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HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE
#29
MUSLIM CLEANSING: A GLOBAL PANDEMIC?
Muslims across the world persecuted, abused and murdered by Muslim and non-Muslim regimes

What is happening to Muslims around the globe? In China they are put into concentration camps, in Myanmar they are slaughtered en masse, in Indiathey have been the targets of systematic pogroms, in Israel along with Christian Palestinians they are mowed down on a daily basis, in Europe and the United States they are subject to increasing demonisation and persecution.  The fate of Muslims in their own homeland is not particularly rosier. From one end of the Muslim world to the next, Muslims - in Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in particular - live under tyrannical regimes, ruthless dictators, murderous military juntas, with their most basic civil liberties and human rights denied. In Yemen, they are being slaughtered and subjected to man-made famine by the Saudis and their partners - and if one journalist dared to raise his voice he is chopped up to pieces in his own country's consulate.  

What is this? What is going on? What does it all mean?

Chinese gulag
Let's begin with China. How are we to fathom the criminal, vicious, atrocities of the Chinese authorities in their Muslim gulags? "If ethnic cleansing takes place in China and nobody is able to hear it, does it make a sound?" asks Josh Rogin, in a  poignant piece for the Washington Post.  " That's what millions of Muslims inside the People's Republic are asking as they watch the Chinese government expand a network of internment camps and systematic human rights abuses designed to stamp out their peoples' religion and culture."  The numbers and the very idea are staggering: the UN reported that more than one million Uighurs are in detention in "counter-extremism centres" and at least two million are in "re-education camps".

In another investigative piece, BBC reports: "China is accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Muslims without trial in its western region of Xinjiang. The government denies the claims, saying people willingly attend special "vocational schools" which combat "terrorism and religious extremism". That "terrorism and religious extremism" bit belies the malignant intent of these camps.  

In another report, we read, "Muslims forced to drink alcohol and eat pork in China's 're-education' camps." The same reports further add: "The psychological pressure is enormous when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking."  These are not just journalistic reports. "British diplomats who visited Xinjiang," Britain's foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has told parliament , "[we] have confirmed that reports of mass internment camps for Uighur Muslims were 'broadly true'." 

Myanmar genocide and beyond
Then we come to Myanmar. The massacre of Muslim-majority Rohingya in Myanmar under the watchful eyes of the Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has horrified the world but been kept apace for years now.  Since 2016, Muslim-majority Rohingya in Rakhine State have been the targets of Myanmar armed forces and police, which have been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide by the United Nations, International Criminal Court officials, human rights groups, journalists, and governments including the United States

WATCH: Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh too traumatised to go back home (2:24)


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 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.    


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 h e'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.    

Let's move to the other side of the globe: The historic xenophobia of the racist white supremacists in the US, the chief supporter of the Israeli settler colony, resulted in two major and many more US-led invasions of Muslim states in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims were slaughtered. When Americans freely and openly elected Donald Trump, he unleashed the most hateful campaign of terror and intimidation against Muslims in the United States. His infamous Muslim ban, sustained by the US Supreme Court, is the legal manifestation of this abusive treatment of Muslims.  

In Europe too, the historic hatred of Muslims rooted in their version of Christianity have now reached epidemic proportions among racist, xenophobic, and proto-fascistic movements, best evident in the Brexit crisis but equally staged in the rest of Europe.

In Australia too, where Prime Minister  Scott Morrison just recognised west Jerusalem as Israel's capital, anti-Muslim racists enjoy wide-spread support among xenophobic nationalists. He is in the good league of the notorious Australian MP Pauline Hansonwho believes her country is about to be "swamped by Muslims."  

Darkening horizons  
But Muslims killing Muslims is not any less evident on the global scene. Saudi Arabia and its sidekick, the United Arab Emirates, have led a coalition of Muslim states to slaughter tens of thousands of Yemenis and drive millions more to starvation. Yes, the US and Europe are chiefly responsible for arming these Arab countries, but it is the Arabs who are pulling the triggers and dropping the bombs.  

In Syria, it is first and foremost Bashar al-Assad (and his Russian and Iranian backers) who are responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and driving the rest to refugee camps in and out of their devastated homeland.

Yes, the US, Israel and multiple Arab states are equally guilty of the mayhem in Syria, but the net result is the massacre of more Muslims in Syria. Turkey's war with the Kurds amounts to even more Muslims murdering Muslims. In Egypt and Iran too, the ruling regimes have had no qualms maiming and murdering their own citizens in prisons or in the streets.     

No doubt in each and every one of these circumstances one can come up with multiple and varied explanations as to what is happening to Muslims. One must make a distinction between the 're-education' camps in China and the Muslim massacre in Myanmar and the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen, the incremental genocide Israel is committing in Palestine, and Bashar al-Assad's mass killings in Syria.

But the net result is the same, there is a pandemic of Muslim cleansing around the globe, what amounts to incremental and cumulative genocide, in part committed by Muslim rulers and despots. That pandemic needs urgent attention - perhaps even a UN-sponsored conference. There is no single cause but there is a field of hatred and Islamophobia in which Muslims as Muslims or Muslims as humans or Muslims as critical thinkers or Muslims as defiant agents of their own destinies are seen as the enemy that must be neutralised, pacified, killed, and eradicated.  

The centre and periphery
The epicentre of this Muslim cleansing in its current gestation is no doubt the rise of Islamophobia in the US and Europe rooted in historic hatred of Islam and Muslims in the European context. And this fear and loathing of Muslims is the extension and mutation of the historic fear and loathing of Jews writ large and rendered global. The pathological roots of Euro-American Islamophobia are rooted in their endemic anti-Semitism. 


With Islamophobia, however, that European disease has shifted its target and become global in the age of globalisation. Since medieval European Christianity, both Jews and Muslims have been sources of fear and hatred in Europe. With the Holocaust, the European hatred of Jews came to a genocidal crescendo. With the writing of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1993), Muslims have almost completely (but not entirely) replaced Jews as the civilisational other of the thing that calls itself "the West".  To be sure in between that medieval version and the current gestation we have the agitation of Muslim-Hindu hatred in India during the British colonialism.  

In his book titled Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Nicholas B Dirks has demonstrated how what is globally coded as "the Indian caste system" was in fact the product of the encounter between India and British colonialism, when under British rule, the caste system became a stable term subsuming diverse forms of social formations. Even more so is the Hindu-Muslim communal violence deliberately exacerbated to serve the British colonial rule.  

Therefore, the affinity between Hindu fundamentalism and European and US racism is hardly surprising. As Aadita Chaudhury has recently argued: "white supremacy and Hindu nationalism have common roots going back to the 19th-century idea of the Aryan race."

What is happening in China is also aided and abetted by European and US Islamophobia, which offer the convenient cover. The anti-Uighur campaign is framed in the Western language of anti-terrorism and deradicalisation.  That religious bigotry in China is also underlined by an equally poisonous ethnic element whereby Chinese imperial arrogance is dead-set to consolidate a Han hegemony over all other ethnicised communities.

In manufacturing a robotic labour and consumer person, China seems determined to erase any sign of cultural or human resistance to its mechanical project, very much on the dystopian model Herbert Marcuse anticipated in his One-d imensional Man (1946). Any deviation from a servile human consumer that does anything other than manufacturing Chinese labour and expansion of state capital is a waste of time and must be eliminated.  

That dystopian nightmare is now spreading around the globe with the speed and in the form of Western-style Chinese Communist party-inspired capitalism. Communism was not destined to be the end of capitalism. Capitalism was the end of Communism. That very sentence spells out the monstrous chimaera our humanity faces today.

WHY WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND HINDU NATIONALISTS ARE SO ALIKE 
White supremacy and Hindu nationalism have common roots going back to the 19th-century idea of the 'Aryan race'

Over the last few years, especially after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US presidential election, we have been witnessing the normalisation, and rise, of a white-supremacist, ultranationalist brand of right-wing politics across Europe and the United States. While the shift towards extreme right alarmed many across the world, far-right ideologues of the Trumpian era swiftly found support in a seemingly unlikely place: India


Many members of the so-called "alt-right" - a loosely knit coalition of populists, white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis - turned to India to find historic and current justifications for their racist, xenophobic and divisive views. Using a specific, "white nationalist" brand of Orientalism, they projected their fantasies about a racially pure society onto the Indian culture and in response received a warm welcome from Hindu fundamentalists in India. While an alliance between the Hindu far right and the Western alt-right may appear confounding on the surface, it actually has a long history, going all the way back to the construction of the Aryan race identity, one of the ideological roots of Nazism, in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, German nationalists embraced the 19th-century theory that Europeans and the original Sanskrit speakers of India who had built the highly developed Sanskrit civilisation - which white supremacists wanted to claim as their own - come from a common Indo-European, or Aryan, ancestor. They subsequently built their racist ideology on the assumed superiority of this "pure" race.

Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas), a French-Greek thinker and mysticist who later became a spiritual icon of Nazism, helped popularise the idea that all civilisation had its roots in this Aryan "master race" in India. She travelled to India in the early 1930s to "discover the source of the Aryan culture" and converted to Hinduism while there. She quickly integrated herself into India's burgeoning Hindu nationalist movement by promoting theories that support privileged caste Hindus' superiority over Christians, Muslims and unprivileged caste Hindus in the country. In 1940, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Hindu nationalist and Indian supporter of Nazism who had praised the Third Reich's commitment to ethnonationalism, seeing commonalities between the goals of the Hitler Youth and the youth movement of Hindu nationalism, Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS). 

Devi worked as a spy for the Axis forces in India throughout World War II and left the country after the defeat of Nazi Germany using a British-Indian passport. In the post-war period, she became an ardent Holocaust denier and was one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists, a conglomeration of neo-Nazi and far-right organisations from around the world. Devi still has a strong influence over the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Her 1939 booklet titled A Warning to the Hindus, in which she cautions Indian nationalists to embrace their Hindu identity and guard the country against "non-Aryan" influences, such as Islam and Christianity, is still widely read and highly regarded among Hindu nationalists. Perhaps not surprisingly, recently Devi and her theories have also been rediscovered by right-wing ideologues in the West and she is now considered an alt-right icon.

However, the current connection between far-right groups in the West and Hindu nationalists is limited neither to Devi's teachings nor the old myth of the Aryan race.
Today, the two groups share a common goal in eroding the secular character of their respective states and a common "enemy" in Muslim minorities. This is why they often act in coordination and openly support each other. 

In the US, the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group with strong links to the Hindu nationalist movement in India, has been rallying behind President Donald Trump's controversial immigration policies, like the Muslim ban and the border wall. Trump's campaign strategist and prominent alt-right figurehead Steve Bannon once called India's Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi the Reagan of India.

Meanwhile, in India, a far-right Hindu nationalist group named Hindu Sena (Army of Hindus), which has been linked to a series of inter-communal incidents in India, has been throwing parties to mark Trump's birthday. The group's founder even claimed that "Trump is the only person who can save mankind."  

In Canada, far-right Islamophobic organisations such as Rise Canada, which claims to"defend Canadian values" and combat "radical Islam", are popular among Hindu-nationalists. The group's logo even features a red maple leaf rising out of a lotus flower, which is often associated with Hinduism.

In Britain, the National Hindu Council of Temples (NHCTUK), a Hindu charity, recently caused controversy by inviting far-right Hindu nationalist Tapan Ghosh to speak at the parliament. Ghosh has previously suggested the UN should "control the birth rate of Muslims" and said all Muslims are "Jihadis". During his visit to the UK, Ghosh also attended celebrations of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, with cabinet ministers Amber Rudd and Priti Patel, and met the former neo-Nazi leader Tommy Robinson. On top of their shared Islamophobia and disdain for secular state structures, the destructive actions, protests and aggravations of Hindu nationalists and the Western far right are also very much alike.

In November, the government of the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is led by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), proposed to build a statue of the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, where the historic Babri Masjid was illegally demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992. Only a month earlier, the same government pulled off a massive spectacle, having a helicopter drop off individuals dressed as Ram and Sita at the Babri Masjid site to mark the start of Diwali celebrations.  The sentiment behind these apparent attempts to intimidate Muslims and increase tensions between communities was in many ways similar to the far-right, white supremacist rally that shook Charlottesville in 2017. The neo-Nazis chanted "You will not replace us" as they marched through the streets of Charlottesville.
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HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE - by Admin - 03-07-2010, 11:10 PM
RE: HOW GLOBAL ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY BECAME ACCEPTABLE - by globalvision2000administrator - 12-31-2018, 10:52 AM

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