Several news items bearing the protest and rage by Muslims usually photograph one single man, Shakeel Ahmad Bhat. The man is noticed in many newspapers, bogs, social websites, shouting for Muslim justice. The Indian born Muslim has been given label of Islamic Rage Boy by the many bloggers after he was first named in the year 2006 in September. His pictures have appeared in the local and national newspapers such as The Sunday Mail, Times of India, France 24 and Middle East Times.
Shakeel hails from Indian Kashmir and belongs to a Sufi family. Being unable to adjust in the educational institution he remained uneducated. A young boy turned into a militant when his sister got killed by being thrown up from the stairs in an Indian raid. He had joined a militant group after this incident and had been part of it for 3 years from 1991-1994.
However he says that he has never killed anyone. The Kashmiri activists have often used him as a cult figure on the internet. He has had also been prison and detained several times. Being a Muslim he has joined the protest against Muhammad cartoons, Indian Army, Salman Rushdie and many others. He has been usually pictured as among the front line protestors. The western media have humiliated Bhat by posting his picture on a pig face and printing his pictures on mug-shirts thereby propagating against him as an extremist, terrorist.
The often seen demonstrator in response to the propaganda aimed at him said that it is us who is uncivilized or them who lack the very basic ethical sense and violate one’s reputation?
Notable figures have written on Bhat including Michelle Malkin, Christopher Hitchens, Kathleen Parker and Robert Spencer.
Unfortunately like Shakeel many Muslim Jihad fighters are termed terrorists. We Muslims fail to respond back to the Indian and the West media to pay back in the same coin.