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country at a security conference held in Colombo attended by representatives of countries across the globe. The statement seemingly gives credentials to the false claim made by certain communal elements. These elements are hired by some invisible forces to discredit the government in the international arena by whipping up communal hatred through cooked-up stories.
History has shown that Muslims in Sri Lanka have right throughout been patriotic and even stood against separatism paying dearly in terms of lives and property as a result, not to mention the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the north.
Pre-independence Sri Lanka had witnessed the Muslim leaders of that time contributing no less to the independence struggle than the leader of other communities.
The tolerance that the Muslims have evinced in the face of provocative attacks on their places of worship and of their faith itself as well as their practices as Muslims which have been going on for more than one year now speaks for itself.
In any country there are individual criminals such as murderers, smugglers, rapists and drug peddlers belonging to every community, to deal with whom there are laws. However, a tendency prevails today to depict a picture portraying the Muslim community as a whole as the culprit when a crime is committed by an individual Muslim while offenders belonging to other communities are treated as individual offenders.
Not-withstanding such a tendency prevailing, there has not been a single incident where a Muslim had been identified to have been or arrested for having been involved in extremist activities.
Under these circumstances, Muslims all over the country deplore the said statement and are highly perturbed particularly at a time when there is sudden eruption of hatred directed at Muslims by certain interested elements which we believe needs to be investigated to get to its root.
The ACMC as a partner in the Government has stood with it in times of need. Therefore it is in the same spirit as well as in the best interest of the community that we represent that we call upon the Defence Secretary to clarify this statement so as to dispel any mistrust that the particular statement has created.
