Imran Khan’s maiden speech at OIC summit

Prime Minister Imran Khan delivered a keynote speech at the 14th OIC Summit in Makkah, in which he raised the issues of Islamophobia, blasphemy and Kashmir and Palestine. He said: “Islam has nothing to do with terrorism…Some western countries are suffering from Islamophobia. The West should differentiate between moderate Muslim and extremist Muslim…
The international community has to respect the feelings of more than 1 billion Muslims…When someone from the West blasphemed our Holy Prophet (PBUH), I always felt the response from the Muslim Ummah, but OIC was lacking”. He also touched upon the plight of the people of Kashmir as well as Palestine, saying Pakistan supports the two-state solution recognizing East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, adding that the people of Kashmir must also have their right to self determination; and OIC as a body must stand against the oppression happening with the Muslim world.
Imran Khan rightly referred to the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand on March 15, 2019 during Friday prayers to prove his point. Brenton Tarrant has been charged by New Zealand police with engaging in a “terrorist act”, in addition to existing murder charges over the two mosque attacks in Christchurch. This proves what Imran Khan said that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, and that just like every Muslim is not a terrorist, every terrorist is not necessarily a Muslim. Anders Behring Breivik, a Christian antagonist of Norway and mass killer, is also a case in point. The Time magazine (April 16, 1979 issue) had reported that “over 60,000 (sixty thousand) books have been written against Islam by the Christian West’ during the last 150 years. Since then, the number has multiplied to a great extent.
With the popularity of internet and social media, this negative propaganda has multiplied so much so that millions of anti-Islam and blasphemous websites as well as think tanks have been created by the opponents, as if maligning Islam is the sole aim of their life. This hate literature is actually a major source of widespread Islamophobia all over the world. For instance, the mass killer Breivik had excessively quoted anti-Islam literature in his manifesto. According to The New York Times, ‘the accused Norway murderer Anders Behring Breivik cited the work of anti-Jihad activist Robert Spencer 64 times in his 1,500 page manifesto’. It actually manifests that such propaganda war waged against Islam is not only creating thousands of Breiviks in the west but also producing millions of Osamas in Muslim world in retaliation making the world more dangerous to live in.
This trend has brought different religious communities to perilous confrontational paths bringing the world on the verge of disaster. Prudence demands that terrorists should be treated as criminals and not as torch bearers of a religion. If we see things in this perspective, we would find Osama, Brevik, Swami Aseemanand and such fiends in the same category. Comprehending these points with open minds and hearts can really facilitate ways for interfaith harmony and there would be no room for the Islam-bashing terms like Islamophobia, Islamic terrorism, Islamic militancy and so on. Having that said, members of IOC should work in unison to remove the causes that engender extremism by focusing on providing social net in their societies to fight poverty, hunger and disease. They should also try to avoid grouping in the body on the basis of fiqah and remember that Muslim fraternity has suffered by fueling the contradictions by the enemies of Islam.