Engaging discussion and more of this is required. This is flashback 2012, but just listen to some of the participants and notice how their fear became true about #CharlieHebdo and other similar incidents. The exact fear of the journalist from Egypt in the beginning was just realized. No major opposing views on the panel or from the audience could be observed, except Myriam Francois-Cerrah who highlighted the issue of racism against Muslims in France, including banning of Hijab. This looks so surreal, as if this interview just happened yesterday. Except that this occurred back in 2012. How predictable and accurate, one might argue. Maajid Nawaz is spot on to call for defending civil liberties, especially the call for Islamic civil societies to step up and bring consistencies in their protests. He further concludes, Because of geo-political factors, an Islamist political interests, its become a lot more difficult to do that with Islam; because of the combination of identity, foreign policy grievances and the agitation by the extremists. And to solve that problem, all of those factors needs to be addressed. We need to look at [issues of] invading countries; we need to look at respecting peoples identities in the rise of anti Islam far right, but we need to seriously start to look at - Muslims need to start looking into extremism into their own ranks, because frankly, there have been left wing activist in this country for years challenging fascism, challenging racism. Sadly there arent too many Muslims challenging extremism. Going by the international and current trends, it is hard to disagree with Maajids views, who was a one time extremist himself. As a matter of fact, most of the panelists are echoing similar views.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 05:47:40 +0000