We have embraced dialogue.... How about You,Sir?

Dear Orientalists, Seculacrats, Kemalists, Politicians, Neo-Liberals, Journalists, Media, White Supremists, Seperatists, Neo-Cons, Islamophobics....

Since Sept 11th 2001, you have had the convience of a greater wealth of arsenal to employ in your rhetoric and exercise to demonize Islam and isloate Muslims. More than ever before you implicitly chose to use the actions and words of an isolated bunch of Muslims to represent Islam and Muslims though explicitly you denied this.

In the 80's some of you embarked on a campaign to get rid of USSR through Afghanistan by recruiting Muslims worldwide in large numbers to this cause using wahabi ideology of jihad. You armed them, trained them, created seperate militant curriculum in the madrasahs there for them using the research activities of one of your top universities. Then you refused to engage the mainstream Muslim world and decided to keep them at the peripheries and used peripheral entities to answer the political question in central asia. Two decades later, they have come to haunt you.

Today you still refuse engage the mainstream Muslim world. You embark on a superficial and idiosyncratic project to create Moderate Muslims, which implicitly you are trying to create the "Muslim" other of you. You call for dialogue but the only dialogue you conventionally engage in with the Muslim world is through the peripheral, isolated entities, such as Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nyamko Sabuni etc , amongst whom almost everyone is totally disconnected with the rest of the Muslim ummah. In your project to create Moderate Muslims, you have turned towards seculacrats and kemalists who in their very nature are radicals therefore making their brand name Moderate paradoxical.

Since Sept 11th 2001, the mainstream Muslim world had engaged you through dialogue always. In North America alone every mainstream Muslim scholar, speaker and leader were reaching out through dialogue in their own avenues. However you turned them away and only chose to engage with those who only agreed with you views and echoed them. Your lack of tolerance to diversity of opinions shut you out from any dialogue. Till then to today, your calls for dialogue had not been demonstrated through actions. Your invitations for mainstream Muslims to speak up against violence had failed to recognize the efforts by mainstream Muslims to speak up against violence as you had been selective of who you want to engage.

All this while mainstream Muslim world had been trying to engage you, though in futile, individually. In an unprescedented way, 38 leaders scholars and leaders who have the mandate of the majority of the Muslim world, have in a significant way reached out to you in dialogue and intellectual discourse through their letter to the Pope.

Controversies, peripheral and isolated Muslims, confrontations, cliches, rhetoric, biases, prejudice, slogans, pre-emptive military confrontations are the ways you have been increasing engaging the Muslim world since 2001. The question now is we are two steps ahead of you in dialogue, when are you going to stop your superficial claims for dialogue and sincerely engage the mainstream Muslim world positively through dialogue and exchange?