Christianity: West's default religion?

Namaste,

I had to read and re-read Christianity: West's default religion by Sandhya Jain. On first reading, I took offence at the intimation that the problem of Islam should be sicced on the West – and it still bothers me.

Contrary to what the author says, the recent Swiss vote to ban minarets does not represent "a frontal return of Christianity." Europe is largely secular in its orientation and post-Christian (the same cannot be said about America). Since WWII, Europe has lost the will to fight, if it ever had the will to fight: the U.S. and British, in an opportunistic alliance with the Soviet Union, crushed Nazism on its Eastern and Western fronts. By abandoning Christianity, Europe has no ideology that can effectively counter Islam.

Western politicians have sold out their people through alliances with Muslim states for oil. The philosophy of cultural relativism has also eroded Western confidence in itself. I see the Swiss vote to ban minarets as a baby step by its citizens to reclaim its culture and its way of life. This does not mean a Christian resurgence in Europe, the return of The Crusades, and expanding missionary activities.

Upon re-reading this article, I do have to agree with the author on the following:

The Swiss vote has caused a frisson of excitement in traditional and secular circles in India, with some Hindus hallucinating about a ‘natural’ alliance with the Christian West to mutually crush Islam. This foolish hope once soared after the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and Hindus in particular and Indians in general failed to comprehend why Pakistan emerged as the West’s leading non-NATO ally.

… Should Hindus respond to a Western Crusade against Islam, the result will be similar to our experience in World War II, where the 2.5 million-strong Indian Army won the war for the colonial West, only to be betrayed back at home. The British eventually quit India in 1947 only because of the military mutinies inspired by Subhash Chandra Bose, and they successfully cut up the nation before leaving, retaining critical territory in the form of a land bank called Pakistan …

Neither the Government of India nor Western government have the guts or will to stand up to Islam and its expansionist aims on society. Both are in denial. Even if there were awareness and will, India is not strong enough on its own. India will have to employ cunning (something it lacks and which Pakistan and China have in abundance) and enter into opportunistic alliances, as the Americans and British did with the Soviet Union in WWII.

Being the Bahu of Bengal is no longer a joke

I chose the screen name Bahu of Bengal as a joke. I extended that joke with a reference to Amitabh Bachchan, who worked as a shipping agent in Calcutta before he went into movies and met and married Jaya Bhaduri.

True, I am married to a Bengali and I have a loving relationship with my husband’s parents, who still live in Kolkata, so there’s the sentimental attachment. I realized that calling myself the Bahu of Bengal was something other than a joke when I reacted to this story about Muslims taking over a historic terracotta mandir in Bangladesh to build a madrassa.


Terracotta temple in Birgonj, Dinajpur, Bangladesh

We had visited this mandir (which is similar to those in Bishnupur, Bankura District, West Bengal) when we traveled to Bangladesh to see where my father-in-law was born and grew up. I was indignant and shocked to learn that this mandir has been appropriated to serve as a madrassa. These stories hit home when there's a personal connection.

Dar-ul-Aloom's phony fatwa

The Dar-ul-Aloom seminary in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh is the most influential school of Islamic learning after Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Moreover, Dar-ul-Aloom provides the ideological underpinning for the Taliban and Islamic terrorist movements in South Asia. Small wonder that Moorthy Muthuswamy said that its influence should be "neutralized."

Dar-ul-Aloom recently issued a fatwa (link found through MEMRI) ostensibly condemning terrorism. This article Deoband plays peace card; a few call it bluff from the Times of India reviews feedback from readers about the fatwa. While the article provides considerable space to opinions of those who are rightly critical about the fatwa and the motives of the Islamic scholars, it concludes with this statement:

For the majority though, the Deoband's initiative was an important step in the war against terror.

What I read in the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa was a cursory denunciation of terrorism. As with a fatwa issued by American Muslim groups, no Islamic terrorist individual or group is called out by name and denounced. The principal concern of the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa is the treatment of Muslims in India and around the world, not opposition to Islamic terrorism.

Jihad in India: an interview with Moorthy Muthuswamy

Moorthy Muthuswamy

Terrorism in India has been a recurring theme on Mera Bharat Mahan. I have mapped terrorist attacks in India at Tagzania and have presented views of Sadanand Dhume and others about India's susceptability to terrorism. From FrontPage Magazine via Jihad Watch, here is an interview with Moorthy Muthuswamy, Ph.D., author of The Art of War on Terror: Triumphing over Political Islam and the Axis of Jihad.

Salient points from the interview:

• Terrorism is a humanitarian issue. According to Dr. Muthuswamy, "millions of Indian children are going hungry and getting malnourished due to economic bleeding imposed in the name of Islam."

• Political Islam is the enemy. It is based on the trilogy of the Qu'ran, Hadith (documented sayings and actions of Muhammad), and Sira (biography of Muhammad). Dr. Muthuswamy elaborates, "We are now further identifying the enemy: a political ideology of conquest that inspires terror, mosques as the nodes that spawn jihad and axis of jihad [Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan] as the main backer nations of the ideology and the nodes."

• Jihad has forced out non-Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kashmir. This pattern has been re-enacted in Muslim majority areas of India itself.

• "… Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party, according to Indian intelligence, has been infiltrated by jihadists. Due to the policies enacted by Manmohan Singh’s government, jihadi infiltration into Indian institutions is escalating, including its paramilitary forces.…"

• "It is a matter of time India is hit in a major way … Strikes on India’s nuclear reactors, oil refineries or call-center infrastructure, for instance, is bound to make devastating economic impact and make hundrends of milions more of its children go hungry, and destitute and set the stage for India’s ireversible destruction andeventual Islamization."

Dr. Muthuswamy notes that India has the right under international law to take pre-emptive strikes when faced with a "blatant and long-pattern of genocide by an enemy." Don't hold your breath for that to happen. Israel had the political will to bomb Saddam's nuclear reactor, as it expected that Saddam would unleash nuclear weapons on Israel (Col. Ilan Ramon, who perished in the Space Shuttle Discovery mission with Kalpana Chawla, was one of the pilots on the mission to take out Saddam's nuclear reactor). India's current leaders do not have that political will.

India Appeases Radical Islam - WSJ.com

In this article India Appeases Radical Islam from the November 27, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Sadanand Dhume addresses the UP courthouse bomb blasts and cites terrorist attacks that I have mapped: the August 2007 blasts in Hyderabad, the July 2006 train blasts in Mumbai, and October 2005 bomb blasts in Delhi.

He argues that "An increasingly radicalized neighborhood, fragmented domestic politics and a curiously timid mainstream discourse on Islam add up to hobble India's response to radical Islamic intimidation." Nothing new here for people who follow these issues, but the significance is that these issues are being addressed - however cursorily - in a prominent newspaper.

NOTE Some access to the Wall Street Journal online is available only to subscribers.

Arise Arjuna: Seeds of Terrorism: Economic Disparity or Ideology

Islamic Rage Boy in Kashmir:
It's not the economy, stupid!

It's been a long time since Atul Kumar has blogged on Arise Arjuna, but for some reason, this article showed up when I viewed news feeds for favorite India blogs in Bloglines:

Arise Arjuna: Seeds of Terrorism: Economic Disparity or Ideology

This article is meaningful today, as it debunks the idea that poverty and the desparation it causes drives people to terrorism. The example of Kashmir illustrates the author's point.

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.