"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” So wrote Karl Marx. He should have added that its preachers and promoters are the worst kind of elitists and classists. They discriminate on the basis of the economic and cultural status of their followers.
United by faith only for effect, they stand divided due to the influence of markets and money power. From Christianity to hard Hinduism to Islam, it is becoming increasingly evident that the presiding human deities of these faiths enjoy special societal and political status which they deny to their blind followers all over the world. The devotees are killed so that the self-acclaimed ambassadors of their faith can continue to live luxurious lives. None of the affluent and influential monarchs or oligarchs, particularly in the rich Muslim countries, come forward to adopt them. On the contrary, they are abhorred and abandoned.
Nothing could be a better example of this economic and social discrimination than the homeless and hapless Palestinians. For the past two weeks, they have been paying the price of harbouring the terrorist organisation Hamas. Over 2.2 million Gazans are living in the world’s biggest open-air prison which has been turned into an urban hell with minimum facilities.
As Israel keeps pounding them with bombs, they are not allowed to leave their homes in order to relocate to the neighbouring Muslim nations. Israel, which has been facing a threat to its very existence for the past 75 years, resorted to massive retaliation when hundreds of Hamas terrorists broke the border barricades and massacred innocent civilians including infants, raped women and kidnapped nationals from over a dozen countries including the US.
Ironically, the Hamas leadership has parked itself in safe and opulent havens in other Muslim countries such as Egypt and Qatar. Poor Palestinians elected them to run their tiny country and not to spray bullets and bombs. But the Hamas leadership is unambiguous about its final intent: it calls for the establishment of an Islamic Palestine to eliminate Israel from the map of the world.
It preaches the use of violence to destroy Israel and the Jews. Israelis are equally determined to give Hamas and its sponsors the same treatment. If Hamas's inhuman hunters were able to kill over 1,500 people, Israel ensured that for one dead Israeli, they killed at least three Gazans.
Now, when the Israeli government has ordered that they vacate the Gaza Strip, most of them are stuck at the border with their children. Egypt is not letting them in. Jordan has firmly told them to stay back in their homes. Egypt seems more concerned about the threat it would face if it allowed Gazans to settle near its border with Israel. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi gave a rather strategic defence for his decision when he said that any transfer of people from Gaza to Sinai would mean that "we move the idea of resistance, of combat, from the Gaza strip to Sinai, and so Sinai would become the base for launching operations against Israel". It was clear that even El-Sisi was concerned about Hamas using its territory to attack Israel.
Jordan, which shares a border with Israel on the West Bank, was much more upfront. King Abdullah was firm in not allowing Palestinians to enter Jordan again. Strangely, the Arab world including the oil-rich Middle East economies has been wary of accommodating their Muslim brothers and sisters from other parts of the world including Palestine. Jordan was actually the original abode for them till the idea of having their own state was germinated in the minds of the Jews.
Most of those who left their own countries such as Syria and even Sudan ended up joining or creating their own terror groups like the ISI, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah. An analysis of the Muslim refugees reveals that a massive majority of Muslim immigrants from relatively poorer countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Bangladesh were never welcomed into any of the rich Muslim countries. When the Rohingya Muslims were pushed out of Myanmar a couple of years ago, not a single Islamic country gave them shelter. Most of them landed in non-Islamic India.
All Muslims who left their own countries during the past decade have found homes in the liberal UK, Europe, US, Canada and even India. Between 2010 and 2016, 3.7 million Muslims from the Middle East have found new habitats in the West. Yet they haven’t adjusted to their local identities and most of them have become major suppliers for organised terror networks all over the world.
They have been able to intimidate even the moderate Muslim population in other countries to take sides with them against what they call infidels. Even last week, numerous pro-Hamas protests were taken out in various US cities and European countries. There is now a growing realisation in the Western world that their policy of giving refuge to Muslims has boomeranged on them.
While the entire world is grappling with the new terror threat emanating from religious identities, the current bloody confrontation seems to be between the 1.8 billion Muslims settled in 57-odd countries and a little over nine million Jews living in a nanoscopic nation, Israel. In the absence of their own nation for more than a century, another one million Jews migrated to over 100 countries all over the world, with the maximum to the US. While fundamental Islamists are out to eliminate Jews from the earth, the Jews have shown their intellect, innovation and diligence by becoming one of the richest races in the world. Barring Jordan and Egypt, none of the other Islamic countries has more than one per cent of their population as Muslim refugees.
There seem to be both cultural and economic explanations for keeping refugees out of their own countries. Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Turkey and others like Indonesia and Bangladesh have chosen to join the global mainstream in terms of development. Saudi Arabia is now aggressively promoting itself with attractive ads. The UAE has always been a favourite tourist and business destination.
All of them feel that letting these half-educated and brain-washed arsonists from places like Gaza would disturb their rhythm of modernisation with Islamic identity. They feared that religiously driven insurrectionists would pick up arms and lead to a discombobulated environment. The abominable plight of Palestinians and other poor Muslim immigrants symbolises the ugly face of an affluent and corporatised Islamic world.