Voices of hate louder than the majority

Voices of hate louder than the majority

After Paris, it has been a week of heartbreak. Not again, the godless killings, the barbarians at the gate! It has also been a week of blanket accusations, of Islam-bashing, and of frantic apologies from 1.5 billion peaceful people who’re told that what they’ve believed all their lives is making them inherently evil, only they don’t know it yet (the accusers know it).

It has been a week during which the loud gunfire in Paris — how I love that city — were made even louder by anger and hatred, by social media spats, by the tricolour-or-not-tricolour squabbling, by the “clash of civilisations” drama. In a week of a thousand op-eds, I dread adding to the noise for I know I can only whisper. That’s the saddest thing. One bomb can wound a million people at once, physically and psychologically, but to heal them, you can only do it one by one, person by person. Then another bomb hits again. This isn’t new. When Osama bin Laden was around, news agencies awaited his next tape as if he was a rock star. Whatever nonsense he said was broadcast all over the world. The extreme minority voice is always louder than the reasonable majority — and there’s never been a shortage of reasonable voices trying to break through the racket of radicalism, like murmurs or whispers in a stadium. Before Facebook and Twitter, bin Laden also knew how to exploit media hunger to air his bloodlust — it’s inevitable, it’s our job — and moderate Muslims learned the strange art of apologising for the thing they never agreed with in the first place since then.

Islam, more intensely than other faiths, faces the internal struggle between the progressive and the traditional, between the bomb-droppers and the whisperers (the IS is the extreme case, though we shouldn’t regard them as Islamic anyway). Buddhism has its moments too: the hard-liner Myanmar monks inciting violence, the Thai nationalist clergy calling for the burning of mosques, the online extremists shouting “All terrorists are Muslims”. Although most people see how horrible their views are, these firebrands inspire morbid fascination that somehow keeps them in the news.

We would have thought the whisperers would gain more attention with the widespread use of social media. That’s where diversity of information is the goal, isn’t it? That’s where we should read how top Islamic scholars recently tore the IS’s twisted ideology to shreds, for a start. Instead, the delirious shouters still attract all the attention, their voices amplified by the speed of connectivity, the one-click sharing of rubbish and rants. When things get too complex, we resort to the simplest of narratives: us vs them, black vs white, West vs East, Islam vs the rest. We consume information merely to confirm our prejudice, and now it’s an all-you-can-hate buffet round. We have countless examples in the past week — the anti-Muslim propaganda like poisoned fruit, yes, but also some Muslims’ denial of the Paris atrocity as a CIA plot, or the work of the Zionists, or the Illuminati. Not that again.

Either way, the point is that the sensible and the cool-headed will have to keep whispering amidst the growing din. I was in Indonesia this past week — the largest Muslim country in the world. What I had read about it was that a few hundred people there have joined the IS in Syria. I had also remembered that the extremist groups just announced they would form a regional branch for that death cult. Shouters they are, and I’ve heard them.

Once I was there, however, a friend reminded me about Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhamadiyah. These are two Islamic organisations with a combined membership of 130 million, and their mission is to promote progressive, modern Islam that fits into contemporary society, with an emphasis on tolerance, social welfare, support of political democracy, and education (they give many scholarships to Thai students). In short, they’re the counter image of IS. And yet, my mind was so burdened by the grotesque theatre of that evil bunch that I forgot all about these rational, moderate whisperers who have been active for decades. Actually, something with 130 million members shouldn’t be qualified as whisperers. It says a lot that their presence is completely drowned out by a band of fascist murderers in the deserts of Syria. After Paris, it’s hard to maintain one’s composure. It’s hard too with the Beirut suicide bombing on Nov 12, the air raids in Yemen that killed civilians at a wedding in September, or the recent “blunder” when a US warplane struck a hospital in Afghanistan. Hate is easy, a bang is loud, and it’s heartbreaking to know that to defeat it, we have to keep whispering and hope the bomb won’t go off again.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

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