By Aliyu Smith Almusawi
My friend Yusuf Ahmad Shia often tells me that he has never come across the strangest Muslims in the whole world who think lopsidedly and behave shortsightedly like some Muslims in Nigeria. Social media are filled to the brim with brutal genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Burma, a brutal crackdown by the Burmese military and aided by Buddhist balded-monks who have been embarking on tortures, rape, summary executions and arson against defenseless people.
This kind of inhumanity should be condemned by every sensible individual who is empathic and sympathetic to human suffering not only the Muslims but every human being, and I am happy to learn more and more people are speaking out against the ongoing pogrom. This is the case in Burma, and many people never knew the country was in existence until they were informed by the upswing in violence against the Rohingyas.
My only reason to be jittery about the way certain Muslims behave and think is they are either happy or don’t care when similar type of inhumanity is meted out to the Muslims they hate. I think people are fully aware of how our people were oppressed in Zaria worse than what the Burmese military has been doing against Rohingyas.
It takes more than a month of military campaign by the Burmese military to kill four hundred people, yet people all over the world are crying foul, but the Nigerian army in less than 48 hours massacred more than one thousand people in Zaria, their bodies were burnt to cinder, some injured people were buried alive, some women were shot in their private parts while some were set alight when they were too weak to run for their lives. Moreover, during the siege in Zaria, children and infants were not spared, during the siege, women were massacred like ants, and even the aged people and cerebral students had their lives cut short by the murderous military who kill more than they protect.
Hundreds were killed, hundreds are still missing and hundreds sustained various degrees of injuries. Their crime ? It is said they tried to assassinate the chief of army staff with catapults while others claimed they blocked road, and none of the allegation could justify the carnage. This is the kind of inhumanity that should be condemned by the world community, but world is silent, Buhari justified the massacre, some Muslims celebrated and cheered while Salafi clerics hailed it and described it as a nemesis for insulting Sahabas.
This hypocritical double-standard displayed by the so-called Muslims can be discerned by taking a cursory glance the humanitarian crises in Yemen, Syria, Nigeria. I condemn the ongoing genocide of Rohingyas, but a hypocrite is a person who overlooks a genocide against the minority group at home and decries it when it is done to others who live thousands of miles away.