Because the majority of Muslim scholars and leaders continue, with their silence on the issue, to sanction by default the use of suicide to ‘further the Islamic agenda’, we now begin to see young people making career and life-choices tantamount to the suicide of their own souls.

Let us examine the recent failed attempt to blow up an American airliner over Detroit. The only reason those passengers did not die horrible deaths was that a young, athletic passenger nearby the bomber became suspicious and tore off the blanket that the bomber was using to hide his attempt to detonate his explosives. That is the only reason 200-plus innocent people were not murdered on Christmas Day, by yet another maniac Muslim.

There was no other reason. Airport security in both Nigeria and Amsterdam, global watch lists, the US State Department granting this man a visa, all failed to protect those passengers. Only the chance seating of a brave young man near the bomber foiled the attempt.

An American Muslim has observed that the initial spate of interest in Islam and Muslims that followed the Sept 11 event has now dissipated. People are no longer interested. Some Muslims have forfeited their respect among the community of nations – because of their silence and sanction for a tactic that was never once practiced by any of the Sahabah of the Prophet (s.a.w.), no matter how great their pain and suffering.

Locally, college students are joining the Malaysian navy instead of continuing their scholarly studies, which, especially for a slightly older and very sensitive and marriageable young woman, is tantamount to ‘suicide’. Can we blame them?

What are Muslim men doing to protect their women from the insanity gathering around us all? Nothing. So the Islamic university consists 80 percent of women preparing themselves to work and protect themselves. They have no real hope of finding adequate husbands.

Civilised life is becoming impossible. Muslim men and women wishing to fly into or within the US must now have whole body scans that clearly outline their private areas. Can travel under such circumstances be considered ‘halal’ to Muslims?

And yet, how can we blame the Americans? Suicide as a military tactic is virtually undefendable. They did not drop atomic weapons on Japan because either they, or the Japanese people, were nasty.

They were debating the issue of losing the ‘high moral ground’ by such an attack when over 200 Japanese fighter pilots committed suicide by flying into the Allied Pacific Naval fleet. This culture that was sanctioning suicide ‘in defence of the divinity of the emperor’ had to be stopped – immediately. Therefore, the bombs were dropped.

Muslims can expect continuing and growing hostility from the rest of the world until they learn the basis of any civilised culture, the ability to police themselves against certain practices that are universally, and in every religion known to man, condemned, such as suicide.

It does not matter who instigated the suicides – Osama Laden or the Israeli intelligence. Muslims will not rest easy at night, nor rest safe and secure, until this outrage against common humanity, this wanton destruction of innocent civilians, this deliberate desecration of the life and body loaned to us by Allah swt, is stopped.