Death of Muslims used by extremists for recruitment, propaganda

The ABC News analysis notes that the benefiters of this misrepresentation of facts are terror groups like al Qaeda, which spread propaganda, using videos and speeches, showing innocent Muslim women and children killed by Western drone strikes, and in U.S.-led military operations throughout the Middle East. The perpetrators of the attacks on the Boston Marathon, and the Westgate Shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya were reported to be motivated by America and its allies’ campaign against Islam. Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev, before he was captured, scrawled messages on the inside of the boat in which he was hiding that read, among other things, “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians.. ‘I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished,” and “We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.”

Western and non-Western powers have played a role in helping create this conspiratorial mindset. The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan killed about two million Afghans; the Soviet war in Chechnya killed 240,000 Chechen Muslims; Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina killed about 220,000 Muslim and forced about two million Muslims to become refugees through a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing; and the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq has resulted in about half-a-million Iraqi dead.

Experts note, however,,  that loss of a large number of Muslim lives is attributable to conflicts which are exclusively between or within Muslim countries, like Egypt’s war in Yemen in the 1960s, Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Saddam Hussein’s campaign against Kurds and Shi’as in Iraq, Sudan’s war in Darfur, Basahr al-Assad’s indiscriminate killing of Sunni Syrians, and many more.

These facts notwithstanding, many Muslims believe that   Western powers are often the cause of internal conflicts among Muslim groups. “Local circumstances, local conflicts, local dynamics are ignored for a convenient explanation,” said Ed Husain of the Council of Foreign Relations. “Even if it’s Muslim on Muslim, it’s still portrayed as they’re both fighting for external players.”

Haroon Moghul, a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security, believes Muslims must see through this one-sided portrayal of the West. “It produces the refusal to take ownership of anything,” he told ABC News. “If everything is a puppet, not only don’t you take responsibility, you can’t! Therefore, there is no actual grievance. It’s a Western plot.” Moghul urges the West to respond to the reality of this perception among Muslims and become a positive force for change. “Although everyone is affected by this, the only ones who propose to do anything about it is the extremist groups … and their solution is violence,” he said. “There is a huge vacuum of leadership that is coupled with a feeling of pessimism and marginalization.”