my next closest family are the righteous people, people always in pursuit of Justice without discrimination, and of their other identities I’m unmindful.I’ve long overcome the naiveté of hating a people based on the crimes of a group of which they are non-compliant members, just the way I don’t owe any non-Muslim and southerner apology for the atrocities of the Boko Haram. I only owe them explanation, defence, solidarity and empathy. My seeming silence over the killings in Gaza is simply because I’ve also been mourning, and also holed up in a mess of immeasurable depth. The Palestinians, I know, have global solidarity soldiers fighting for them. But, beyond hashtags, who are actually fighting for the redemptions of this place in which we don’t need a visa to reside?This week, at our Abuja’s #BringBackOurGirls sit-in, as I listened to Oby Ezekwesili, a woman whose public service records never really attracted my curiosity, but I’ve come to like as a humanist and patriot of impressive resilience, lament on the fate and conditions of the abducted girls and the dysfunctionality of the system in charge of our safety, something within me collapsed. So I withdrew from the crowd, hoping that could stem it, but I still couldn’t fight the tears. And that was how I left the sit-in, broken. This is because, in the cruel politics of migrations in this century, I have no home other than Nigeria, and the tragedy that befalls a fellow countryman, irrespective of his/her religious and ethnic and regional affiliations, is a shared grief.I’m not inconsiderate to your reference to “brotherhood of faith” in standing for the people of Gaza, but I will never ever stand for them simply because we’re of the same religion. My own version of that excuse of yours is: “faith in the universal brotherhood of Man.” I only empathise with them because of a shared humanity. As for those who rightly explain that humanity has no border, which I also endorse, my belief in yours may only be confirmed if you also recognise the conditions of the Iraqi Christians who’re now fleeing Mosul, for they have been told by the ISIS animals to convert to Islam or lose their lives. Many of you are in Abuja, but participating in #BringBackOurGirls is seen as a “waste of time”, insulting those who defy the tasks of their 9-to-5 daily to be a part of the campaign, ignorant of the impending dangers, the danger of becoming refugees in your own city!Yet, some of you have sought to typify my refusal to label corpses in order to know which deserves my empathy as simply a bid to earn a medal from the non-Muslims I’ve been struggling so hard, according to you, to impress; some of the same non-Muslims who, in a spark of mischief, have in their turn called me an “Islamic propagandist”, whatever that is, for condemning the profiling of northerners in the East, for endorsing a Muslim as presidential candidate… But I’m indifferent to their malicious labeling just as I’ve been to yours because you’re both incapable of denying me the rights to such expressions.Humanity is still a joke because of this army of cerebrally malfunctioned brothers and sisters to whom we’re seen as hypocrites merely trying to impress the non-members of our group, for exposing a form of oppressive hypocrisy. Well, my dear friend, I don’t write to influence or change you; my writing is a sport that seeks to prove that I don’t think the way you do, and that the way I think is independent of yours. I hope this would be taken in good faith. May God save us from us!REJOINDER!Reply to Kakandas Cacophony of Misconstruals By Muhammad Mahmud 27-Jul-14Dear Kakanda,Reading your letter to me, in which you chided my worry and anger about what is going on in the third most important places of my religion, further strengthen my position that the resistance should be doubled, as it is indeed working, the manifestation of which, possibly, prompted your flawed attempt to stop me.First, I never ever expected any praise from you or any mortal for what I am doing or refusing to do. My prayers, my sacrifice, my living and my dying are for Allah, The Lord of the Alameen (Mankind, Jinn and all that exists). He has no partner. And of this I have been commanded, and I am the first of Muslims. Therefore, you take your praise where it is needed not to me. I have a greater goal and far wider ambition.Second, I am not a humanist. I am a muslim whose religion taught to revere and sanctify every soul, be it that of human or animal, male or female, notwithstanding the status,region, creed, race or specie of that soul. I adore lives because I am a Muslim not a humanist. I look and crave for whatever will make humans and animals better because that is what my religion taught me, not the other way round.While I concur with you that commonsense demands that a man find means of extinguishing a fire in his house before trying to extinguish similar fire elsewhere, I believe your erroneous understanding of the situations made you assume that my call for the world to stop the genocide in Gaza is a direct contradiction to my efforts, which you seem not to be aware of, to stop atrocities in my country.You also need to be educated that, to me, Palestine is my home as a Muslim. For ever second my mind was never off that third most sacred places of my religion, which was forcefully occupied by Jews, who subjected my brothers down there to unprecedented humiliation.It is my duty, as a Muslim, to do whatever I can, no matter how little, to reverse the situation in Palestine. Therefore, it is irrational to me, for someone to assume that Palestine is someones house not mine. That place is not just a geographical expression, as you seem to believe, it is a sacred religious environment, third to Mecca and Medina.But put that aside, as I know that, you, and probably your like minds, might be pretending to be flabbergasted with this, It is utterly unimaginable that at this time of globalisation, some supposedly enlightened folks still think that we are living in isolation and should ignore happenings elsewhere, even as the world recently stood up for us when the insurgents abducted school girls and flew into the forest.By this line of thinking, we should never mind happenings save that which directly affect us. But even that argument can not stand here, because as human beings with conscience, one cannot feel that it is normal that fellow human beings are killed and maimed after their country have been occupied. Normal humans can never feel this is okay. Thus, this argument that we ought to mind only what is happening in our own country only is very wrong. If we are to follow this line of thinking to its logical end, we should never mind what is happening in Nigeria till it directly affect our household.On the other hand, it is not true that the Nigerian situation is similar to that of Palestine. This misconception or deliberate misconstruing of realities informed your bad judgement about the whole thing.While the Palestinian situation is simply a full religious and territorial war between Jews and Muslims, the Nigerian situation is so complicated that it is ever changing, shaping and reshaping, as such needing diverse and relevant actions at different times depending on the prevailing situation.While the Palestinians are under heavy bombing from their occupiers, the Nigerian Muslims are daily bombarded and slaughtered by their own brothers. Their mosques and markets are destroyed and their scholars killed by their own brothers. How does this looks similar to the situation in Palestine? While the Palestinians are united in fighting the occupiers and regarding them as enemies, there is so much distrust and suspicion among Nigerians to the extent that Muslims in Nigeria, who are more at the receiving end as testified by the president, are regarded as members of BOko Haram, particularly the northerners. On the other hand, heartless and sadistic politicians, both from the opposition and government, are exploiting the precarious situation to fuel distrust and tension among Nigerians with a clear aim to wrestle or remain in power. How does this looks similar to the Palestinian situation? There are lots of dissimilarities between the two that it is nonsensical to assume that a panoptic approach is required to both situations and as such condemning the first (Gaza) is ignoring the second (Nigeria).The simple hash-tagging that sparked international protests, which extremely disturbed the occupiers, could not make Boko Haram grimace, as we witnessed recently. What I am doing at home could never be simple hash-tagging. It is far beyond that. You cant expect me to apply same approach to dissimilar incidences that affects me, I am not that asinine.Your attempt to hoodwink that only (citizens of) countries with less problems are protesting the genocide is shattered to pieces when you posited that Malala was here not as a Pakistani, an admittance that Pakistan is a bereaved country. Because, as you might probably not have been told, by your primary sources of western media that back the occupiers, like BBC and CNN, the Pakistanis are among the millions of people that are participating in campaigning against the genocide. They and countries like South Africa and Afghanistan even organised mass protests against it, unlike me and my likes who did not even bother to organise that here. The Shiite demonstration is an annual event that would still took place even if there is no fighting in Gaza, so it is not directly for this genocide which is our topic of discussion.You put aside all manner of honesty, morality and truthfulness, when you ignobly claimed, albeit without any proof, that I internationalised my empathy to show that all is well in my home. This is the height of fallacy and roguery. Can you give one single proof to substantiate this claim?Truth is, you are so annoyed that I refuse to be so parochial like you, to cage myself in an extreme individualism garbed in afeigned patriotism that seek to limit all my attention to where westerners expected of me, so as to fit as modern Muslim. In other words, you are annoyed that I complied with the injunction of sharia to be mindful of the affairs of Muslims wherever they are. You couldnt find anything to smear me, so you chose to fabricate lies to console your worried mind.Contrary to your claim, I inform the world more about my problem at home than the Gaza hashtag. I, and my likes, posted more on our domestic problems than the Gaza issue that only started few weeks ago. We wrote articles, debated, posted pictures, critiqued, condemned and commended on issue that directly affected us here at home. In fact what we wrote or posted on Gaza could not take one percent of what we wrote about our home problem, this could be verified by simply going through our outputs. We never ever claimed that all is now over at home. Where and how did you get this chicanery that I am pretending as if all is well at home?We have been more than half as passionate about our problems than the happenings in Gaza. Are you not aware that we have been praying every time for the return of normalcy in our country? (I am aware that you dont give much importance to prayers). Are you not aware how many of us risked their lives by publicly calling for the halt to the bloodshed? Are you not aware how many paid with their lives for this? Are you not aware that the civilian JTF are out there with sticks facing well trained insurgents? Are you not aware that many successful operations by Nigerian troops were on tips from our people who risked paying with their lives? The list is endless. Perhaps, you will only agree that we are passionate if we and our wives trooped to Abuja and wailed at your camera to upload to God knows where. Perhaps you expect us to be so passionate to the extent that we publicly insult our religion and disassociate ourselves from it because some people did what we believe is wrong and flagitious. This we will never do.You amaze me with your audacity to play with my intelligence that the ongoing genocide is about Abu Khudayr, who was killed by the occupiers. Cmon pal, it is not about Abu Khudayr, it is about the occupation. I dont think you are too dumb to miss this. Either you are so ignorant about the history of the happenings there or you are mischievously downplaying the real issue. For your information, the on going genocide is a continuation of centuries of conflicts at that venerated place, between Muslims (that is we) and the west. Read Ibn Katheers Albidayah and free yourself from that bondage.Your holier than thou posture was betrayed by the following from you: ...while all the killed and abducted Dantatas and Asma’us and Johns and Naomis of Yobe and Borno are seen as mere statistics, unworthy of collective advocacy by you.Advocacy my foot! I cant believe this. So all the accusations you have been throwing is just for me to only advocate while my people are killed by the day? I expect better from you, my friend.We not only advocate and pretend to do our role, like you, but we actually engage the problem. Both from ideological point of view and the physical confrontation. We lost many people, none of whom you ever deemed fit to even recognise. So many Islamic scholars paid the ultimate price just like so many youth members of civilian JTF. It is a shame that all you expect from us is to retort to advocacy. You see, you and your horde of brainwashed yan Boko, are so delusional and obsessed with yourselves to the extent that you presume every effort by anybody as null and void unless it complies with your westernised way of thinking. That is why, sometimes, we only read you and grin, not minding to even waste our time commenting.I understand that you are angry with me for unflinchingly supporting Palestinians, on what you called brotherhood of faith ground. You are obviously not happy for that. Had it been I supported them on humanitarian ground, you might be happy.But that mark the breaking point between us. Because as a Muslim, I do everything as commanded by my religion, and I pay no attention to whose ox is gored for that. The Almighty Allah bonded all Muslims together as he declared that Believers are indeed brothers (and sisters). His Messenger also said A Muslim is a brother to a Muslim. He who does not pay attention or care about the affairs of Muslims is not among them. Muslims, in their love and affection towards each other, are like one single body. If a part of him is sick, the rest of the body would be in pain or fever. This last Hadith is an answer to you. It might give you an insight as to why the Palestinian issue and pain, as my brother in faith is mine.You inquired But, wait, what sort of a human being is responsive to the tragedies that fall upon just the people of his faith?You can ask your Christian friends that question. They are the ones who turned your much cherished #BringBackOurGirls into a Christian affair. They are the ones who only condemn attacks on churches and Christians. But we, Muslims, never did that. We condemn attacks on any human being.Your misconstruing the bond of brotherhood between Muslims as been only responsive to the tragedies that fall upon just the people of his faith, further expose your either misunderstanding of the religion or unacceptably limited knowledge about it, but which you always want to talk carelessly on.First, the verse and Hadiths quoted, and their likes, are not limiting Muslims responses to calamities or tragedies to only members of their faith. In contrast, there are other texts encouraging Muslims to help the needy, save lives, help the downtrodden, feed the hungry and so on, without limiting us to those of our faith only. In fact, those texts, I think, are more than the ones cited on Muslims brotherliness. Not only humans, we are encouraged to preserve and protect the lives of animals and be gentle with them.For you to accuse that Islam only encourage us to respond to atrocities committed on Muslims only is very unfortunate.You kept regurgitating your flawed conjecture about the similarity of the Palestinian situation and ours. They cant be collocated as I pointer earlier, and that dislodged your argument that our hash-tagging Gaza and retweeting supportive tweets is less than our active confrontation of our problems at home.You seem to forget or ignore that we are doing all this as a religious duty not as a payback or with an expectation of payback from our brothers. The whole world forgot our race and creed when they stood for us on Chibok. We are not racists, neither are we tribalists. Our religion abhor those despicably parochial purviews within which you want us to view issues.It looks more likely that you are more in need to read more than me. You need to understand that the Palestines are also Semites. When you cautioned, mischievously, that I will fall into Anti Semitism for feeling bad about killing children and elderly, I was flabbergasted, I wondered whether a new definition of Semite has popped up. Alhamdulillah, I read a fair share of history books to be enlightened enough about the Palestine to the extent that the revisionists versions failed to redirect my attention. I advice that you read as a human with discerning mind, not reading that will make you ape absurdities.Your fear that I might think like an Aryan German who think they are the best of humans, is baseless, as I told you that I am a Muslim. To me the best is the most pious. We dont position people or race based on those features. I though you use to read Quran. If you have been reading and understanding the quran, you wouldnt have wasted time trying to exonerate some Jews from the horrors of Zionists. I dont think there are a people so accused in detail, in the quran, like the Jews. Yet the Quran, as usual, was very fair to them when it was clearly clarified that the Jews are not all the same. Some virtues of some of them were extolled in the quran. Thus, as a Muslim I felt amazed that you think you need to tell me the danger of generalisation. Though when you are referring to us, northern Nigerian Muslims, you gleefully generalise.I was really amused when you laboured to tell me what I know about the prophets who were Jews and their status in Islam. Are you in the illusion that, even though Allah clearly stated that the Jews are the most hostile to Muslims in the whole world, there were no Muslim Jews at that very time. I will advise you to read Islam and understand it well, my brother, your are exposing too much of the unenviable stuff you are made of.You shouldnt have minded been didactic and/or pedagogic about Einstein et al to make a point an elementary school pupil knows much about. There is nothing special about those inventions by the jews to me, because I have handful of Muslims some of whose works on scientific field made their works a reality. Knowledge, as we have known, is not a preserved treasure of a given race, colour or creed. The cumulative efforts of others are further expanded and built on to further arrive at a step further. By the way, Einstein was agains the Zionists, we all know that.You wrote that Unlike you, whenever I see a group of people, the first identity that strikes me is the human. This is debatable. Because, first, I am the real humanist. I am a humanist because I am a Muslim, and a Muslim is commanded by his religion to be more humanist than the bunch of pretenders that you are. I pointed this earlier.Second, this very piece exposed your inhumanity as you seek to distort the real and actual bone of contention between the oppressor (Jewish Occupiers) and the oppressed (The Palestinians). You also, subtly, justify the aggression on humans under attack (Palestinians) under the guise of worn out caution on the so called anti Semitism. You clearly came out in defence of the Jews and accused the Palestinians of never caring about my situation. Thus, you implied, I should forget about them.The piece also expose your racism, which you claimed to be against, just as it protruded your blanket judgement on northerners as you caution them not to generalise others. See?No my friend you are confused and disturbed that I choose to follow my religion, a way you think I should not follow and wished I should put aside.I always pray Rabbana La Tazigh Qulubana, baada izh Hadaitana, Wa Hab lana Min Ladunka Rahmatan, innaka Antal Wahab, amen
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 10:28:58 +0000
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