A WIDE CANVAS
FACTS AND FANCIES
The human capacity for self-deception is incredible. We choose to believe theories in spite of all the hard evidence.
If we follow the news and look at the world, we notice a stark fact: there is strife in all the countries with Muslim majorities and govts! And the Muslims are at peace in all Christian countries and India where they are in minority! But they are asserting their ethnic or religious separatist identity in those countries and fomenting trouble and strife or preparing for one! This has been the history of the last 1400 years wherever Islam went, and yet we have academics and others advocating that Islam is a religion of peace!
American academics and universities like Harvard, Chicago who are anti-Hindu are muting anti-Islamic criticism. It seems they have decided, after 9/11 that to flatter mainstream Islam is the best way to buy peace and feel safe! Hush puppy syndrome?
We saw a nakedly stark example of this last year. In April 2014, The Brandeis university at Boston, Massachusetts, suddenly reversed their decision to confer a honorary degree on a Muslim woman and rights activist, on the ground that she had made critical comments on Islam! Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Muslim, rights activist and member of Dutch Parliament in 2003-2006 had said in a magazine interview in 2007 about Islam:
Once it is defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It is very difficult to talk about peace now. They are not interested in peace. I think we are at war with Islam. And there's no middle ground in war.
The University said that they had not been aware of these remarks when they decided to confer the honorary degree on her, and so reversed the decision, yielding to mainstream Islamic elements, who protested the degree on grounds of "civil liberty and religious freedom". What gross misuse of language! This is how these elements, like the newspapers, are distorting the meaning of words and dictating public discourse! But when it comes to Hinduism, nothing matters.
In 2011 Harvard had cancelled two economic courses taught by Subramaniam Swamy on the ground that he had written against Islamic fundamentalism!
There is a vital difference between journalists who join the public discourse on the basis of their skill in spinning words, and historians who study the subject deeply. Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-French writer and historian of early 20th century had noticed the tendency among the elite of the West to disregard the nature of Islam and its history and he warned them in 1938:
It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.....It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons and our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.
From: Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies.
1915 photo of Hilaire Belloc.
Public Domain, Wikipedia Commons
Europe or the West is not officially Christian any more, but in essential ways it is conventional Christian values which govern society. Islam is in global Jihad mode against the West.
50 years before Belloc, in 1883 the French philosopher and expert on Middle East languages and civilisation, Renan, had written:
Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror....But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent followers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.
Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Serious students, who want to travel beyond the platitudes and half-truths propagated through the daily press should study such historians and ponder deeply over what they wrote with such prescience so long ago. We Indians do not study the history of culture and society deeply, and have only superficial knowledge of even our political history. We ignore our own experience of Islam in India of the last thousand years. Our media and politicians are whitewashing history, just as Obama and some other leaders of the west are refusing to acknowledge what is happening right now in their own countries.
We have had such experiences in the past. England kept ignoring the threat from Germany till the invasion of Poland and Churchill who had long been warning about it was considered a war-monger.Nehru was a genuine lover of peace . But he was a dreamer. When China invaded Tibet in 1949, Sri Aurobindo had warned that China's real aim was India. Nehru ignored it, and went with the bhai-bhai spirit and slogan. In 1959 Dalai Lama secretly escaped from Tibet and came to India. Nationalist leaders like Acharya Kripalani , Lohia and others had toured the Ladakh area and noticed Chinese troop movements there and duly warned Nehru. Nehru ridiculed the leaders and pooh-poohed the Chinese threat. October 1962 brought invasion to India, and Nehru to his senses, and he confessed that we had been "living in an artificial atmosphere of our own creation". It is good to dream of peace, but it is practical to be prepared for its absence. Our leaders and the press are likewise closing their eyes to the Islamic threat. On one hand, Islamic violence is reported almost daily; on the other, they are busy pontificating on the nature of Islamic peace!
Islam has a history of 1400 years for all to study. Every Islamic country in the world is busy either fighting the infidels or its own divisions. Our love for the Muslim brothers should not blind us to the nature of historical Islam. The motto should be, as the Catholic priests used to say, 'hate the sin, not the sinner'. But be prepared to deal with the sin! At least, don't deny its existence!
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