Monday, June 18, 2007

Dhimmi Watch: Fitzgerald: Non-Muslims in India and the "wrong signals"


Sen scratching his head: "Now where did that elephant go?"

A good article by Hugh Fitzgerald in Dhimmi Watch, companion to the Jihad Watch website:

Non-Muslims in India and the "wrong signals"

I particularly enjoyed the skewering of Amartya Sen:

For every mordant truth-teller such as [V.S.] Naipaul, or for that matter such apostates as Anwar Shaikh and Ibn Warraq, there are a hundred, such as Amartya Sen, who acquire a reputation in one field, and then proceed, as natives of India, to present themselves as experts on Islam, its tenets, and the history of Islam.

Sen's views seem to be a result of a formative experience he had as a youth, when a Muslim man was attacked outside his family's home and lied dying: for more, see In Conversation with Amartya Sen. This experience, as horrific as it was, and his collaboration with a Pakistani economist, probably inform his anti-Hindutva views.

However, Hindus were victims of communal riots in Bengal. In the interview, Sen stated that there are no longer Hindu-Muslim communal riots in Dhaka. Could it be that few Hindus still reside in Bangladesh? The Hindu population in Bangladesh has gone down precipitously, due to well-documented incidents of discrimination and attacks on Hindus and their places of worship.

Hindu-perpetrated violence is an easy target: unlike Muslim terrorism, which is global in its reach and intimidates all, it is confined within the borders of India. There is no comparable risk in denouncing Hindu-perpetrated violence as there is with denouncing Muslim terrorism. Hindu-on-Muslim violence within India is also an irrestible cause for human rights organizations to prove that they are not anti-Islam or anti-Muslim.

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