Today’s Jerusalem Post has an interesting interview with Tashbih Sayyed, a Muslim American who speaks out against militant Islam in his publication, Pakistan Today:
“As a little boy, I thought all Jews should be killed,” he says. As a young man, his virulent tirades against his purported enemy at a local radio school attracted the attention of a Pakistani Jew who quietly funneled him books on Jewish history and Israel, including Exodus by Leon Uris. When Sayyed took a closer look at the Koran, a different Islam was revealed to him: a religion of peace, free of the hatred that he argues has held his people back for centuries.
“I became vengeful, as if somebody had cheated me of my childhood, as if somebody had tried to make me a serpent when I was not a serpent. I blamed the mullahs and the clerics,” he says.
Sayyed argues – in a somewhat contradictory fashion – that either there is no Muslim moderate “silent majority”, or else they are not represented by the official Islamic organizations:
Why is it that every time I look at the White House or a senator’s or congressman’s office, every time I find an intern or employee who is Muslim, he is always connected to some Islamic center or mosque? [ . . . ] There are gatekeepers in the White House who are promoting Islamic radicals. So long as you call Islamic centers [for advice] on whom to invite to do American jobs, you will only get Osama bin Laden.
Sayyed is, of course, dismissed by most Islamic centers as being “controlled by Zionists” and somehow, this allows them to ignore the fact that people like him exist.