Newsweek: In the wake of the tragic Brussels attacks, the world has been flooded with familiar knee-jerk, emotional responses. Symbolic of this superficial divide has been the Twitter hashtag #StopIslam, emerging as a conduit for polarized views. But, facing down extremism—one of the challenges of our age—requires level heads and sombre pragmatism, not senseless finger-pointing.
The dust barely had a chance to settle in Belgium’s Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station when the #StopIslam hashtag began to flood Twitter and seep into news sites. While the left have adopted the hashtag as a form of sarcasm, used to mock early assumptions made about the attacks; the right has seized it as a means of linking, rightly or wrongly, the Brussels attacks to refugees, EU migrant policy, Syria, and Brexit.
The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), was quick to link the attacks to open EU borders, bursting to the seam with Syrian refugees. Lost on them was the fact that all of the early indications, as with previous attacks across Europe, were that the terrorists were Europeans, not foreigners.
Categories: Accepting Islam, ISLAM, The Muslim Times