Then we go to India. The roots of Hindu violent mobs attacking Muslims in India is of course as old as British incitement of communal violence to sustain their own rule. The list of systematic Muslim massacres[sic for “massacres of Muslims”] is gruesome: From 1964 in Kolkata and 1983 in Nellie to 1987 in Hashimpura all the way to the Gujarat slaughter of Muslims in 2002, in which Narendra Modi, who is now the prime minister of India, was accused of orchestrating the violence.
Hamid Dabashi talks exclusively about Hindu violence against Muslims, saying that the “systematic Muslim massacres” (he means massacres of Muslims) is “gruesome.” But he leaves out the much more frequent, and much deadlier, massacres of Hindus by Muslims. Are we to forget the terror attacks in Delhi (many times), in New Delhi (many times, including an attack on the Indian Parliament), in Mumbai, in Hyderabad? Are we supposed to overlook the mass killings of the Kashmiri Pandits, with hundreds murdered at a time, which led to 99% of the Hindu population of Kashmir fleeing in terror, so that where there were once 300,000-600,000 Pandits, there are now 3,000? What about the 1998 Chamba massacre, the Wandhama Massacre in 1998, the 2000 Amarnath pilgrimage massacre, the 2002 Fedayeen attacks on Raghunath Temple, the 2002 attack on Akshardham Temple attack perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Godhra train, full of Hindu pilgrims, set on fire by Muslims in February 2002, and the 2006 Varanasi bombings? And consider how many hundreds of Muslim attacks we have had to leave out. If we go back in time, we find that in the several hundred years of Mughal (Muslim) rule, according to such respected historians of India as K. S.. Lal, between 70 and 80 million Hindus were killed by their Muslim masters. But Dabashi doesn’t mention any of this. For him, Muslims can only be victims.
Now look at Palestine: Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike have been the subject of systematic ethnic cleansing in their own homeland now under the occupation of the European colonial enclave of Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son has recently said he’d “prefer if all the Muslims leave the land of Israel.” Facebook temporarily banned the despicable thug from his habitual racism and deleted that call for genocide. But he was just airing what his father and other Zionist warlords have been practising for decades in Palestine.
What sort of “ethnic cleansing” is he talking about? Is he perhaps thinking of the Arabs — now called “Palestinians” — who began leaving Mandatory Palestine in late 1947, in order to get out of the way of what they were sure would be victorious Arab armies, and planned on returning when the Jews had all been killed or expelled? Is he thinking of all those forced mass expulsions of “Palestinians” by the Israelis — of which not one single instance is known to exist? There are Arabs living all over Israel, in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, Safed, Hebron, in every city and many villages. Where is this ethnic cleansing? Have the Israelis driven the Arabs out of the West Bank, as the “Palestinians” have made clear they will do to Jews in any future “Palestinian” state? They have not.
There have been cases of “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine, but these have all been of Jews by Muslims. In Hebron, where there had been a continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years, the Arabs killed or drove out every last Jew in 1929. In the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1949, the Jordanians drove out every remaining Jewish inhabitant, making the Old City Judenrein for the first time in its history. None of this “ethnic cleansing” is mentioned by Dabashi
As for Dabashi’s claim that Israel is “a European colonial enclave,” he ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews not from Europe, but from Arab lands. These Jews are indigenous to the Middle East. How is Israel a “colonial enclave”? Is it filled with people who were settled there by a colonial power, to strengthen that power’s presence? If anything, the Jews of Israel had to fight the colonial power that mattered most, Great Britain, which as the Mandatory authority frequently betrayed the solemn promises it had made to the Zionists, most notably in reducing the territory assigned to the Jewish National Home by 3/4. Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, or attempting to get to Palestine from D.P. camps after the war, were blocked by the British, who were always seeking to please the Arabs by severely limiting the numbers of Jewish immigrants. The British simply ignored Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, which called for the Mandatory authority to facilitate Jewish immigration into Palestine and “close Jewish settlement on the land.”
The Jewish commonwealth was resurrected in modern times by the Jews themselves, not by, or with any significant help from, any colonial powers. They were not, could not be, “colonists” in their own land. They were returning to Eretz Israel, the land that had made them, the land where their history unfolded. As for the impolitic tweet by Netanyahu’s son, that he wished all the Muslims would leave Israel, that is not, as Dabashi claims, a call for “genocide.” There was no statement of the genocidal sort, as “I think we should kill all the Muslims/Arabs/ ‘Palestinians.’” Dabashi should be reminded that true genocidal remarks can be heard all the time in the “Palestinian” and Arab media, directed at the Jews or or at all Unbelievers.
Ren says
Muslims are entirely responsible for “All the terrible things that are being done to them”. That is what happens when they believe in an evil ideology, islam.
BC says
“prefer if all the Muslims leave the land of Israel.” Is that not what the ‘pallies’ and their Western supporters call for all the time re Israelis having to vacate Israel and nobody ever call that genocide?
dan christensen says
From the internet:
Dabashi has described the state of Israel as “a dyslexic Biblical exegesis,” “occupied Palestine,” “a vicarious avocation,” “a dangerous delusion,” “a colonial settlement,” “a Jewish apartheid state,” and “a racist apartheid state”.
In June 2003, Dabashi stated that supporters of Israel “cannot see that Israel over the past 50 years as a colonial state – first with white European colonial settlers, then white American colonial settlers, now white Russian colonial settlers – amounts to nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.
Israel has no privilege greater or less than Pakistan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. These are all military bases but some of them, like Israel, are like the hardware of the American imperial imagination.”
The man Dabashi has double standards. He sees no fault with islamic colonialism, but is enraged with western colonialism. He is a professor of litterature at a New York university, and apparently considers the US a “predatory empire”. His way is a very special Jihad.
thebigW says
He is a professor of litterature at a New York university, and apparently considers the US a “predatory empire”.
Heck, he fits right into Western academe!
Rarely says
Once again the “Big Lie” gets the press and gains support from the uninformed.
It is convenient to peg “Jews” as the “bad guys” because hating Jews is a knee jerk reaction for many. Find a reason, true or false it matters not, and you have a ready and willing base to hang your hat on. The facts and/or reason becomes totally irrelevant as the BDS Movement proves.
mgoldberg says
What’s disturbing is that this man, this ‘scholar’ can get away with peddling such notions without worrying about being excoriated, humbled and utterly refuted with the facts at hand. The mere presentation of these facts of these three posts by Hugh, would and will be seen as gossamer ‘right’ wing bigotry against Islam, by most media. And there will be no outlets of the msm to actually refute the absurb assertions of Dabashi. Absurd in the extreme because India has indeed suffered the greatest numerical losses over the thousand years of oppression and tyranny by Islam. And the ever ongoing assaults upon Israel, is simply vulgar to portray as the reverse upon arabs. But that reversal of facts is what drives Islam.
I guess what bothers me is that we here who read and study these events and facts of the matter will no doubt heartily agree at the falsity of Dabashi and his distortions- and yet, it should be a tidal wave of criticism that engulfs that man’s pretentious lying and distorting, which unfortunately will be only the whisper here and at a few other sites.
Terni Lapilli says
Whenever I listen to the radio following an Islamic Terrorist attack someone always mentions that the are more Muslims killed in Islamic terror attacks than anyone else.
I am surprised he did not mention Sunni Muslims killing Shia Muslims and vice versa.
There’s a couple million victims. Victims of Islam. Or are the ‘hypocrites’ so they don’t count?
Paul J says
Never let the truth get in the way of a good sob story. Islam’s MO ever since Mad Mo strutted around the deserts of Arabia
jimjfox says
“British incitement of communal violence to sustain their own rule”
IF that had any truth, it was a colossal error of judgment. But for colonisation, India would be even more of a sh*hole than it is now.
And THAT is true of most former ‘colonies’, British or otherwise. Islam excepted.
Terra Nova says
People look up to so called People who have studied, because they think, those people know it all. But we all know some logic. A very chique name of a Sheik, does not make any difference. If you are out to kill people who don’t believe the same as you, whatever name you got, you are still a killer.
How come that the Islam is so distorted and stays so distorted, you need logic and think about things with an open mind, but that is mostly the problem, there are no more open minds, all focussed on one Islamic goal:
Conquer and kill, muslims thought like that 1400 years and longer like that and still do.
But it is still the Universal Law: What you put in, you will get it back, for clerics, imams priests, pope and all.