Some of Jawahar's perceptions of conditions in the West are rather skewed and highly debatable; for example, it is his opinion that Israel is overreacting against Hezbollah, that unbelievers in Christian countries are "the biblical equivalent of [Quranic] kafir," and that Europe "has shed its multicultural melting pot idealisms to clam up with a strict no-nonsense attitude towards the mullah menace" following the bombings in London and the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.
However, his editorial contains several astute observations on the challenges facing India-- not just from the jihadists, but from within-- in the aftermath of last week's bombings in Mumbai.
From NewsTodayNet, with thanks to Hugh Fitzgerald:
As I write this, the Israeli military is relentlessly bombarding the airport of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The reason for the rain of hell fire is the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Lebanese terror outfit, Hezbollah. So, is Israel overreacting? Apparently yes. But given the history of Islamic violence that Israel had to contend with particularly in the context of its vulnerable geography too, surrounded as it is by Islamic nations with their legendary hatred for anything Jewish, its actions reveals a stern wisdom borne out of experience: the only language Islamic terror understands is counter terror, preferably pre-emptive! Nip it in the bud, before they turn you into a corpse, which is not a possibility but an eventuality. Little surprise, therefore, that the jehadis deem Israel a tough nut to crack, a small nation of a David holding out against violent Islamist Goliaths all around.
This prelude is presented out of both frustration and inspiration; frustration because of the way Indians have been rendered sitting ducks by a combination of factors, mostly self-inflicted, to the bombs of Islamic terrorists: inspiration, because if India has the will, Israel has already shown the way. If the holding of just two soldiers warrants a war, what should be India's payback to the Islamists for the gallons of 'kafir' Indian blood that they have spilled over the years in the name of their religion? But alas, Bharat somehow still seems to love its blissful confinement to the negotiating table, even as the battlefield beckons. The 'will' to take on the terrorists is nowhere in sight and hence it is frustration that finally overwhelms inspiration, unless you are an incurable dreamer or a fan of Vijayakanth, who has killed more terrorists on screen than have our forces.
Every country in the world, even with just one incident of Islamic terror, has pulled up its socks, geared up, made its intentions clear without mincing words and followed up with concrete action, both defensive and affirmative. The US has ensured that 9/11 is not just the first, but the last strike on its soil. Britain pressed the panic button after the London bombings last July and has remorselessly secured itself to the point of criminal paranoia. The rest of Europe, after the cartoon crisis, has shed its multicultural melting pot idealisms to clam up with a strict no-nonsense attitude towards the mullah menace. But India, with the longest history of being at the receiving end of Islamist violence -- of over ten centuries from the sultans of the Middle East, to the mughals to Ghazznis, Ghoris to the current Dawoods and Jaishes and Lashkars, is in deep slumber ...secular slumber, to be precise. The medieval Muslim marauders varied from the modern versions only in the methods -- the swords and machetes have given way to guns and RDX, horseback has been replaced by faster transports and the famous Khyber pass now has numerous modern peers on a border more porous than a coffee filter for infiltrators to pour in from all sides as and when they wish. But the underlying religious zeal of all these maniacal murderers, queuing up to kill kafirs and thus secure a seat in paradise, has been preserved in its pure and pristine form ever since the onset of Islam. Non believers simply have no right to exist. Period!
The predominantly Christian West, having suddenly realised the grim portents of such a violent group driven by religious rage ...an understanding facilitated by the fact that their own faith too treats the non adherents as heathens, the biblical equivalent of koranic kafir, though not as violently but quite insidiously, for sure ... have not just hit back militarily but civilisationally too. Thus George Bush felt justified historically, when he dubbed the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq as crusades, though he beat a partial retreat for making a politically incorrect statement. Churches and clergymen all over the west are as much a part of the debate on how to handle militant Islam as are politicians, statesmen, thinkers and the media. In short, the 'free and secular' western world, wears its religion and culture like a talisman, to ward off the Jihadi threat even while flexing its muscles and delivering punches, when necessary and even when not so. But India, predominantly Hindu and targetted by the terrorists precisely for that... though we may imagine otherwise, rather unwisely... remains suspended in secular seclusion! Any association of terror with the religion of a minority is taboo even when it is glaringly apparent and any invocation of our own culture or religion is dubbed communal even when it could actually strengthen us, as a rallying point. It does not seem to occur to us that for us to be secular, we have to be alive first!
Read it all.
Such articles need to appear in the Indian press, and the Indo-American press, and the Indo-English (or Anglo-Indian?) press. The more this becomes acceptable, the less Indians in the West think they have to mock "communalism" and to demonstrate a fashionable lack of sympathy with those who worry, as the author of the article above does, about the slow takeover of India from within, the better.
Why should Indians, as a sign of their advanced, western state, use the coin of anti-Hinduism, or at least lack of sympathy for those who have studied what Muslim rule meant for temples, monuments, ways of life, and above all lives -- tens of millions of lives, of those killed, and tens of millions of those forced to convert, and now, having long ago forgotten their own pre-Islamic antecedents, are the new shock troops of Islam against all that is not Islam, in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh.
Very good essay. Overall, I think Arjun would be proud of this man's anti-dhimmitude and what he has written. Is there a Hindu version of Catherine's gold star?
News Today, South India's leading English evening newspaper. Brought out from Chennai every evening since 1982,
the print version of the national daily, News Today, hits the stands by 16.30 hrs IST and the web edition is updated half an hour ahead of that.
Most of the content for this web site is generated by News Today's bureau.
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I AM SO HAPPY TO SEE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS FROM INDIA _ SOUTH INDIA. SHOULD BE ON THE NATIONAL NEWS THERE.
One more voice from News Today.
Warn the United States and Pakistan, now!
M V Kamath
Day after day one hears of terrorist attacks whether in Srinagar or elsewhere in India and the government of India finds itself voiceless. The latest attack is on the RSS headquarters in Nagpur by Lashkar-e-Toiba militants dressed deceptively in police uniforms and carrying AK-47 rifles and hand grenades.
Three militants were killed but all that the Prime Minister could do is to 'condemn' the attacks. This has become standard procedure - and a cruel joke. Is the Prime Minister's condemnation of an attack going to dissuade terrorists from carrying out their murderous activities? When will the government finally take effective action? The usual excuse given by the 'secular' media is that Islamic terrorism against Indian targets is a consequence of the 'pogrom' initiated by Narendra Modi in Gujarat following the Godhra 'incident'. That absolves Muslim terrorists of all crimes committed against innocent people. What the media needs to be reminded of is the statement made by Mohammad Amir Shakeel Ahmed as long ago as 1999 at a conference of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) that his nation is not India, but Islam. Listening to him was one of the founding / fathers of the Lashkar-e-Toiba's Indian operations, Azam Ghauri who happened to be killed six months later in a shoot-out with the Andhra Pradesh Police. But the L-e-T is very much alive and kicking. According to Frontline (2 June), the Intelligence Bureau learnt that a major consignment of arms was to be ferried through Maharashtra to a Lashkar unit in Gujarat.
On 9 May, the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Maharashtra chased a speeding jeep on the Aurangabad-Manmad Highway and managed to capture it. Inside the jeep were found over two dozen kilograms of lethal RDX, 11 AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition. Noted Frontline: 'Despite self-congratulatory official polemic on Indian Muslims' minimal participation in Islamic terrorism, there is real reason for concern. Not a decade ago, the Lashkar's pan-India operations were heavily reliant on Pakistani nationals... Today, neither the Lashkar nor HUJI has great trouble finding local recruits... Terror strikes in India are growing in frequency... Some experts believe this is just a new variant of Pakistan's long-standing search for strategic leverage against India... Policing is a palliative, not a cure. What is needed is vigorous political intervention to isolate Islamic forces, founded on the principles of justice and equality'.
Growth of Islamic terrorism within India has been slow but apparently it is gathering strength. This has to be analysed. After the Partition of India, Muslim communalism slowed down. First, there was a sense of achievement that a Muslim homeland has been established. Second was a sense of fear that without leadership there could be a Hindu backlash that could be devastating. Third was a sense of guilt of dividing India. Nehru's secularism saved them from fear, but the Muslims kept their heads down, stayed away from communalism and took refuge in the Congress to mutual satisfaction. Now Islamic communalism is raising its ugly head again and this is a disturbing development. And for this we have not only to blame Pakistan but the United States as well. It was the United States, in its determination to oust the Soviet influence in Afghanistan that was the first not only to actively encourage Islamic communalism but the jehadists as well, without for a moment giving thought to the likely consequences once its objective was achieved.
And we have evidence of that in a study conducted by one of Pakistan's foremost investigative journalists, Amir Mir, a former editor of the Weekly Independent and how bureau chief of Gulf News in Lahore, entitled The True Face Of Jehadis: Inside Pakistan's Network of Terror. According to Mir - and he is not saying something new - after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the new agenda for thousands of Pakistani militants became the 'liberation' of Indian administered Jammu & Kashmir and that 'by the end of 1989 most of the Pakistan-based jehadi groups and veterans of the Afghan War were joining the jehad in Kashmir'.
By 1992 the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) was operating 13 permanent, 18 temporary and eight joint military training camps for the Kashmiri youth and by the beginning of 1993 an estimated 20,000 young Kashmiris had been trained and armed by Pakistan to fight the Indian forces in J & K.
Worse still, the ISI has been subsidising the Lashkar-e-Toiba in its nefarious anti-Indian activities right in India. And the United States has been doing nothing. General Musharraf has been playing a dangerous game. On the one hand he has been trying to mollify the United States by getting second and third rank jehadists arrested while, on the other, he has been quietly encouraging these very people to stir up trouble in India. As Mir himself writes: 'Pakistan's relationship with radical Islamic terrorism remains dangerously ambiguous. Historically, military leaders, including General Musharraf (have) openly used the Taliban and terrorists groups in Kashmir to advance Pakistan's strategic objectives'. And India is the victim. Liberal Muslims in India maintain a discreet silence. Either they are afraid to speak out openly against the traitors in their midst or they tacitly accept their aims and objectives. The secular media keeps attacking Hindu 'fundamentalists' as being responsible for Islamic terrorism. The Congress-led UPA government seems paralysed and helpless. And the more the media keeps criticising Hindu 'fundamentalists', the RSS, the VHP and Narendra Modi, the more free do Islamic terrorists feel justified in indulging in constant violence, claiming that they have merely taken recourse to violence in self-protection. What was the self-protection they were seeking in attacking the RSS headquarters in Nagpur? With the secular English media's thoughtless support, Islamic terrorism is gaining ground and the media itself may one day find itself at the end of the Islamic stick. But what is disturbing is the total paralysis of the UPA government which has been reduced to condemning violence as a standard procedure. Today the target is the RSS headquarters. Tomorrow it will be the Army Headquarters. The Parliament has already had a taste of Islamic terrorism. When will the UPA government wake up and dare to tell both Washington and Islamabad that there is a limit to its patience? Let it be known: behind the Lashkar-e-Toiba's attacks is the hand of Pakistan. And solidly behind Pakistan is the might of the United States. But in the end it is let to Muslims leaders themselves in India to contain the terrorists in their midst. That is their special responsibility.
Really? Spell Ann Coulter, the woman with an Adam's Apple and her latest shrill screed "Godless", spell Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell who blame 9-11 on America's "Godlessness, tolerance of gays, abortion, etc", and what about all of the Republicans and "conservatives" (even posters on this blog) who share those opinions.. Tell me how wrong Jawahar is in at least This Regard? The others I too dispute, but not the contention that "unbelievers in Christian Countries ..eg. America, are the Biblical equivalent of Kaffirs are indeed and in fact scapegoated and condemned.
Kindly dismount from your hobbyhorse, and before entering the saloon (careful, the ideological doors swing both ways) please make sure that hobbyhorse is tethered to the bollard outside. Lest others come to the end of their own particular tethers.
Wow Nariz, you are so right. A friend of mine who is Jewish married a Catholic girl. She converted to Judaism, and predictably, her family disowned her and the wedding was nearly a bloodbath. The archbishop of the Western US called her to return to the church, or he would "not be able to control the reaction of good Christians". In the end she and her baby were ripped to shreds by a maniacal California mob, driven mad by the humiliations heaped on Californians by the imposition of this movie actor regime and the unwanted immigration of millions of Latinos and Asians, some of whom have not embraced Christ. My aren't we all jus the same, theologically.
Sarcasm off. No one is killed when dolts like Ann Coulter puts out a stupid book. This is a civilized country, where people with foolish views can air them but are not able to incite violence anywhere approaching what we see in places like the Islamist entity carved out of India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, etc.
"what should be India's payback to the Islamists for the gallons of 'kafir' Indian blood that they have spilled over the years in the name of their religion?"
Shouldn't that be "rivers of 'kafir' Indian blood"?
http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/03/3571.shtml
The others I too dispute, but not the contention that "unbelievers in Christian Countries ..eg. America, are the Biblical equivalent of Kaffirs are indeed and in fact scapegoated and condemned.
Posted by: Nariz at July 17, 2006 09:13 PM
Giaour, you are "grossly overexaggerating" as my illiterate neighbor would say. Ann Coulter's title is somewhat deceptive; she has never pontificated to any great extent on religious issues or the perils of sin, atheism, homosexuality, etc. The people being scapegoated these days are Christians, and you are an egregious scapegoater. How often have you been condemned by Christians for your beliefs, or lack thereof? Probably never, yet you persist in your silly equivalency arguments, positing that all religions are equally pernicious.
You're no different than the brainwashed, totalitarian, megalomaniac muslims, who believe that only their god is legitimate. You believe that only your gods, secular humanism and liberalism, are legitimate. Your antipathy for Christianity is irrational, unfounded, and apparently borne of your idolatry of Karl Marx and his defunct ideology.
The US Left wing will have you believe in the world of Christian values, love you neighbor as yourself, but unfortunately, human relations are not necessarily different from the relations of other living species on the planet, and that is the survival of the fittest, you will be defeated or I will be defeated, i.e., the Islamic world or Israel. They are starting to battle out this very question, one day at a time. You may also have another truce, but how long will it last, and, as we know from past experience, when there is a truce, both sides rearm and plan for the next chance to go to war, such as the way of the natural world.
SFOD - No truces. Israel must totally defeat Hezbollah and Hamas and the rest. That is their only chance for real peace, as well as for its neighbors.
The name 'Jawahar' is not a Hindu name. Its origins are from Persian or Arabic. Hindus started giving their children muslim sounding names so at least they sounded to be muslim, not Hindu. Nowadays nobody gives their children muslim names, last these names were given was decades back.
My Persian friends had this problem. One was called Mehraz, Persian for sunrise, and since Mehraz is a common name among muslims, he was often taken for a muslim. He had a hard time explaining that Persia was among the first lands that fell to muslims, and the Persian language is different from urdu, which has several Persian words.