Afghanistan is 99% Muslim and is the home of the Taliban, the “Students,” who call themselves that because they are students of Islam. The Sikhs in Afghanistan have been persecuted and continue to be vulnerable to Islamic jihadists. Islamic supremacists in the West, meanwhile, attempt to co-opt the Sikhs into their victimhood narrative (which is designed to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror), and to their shame, some Sikh leaders have gone along. On the other hand, Sikhs stood with us for freedom at our Ground Zero Mosque rally in 2011 and again yesterday at our rally for Israel and persecuted religious minorities. “Afghan Sikhs: one of the most vulnerable minorities in the world,” by David Blair, the Telegraph, August 17, 2014 (thanks to Gupt Singh):
The Sikhs of Afghanistan are one of the world’s smallest and most vulnerable minorities.
Numbering no more than a few hundred families, they have endured persecution both from the Taliban and wider society in a country that is 99 per cent Muslim.
If the migrants who were discovered at Tilbury Docks on Saturday are indeed Afghan Sikhs, as Essex Police claim, then they would have a clear motive for leaving their homeland.
But that still leaves some unanswered questions. On the face of it, the Sikhs of Afghanistan would have enough fear of persecution to be able to make a formal application for asylum in Britain. Why this group chose to arrive illegally inside a shipping container is unclear.
In addition, only a handful of Sikhs are left in Afghanistan: the vast majority live in India, particularly in Punjab. If, for the sake of argument, the arrivals at Tilbury are actually from India, they might choose to claim to be Afghans to reduce the risk of being deported.
The group is highly unlikely to be carrying passports or any other identity documents, so it will be far from simple for the UK Border Agency to establish their true nationality….