Friday 17th of June 2016, Metro Newspaper reported that British football fans were documented on social media mocking refugee children who were begging for money in the city of Lile, France. “Michael Stothard, a journalist for The Financial Times, claims he saw the young boy drinking beer (alcohol) and posted a photograph of him on Twitter. He said the boy finished the beer in five gulps and was rewarded with some change, before being offered a cigarette. (which he stamped on and refused to smoke).
A video of English tourists throwing coins on the ground for begging children to chase has also gone viral on social media.
Comment:
The disgusting and inhumane treatment of the world’s most vulnerable and innocent victims cannot be taken as an isolated incident conducted by a random group of men. This systematic abuse of the young and helpless can be seen as a cultural norm in all western societies that devalues the youth and places personal freedom and selfish entertainment over any moral codes of conduct. Anyone who views the film footage would be completely sickened by how arrogant and cruel the behavior is towards the neediest and desperate people in the world who have already suffered great horrors. Although the identity of the children begging in this incident were not confirmed to be Muslim children, we are well aware that most likely the boy ‘downing’ a beer was a Syrian refugee – who was too young to appreciate that he may have been consuming alcohol – a practice that the football tourist beasts would have understood to be an affront to Islamic law.
Regardless of whether the children being abused were Muslim they were still children and their treatment as though they were the animals in a zoo is utterly unacceptable in Islam. The nationalistic values that promote one set of people as higher than another based on geography causes this hatred of other nations that divided people and created this colonialist drive to dominate and oppress others. This is not the first time European football tourists have mocked the refugee population of another country and it wont be that last. On the 16th of March 2016, the Independent newspaper reported that “PSV fans create ‘poverty as a spectacle’ by throwing coins at (female) beggars in Madrid. The Dutch fans were seated on the terraces of several bars in the Plaza Mayor area of the Spanish capital” and in the video footage it is clear that these are women dressed in the Islamic dress code and given the magnitude of the migrant crisis it is likely that these are desperate Syrian Muslim women, who under global democracy, have been stripped of their dignity and pushed into the lowest class in society as begging has never been a norm in Islamic culture.
To witness the humiliation of our dear pure beloved sisters as they are treated like so much rubbish, truly breaks the hearts of the believer in Allah سبحانه وتعالى, but it should also make us realize how abhorrent western culture is and how it destroys human dignity. Under the Islamic ruling system of the past, history has shown time after time how the Khilafah honored the refugees and provided safe sanctuary to those fleeing poverty or oppression from tyrants. It is only the re-establishment of the Khilafah (Caliphate) upon the method of the Prophethood that will save the weakest of our Ummah from such open and regular exploitation and smash the false Idols of Freedom, Democracy and Nationalism. Allah سبحانه وتعالى in the Quran speaks of the Ummah’s duty to establish the rule for Islam,
وَأَنِ ٱحْكُم بَيْنَهُم بِمَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ وَلَا تَتَّبِعْ أَهْوَآءَهُمْ وَٱحْذَرْهُمْ أَن يَفْتِنُوكَ عَنۢ بَعْضِ مَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ إِلَيْكَ فَإِن تَوَلَّوْا۟ فَٱعْلَمْ أَنَّمَا يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُصِيبَهُم
“And rule between them by that which Allah revealed to you and do not follow their whims, and beware (be on the alert) that they may deviate you away from even some part of what Allah revealed to you.”
(al-Ma’idah: 49)
Imrana Mohammad