Saudi journalist and TV host Nadine Al-Budair recently criticized the "hypocrites" who say that the terrorists "do not represent Islam or the Muslims." After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity," she said, in an address that aired on the Saudi Rotana Khalijiyah TV on April 3. "Why do we shed our own conscience?" she asked. "Don't these perpetrators emerge from our environment?"

Following are excerpts

Nadine Al-Budair: Whenever terrorism massacres peaceful civilians, the smart alecks and the hypocrites vie with one another in saying that these people do not represent Islam or the Muslims. Perhaps one of them could tell us who does represent Islam and the Muslims.

We witness people competing in an attempt to be the first to prove that everything that is happening has nothing to do with the Muslims, and that the terrorists are highway robbers and homeless alcoholics and drug addicts. We all know that the number of the homeless in Europe is very high. They sleep in the streets and beg for alms, and some of them are alcoholics or drug addicts, but we do not expect these addicts or criminals to even consider coming here and blowing up a mosque or a street in our city. It is we who blow ourselves up. It is we who blow up others.

Why do we shed our own conscience? Why do the sheikhs, the pundits, the journalists, and all the Arab officials insist upon [not] using their conscience when they point to the perpetrators? Don't these perpetrators emerge from our environment? Don't their families belong to our society? Didn't anyone you know - someone from your city, a neighbor, someone from your street, a relative, a nephew, a grandson, a father, or a mother - go to Syria or Iraq to wage Jihad?

After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity. We must admit that they are present everywhere, that their nationality is Arab, and that they adhere to the religion of Islam. We must acknowledge that we are the ones who gave birth to them, and who have made them memorize the teachings of all the Salafi books. We must admit that it is the schools and universities that we established that told them the others are infidels.

We must admit that we all - our different sects and faiths, the Sunnis and the Shia - adhere to one school and one school only: the "freezing of the mind" school. Don't ask! Don't think! Don't resist orders! Welcome to the Arab Mashriq.

We should acknowledge that it is our religious upbringing that has driven these youth away from the Quran, and has drawn them closer to its interpreters, to the point that a Muslim now has 1,000 holy books, from which he draws fatwas and information, whereas the Quran has been made intellectually inaccessible.

What makes us laugh and cry at the same time is that the people who spilled the blood walk at the dead man's funeral and cry. The people who encouraged the terrorists, invented fatwas for them, and called to support their false rights in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, in Morocco, in America, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, in Africa - and the list is endless, with the last incident taking place in Europe...

Now the old supporters (of terrorism) have the audacity to declare that they denounce bombings everywhere, and that the killing of civilians constitutes an attack on the religion. Where are the sheikhs of yesterday? Why don't they have the courage to declare that they are the ones who said that Jihad is obligatory, and who legalized political wars, using futile and disgraceful exegeses, which permit killing, enslavement, and destruction?

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