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Last week, I shared a video of Yasiin Bey (a. k. a. Mos Def) volunteering to undergo the procedure for force feeding hunger strikers in Guantanamo Bay. Muslim community leaders across the country are urging President Obama to halt this horrendous practice during the holy month of fasting (Ramadan).
Despite that he continues to ignore these pleas, with the same Bush-era tactics he once promised to remove, the president’s Twitter account released the following:
@BarackObama The ones you're force feeding in Guantanamo? Or the ones you're bombing?
— Frankie Boyle (@frankieboyle) July 9, 2013
This isn’t anything new for the president. His rhetoric is composed of diction that does call for peace, understanding, family, and rejoice. His actions do not.
Let’s go back to June 4, 2009, and President Obama’s speech, “A New Beginning.” At the American University in Cairo, he promised peace between the American and Muslim worlds. He showed a fake smile, used references from the Qu’ran, and said “salaam alaikum” (may peace be upon you). The crowd cheered, hopeful that a new president would stand by their brothers and sisters in the United States. They were fooled.
Then White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Egypt was chosen because “it [was] a country that in many ways represent[ed] the heart of the Arab world.” For the same reason, it does not benefit them or the United States to continue to fund and back military dictatorships and tyrannical autocrats that have routinely used suppression and violence against their own people.
As another Egyptian youth is attacked with tear gas canisters made in the United States, not to mention drone victims, the supposed new beginning has merely become a new ending to optimism and hope for cross-cultural harmony.
The lack of leadership in the Obama Administration is not only based on misguidance and secrecy, it represents the depression of the American spirit and its foundations. His promises for hope and change were just rhetoric as one would rightfully assume, but they were also a mechanism of deceitful, ulterior motives. Every day American-Muslims are subject to even further ridicule and the denial of their 4th amendment right from the Transportation Security Administration merely for their race and religion. Every day American-Muslims are subject to fear and misery from what may happen and what has happened in their homelands or their families abroad due to the president’s criminal foreign policy.
Moreover, it is a shameful mark in American history that a sixteen-year-old American-Muslim was murdered by the President’s authorized drone, without due process and without much protest from the whimpering anti-war movement.
It’s 2013, not AD 600, not 1776, and not 1960. We’re not in the midst of a war over religions and Gods. We shouldn’t be reliving the dark moments of history of massacres and Jim Crow-style laws. It’s time to speak up and stand up when it comes to the invasion of rights — regardless of who a person may be or what God he may worship.
An attack on one man’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s freedom.
In his final sermon before his death on the ninth Day of Dhul Hijjah AD 630, the Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) said:
All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.
In the holy month of Ramadan, prove your good deeds and piety by demanding justice and liberty for not only yourself, but for all of mankind. Deliver the ink of a scholar, not the blood of your martyr. Stand by your prayers for safety, peace, and love among all your neighbors. Be the one who fights against injustice for all of Allah’s creations.
Allah offered paradise as a reward in the afterlife, but he did not offer hell in our present life. So I ask my Muslim brothers and sisters to reconsider what the Democratic party has offered to you, supposedly different from the GOP, and then realize that politicians won’t stand by you. You have to stand up for yourself.
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