A target for hate

Tarek Fatah

The National Post

Marwa Sherbini, a 32-year-old Egyptian mother, was murdered in a German courtroom in Dresden this week. She was killed as she waited to give evidence against a German man of Russian descent who had been convicted for calling her a "terrorist" because she wore the hijab (a Muslim headscarf concealing the head and neck).

Sherbini, who was three months pregnant with her second child, was stabbed 18 times by a man identified only as Axel W. The woman's husband, Elwi Ali Okaz, was also critically injured as he tried to protect her.

Last year, when Axel W. claimed Sherbini was a "terrorist," he was fined €750. It was during the appeal proceeding, on July 1, that Axel W. and Sherbini found themselves again in the same room. Before she could give evidence, the man lunged at her and stabbed her to death.

The alleged murderer, if convicted, should spend the rest of his life behind bars. The murder of Marwa Sherbini is a blot on the face of Germany, but it should also be cause for concern for Muslims everywhere in the West.

Two years ago, when the hijab controversy erupted in Quebec, I had warned that sooner or later there was bound to be a backlash against Muslims if Islamists continued to push the hijab and the niqab (which covers the entire body, except the eyes) as political symbols of Islamism, and thereby thumb their noses at non-Muslim North American and European society. However, I could never have imagined that the backlash would take such a bloody turn as this.

The question we Muslims have to ask is this: What do we gain by using our daughters, sisters and wives to carry the false burden of the hijab as if it were the flag of Islam?

While I am totally opposed to the ban on the Hijab in France and Turkey, and would defend the right of a Muslim woman to wear one, I am also unwilling to give up my right to expose the political symbolism that hides behind the banner of religiosity.

Most Muslims know that the Koran does not ask Muslim women explicitly to cover their heads or their faces as a fundamental practice of Islam. Yet Islamists inspired by Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to push for this attire.

What are we gaining by thumbing our noses at the host societies of the West that have allowed us to be fellow citizens? Why have we told our young women that not wearing such garments is somehow tantamount to nakedness?

On one hand, we have the rise of the racist right in Europe. On the other, we have a gleeful Islamist left, for whom this murder will prove to be manna from heaven. Sherbini's murder will be portrayed as the ultimate symbol of the West's "war against Islam," and fuel the propaganda that Muslims are victims. Never mind the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan in Tehran, killed by fellow Muslims. Already, there are protests in Egypt asking for revenge.

I have been to Europe six times in the last year and I can see the rise of racism against visible Muslims that parallels a suicidal effort by jihadis to flaunt their contempt for Western civilization and its values. Things are getting worse because two other segments of society that can help cool the situation are either silent or paralyzed by political correctness.

The first is secular and liberal Muslims, who form the vast majority of Europe's Islamic community. They need to organize and confront the jihadis. Not for the sake of government grants and NGO funding, but for the sake of our future as equal citizens in the Western world.

The other group is the European and North American left, which has become a collective apologist for all things Islamist. This group is so consumed by its knee-jerk anti-Americanism that it finds parallels between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden on one hand and Che Guevara and Simon Bolivar on the other. They are so obsessed by their hatred of Washington that they have missed the news; it is their man in the White House, not Dubya.

Now is the time for these two groups to stand up and be counted. The racists and the Islamists have to be challenged. Otherwise, more Marwa Sherbinis and Neda Agha-Soltans will die.

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-Tarek Fatah is author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. Currently, he is working on his second book on the roots of Jewish-Muslim friction, to be published by McClelland & Stewart in the fall of 2010. Fatah is also co-host of Strong Opinions, an afternoon talk show on CFRB 1010 in Toronto.