Enough bullying Muslims with the "extremist" label

Look. For the past twenty years or more, Muslims have been bullied by this term extremist, and we have had to do more and more and more to convince non Muslims that we're not extremist. And the non Muslim definition of what extremism means keeps expanding to include more and more things, and it has to stop. Nobody knows more about how dangerous extremism is than Muslims. We are overwhelmingly the biggest population of victims of extremism in the world.

More Muslims are murdered by terrorists than anybody else. So, yeah, we know how dangerous extremism is. We know what extremism is, and we know what it isn't. The new definitions of extremism don't even include anything about violence, not threats of violence, not actual violence, not promotion of violence, not incitement of violence. We've always been among the very first people to condemn criminal acts committed in the name of Islam.

But now we're being told that it's extremist just to say or to not say Merry Christmas or to use the religious term for non Muslims. I mean, if we can't use the religious term for non Muslims, how long is it before we can't even use the religious term for Muslims? No. We can't allow the definition of what a moderate non extremist Muslim is to keep expanding and the goalpost to keep moving back, requiring us to start disavowing perfectly normal mainstream beliefs just so that we can escape being labeled as extremists. This has become a tactic of intimidation.

The Indonesian Ostad Abdul Samad has been subjected to a very dishonest smear campaign, misrepresenting his views through selective partial excerpts from his speeches, ignoring his clarifications, and a deliberate, even strategic exclusion of context for the things that he said. Look, nobody cares whether or not he can or cannot enter Singapore or anybody else for that matter. All of his content is available online anyway. The issue is the defamatory claim that his views are extremist or radical or divisive or harmful or dangerous because that's just a tactic to lay the groundwork for applying that same label to everybody else. Enough is enough with the bullying already.

You don't get to coerce Muslims into disavowing normal mainstream beliefs through your performative fear and pretend security concerns. Look, Muslims in Nusantara practiced religious harmony and tolerance before anybody else even knew what those words meant.