Shireen Abu Akleh – martyr of the word
Nada Al-Ahdal | Human rights activist
I do not know why most Muslims and their sheikhs feel that God belongs to them alone, that paradise is theirs alone, that God's mercy is their specialty – as if God were an employee under their command – and that they have the right to let into paradise whomever they want and keep out whomever they do not.
Their fatwas have even become filled with certainty that so-and-so is in hell, so-and-so will remain there forever, so-and-so is being tormented in the grave right now, and so-and-so does not deserve a prayer for mercy.
They treat God as if He were an office secretary at their service, who must fulfil their wishes and desires without objecting to them.
Their insolence has even reached the point of considering people their slaves, who owe hearing and obedience to them alone and not to God; and if people must obey God and His Messenger, it has to be according to their whims and their interpretations, and no one has the right to stand in their way.
That is why many Muslims have been leaving religions and Islam: they felt it was the religion of a gang of thieves who stole the texts, seized God's powers on earth and made themselves guardians over people by order of heaven.
Your masks have been exposed, and no one listens to you or obeys you any more except the ignorant, who never had the chance of a good education and were led astray by your false information. This did not happen because of their naivety, but because of their good hearts and their blind trust in you; they did not know that you were recruiting them to avenge your buried grudges and to spread your chronic disease, which has become your only weapon in promoting terrorism and spreading chaos, in your calls for death, killing and wars, and in your enmity to peace, love and coexistence between peoples.
In the eyes of most religious people, Shireen, the martyr of Al-Aqsa, is in hell, just as Israel wants to portray her, while the elite of intellectuals, human rights activists and believers in reason and logic see her as a martyr in the eternal paradise, honoured and esteemed, the bearer of a great message that history will immortalise and that heroes will glorify in their professional careers.
The cancerous ideas promoted in the name of religion kill peoples, booby-trap the minds of young people and promote absurd civil wars that have made human beings kill one another with no aim and no purpose other than answering the demands of the priests, the killers, the criminal fatwas and the preachers of ignorance and backwardness.
Shireen is a martyr and will remain great on the list of heroes and in the imagination of the free. Everyone who died carrying a noble message and striving to spread awareness, peace, love, tolerance and enlightenment is immortalised for all time, to accompany us in our lives generation after generation.
Shireen sleeps in her grave, a martyr of the word, and we still hear her words and pass them on. Sadly, the merchants of religion promote hatred of her and pray for her to burn in fire and hell, only because she was not a priestess or a religious hypocrite, was not one of the criminal mafia gang that ignites wars with fatwas, did not incite against people and did not carry a weapon to kill people. Her only concern was to carry the word for a people who want freedom and to live in dignity.
A salute of reverence and honour to every great leader who has curbed the religious groups and stopped them from spreading their poison among peoples, and halted the malignant cancer that calls for hatred and criminalises love.
