Opinion
Hundreds of thousands of Sunnis have been killed in Syria and Iraq. Millions of Sunnis have been also displaced.
The devastated cities in Syria and Iraq are Aleppo, Homs, Idlib, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, etc. These are all Sunni cities.
Of the Sunni factions engaged in the conflict, no one brands itself as the "Yazid Army" or "Muawiyah's Army." But on the other end, you have got the brigades of "The Imam" "Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas" "Al-Zaynabiyat" "Al-Hussein" "Defenders of Shrines" "Mahdi Army". "Al-Karar Army,", and the list goes on.
For all these facts, there is in our world terms like "Sunni extremists" and "sectarian Sunnis" and terms like "Shiite fundamentalists" or "Shiite terrorists" do not exist.
A few days back, (the second and current supreme leader of Iran) Khamenei issued a fatwa, based on (his predecessor) Khomeini's fatwa, that women riding of bicycles is forbidden in Islamic law, but the media focuses only on the so-called "Wahhabism's" role in banning women from driving.
Neither is bicycling nor car driving is Haram (forbidden) for women, but why are the cameras angled at one corner (in the Islamic world)?
Again, I say tens of thousands of sectarian fighters backed by Iran are accomplices in the killings and displacement of the population of Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
A holocaust in the real sense of the world has been committed against Sunnis an are being documented with evidences and witnesses and there is a stubborn global tendency to deny that these holocausts exist in spite of them transpiring under the watchful eyes of the world.
The world wants to deny all these holocaust happening to Sunnis right in the open and continue to say that "terrorism is Sunni", exploiting the foolishness of ISIS, categorized as Sunnis, despite the fact that all Sunni reference scholars in the world have condemned ISIS's actions, and despite the fact that the Sunnis are ISIS's first victims.
For the world today the word “Allahu Akbar” sounds terrorist slogan if it comes from the mouth of a Sunni, and it does not sound as terrorist if it comes from the mouth of a Shiit even if a sectarian Iran-affiliated militant in Syria is saying it while cutting off someone's neck with an electric saw.
We have got to tell the truth today.
The truth is crystal clear.
It needs be said with no equivocation, no hypocrisy, no falsification.
Sunnis Muslims are the target of Iran's militias, the "alliance of minorities", and international departments in the West.
Iran's radical militias have their religious ideology, which sees the twenty-first century as the "age of Shia", like the twentieth century was seen as the "era of the rise of Shia", and they (the militias) are working on their ambition under the guidance of an imperialist state whose imperial national ambition is driving it into the abyss.
As for the other "minorities", they are haunted by what can be called a "Sunni phobia", driven by own historical and cultural doctrines or motivated by the instincts to seize the casual opportunity [of the Sunnis' vulnerability.]
As for the West, they see the danger lurk in their historical enemy or - so perceived: The “Sunni Islam”, which led the liberation battles against modern Western colonialism, and led the battles of resistance against the Crusader attacks in the Middle Ages, and the battles to liberate Iraq from the Persians and the Levant from the Romans, and spread to Spain and Central Asia. The denomination of Islam that represents the"civilizational counterpart" or "historical peer" to the civilization of the northern bank of the Mediterranean.
It is the responsibility of Sunnis today to face these facts and deal with them.
They must realize that they are the larger constituent of Muslims.
This requires unifying their ranks, postponing their differences, and building a comprehensive strategy to confront the looming challenges, represented by Western-Iranian attempts to make the minorities prevail in the East, in order to reverse history, fragment geography, and overturn the demographic reality of the Middle East.
The task is difficult, and the confrontation is not military in its entirety, and those who think that they can change the facts of history, or undermine the lessons in geography are disillusioned.
This region came in the past saw a lot of invasions, military campaigns, greed, leaders and soldiers. All of them have gone, and the people of the region survived stronger and brighter.
*Media's standing of facts on head
After all this ethnic and sectarian cleansing, how do westerners dare to lecture us about civilization and human rights?
We just need not be defeated spiritually, and the miracle will happen, lord willing
- This opinion by Dr. Mohammed Jumeih (Yemen's ambassador to the UNESCO) was translated from Mareb Press website.