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Posts Tagged anti-Muslim hate

Anti-Muslim Aftermath of Modi’s Election Victory

Anti-Muslim Aftermath of Modi’s Election Victory

By

Sajjad Shaukat

 

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s extremist party BJP had got a land sliding triumph in the Indian elections 2014 on the basis of anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan slogans. Indian election-campaign against Islam, Muslims and Pakistan enabled BJP hardliner Modi to become Indian prime minister. Whereas, the Muslim community in India had felt alienated, frightened and perturbed, as most of them were also effectively disenfranchised.

 

Muslims were already aware of Modi’s agenda to reduce the Muslim community in India to second class citizens and had felt nervous and gloomy. Their anxiety was multiplying due to the fact that during the election campaign, the BJP was also speaking of Hindu deep-seated animosity against Pakistan and Pakistani public.

 

Hence, since Prime Minister Modi came to power, he has been implementing anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan agenda with the support of fanatic coalition outfits. 

 

In this regard, various developments like unprecedented rise of Hindu extremism, persecution of Muslims, assaults on Muslims, including their places of worships and property by the fanatic Hindu mobs, inclusion of Hindu religious books in curriculum, forced conversion of Muslims into Hindus and ban on beef and cow slaughter clearly showed that encouraged by the Hindu fundamentalist groups such as BJP, RSS VHP, Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena, including other similar parties have been promoting religious and ethnic chauvinism in India by propagating the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) which is the genesis of Hindu terrorism.

 

Besides, continuing false flag operations, on Setember18, 2016, New Delhi staged the drama of the terror attack in the Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) at a military base in Uri, close to the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan. After the Uri episode, without any investigation, India’s top civil and military officials, including their media started propaganda against Pakistan by accusing that the militants who targeted the Uri base came from Pakistan’s side of Azad Kashmir. India created war-hysteria against Pakistan and started mobilization of troops near the LOC while claiming surgical strikes on the Azad Kashmir. But, the myth of Indian so-called surgical strikes was exposed, as Indian top civil and military officers could not prove the strikes. Meanwhile, Indian forces also accelerated violations of the LoC by shelling Pakistani side of Kashmir, which still continues.

 

 

India’s Saffron Hindutva Terrorista

 

 

 

However, BJP played the same anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan card to gain votes of a majority of Hindus in the general elections 2019. Hindu majority was mobilized on ‘hate Muslim’ slogans and ‘anti-Pakistan’ jargons, while the incessant and unjust Indian propaganda against Pakistan was beyond anybody’s cognition, which still keeps on going.

 

Notably, very tension escalated rapidly between New Delhi and Islamabad when on February 27, this year, in response to the Indian so-called pre-emptive air strike near the town of Balakot, close to the border with Pakistan’s sector of Kashmir, Pakistan Air Force (PAF) shot down two Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets and launched aerial strikes at six targets in the IOK.

 

In the aftermath of the false flag terror attack at Pulwama, the truth about India’s surgical strikes unmasked, when Indian top civil and military leaders failed in providing any evidence.

 

The myth of Indian surgical strikes was further exposed, when, referring to the statement of Indian India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who admitted on April 18, 2019 that no Pakistani soldier or citizen died in the air strike carried out by IAF across the border in Balakot, Director General of Pakistan Army’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Maj-Gen. Asif Ghafoor stated on April 19, 2019: “After India finally admitted that their so-called air strike carried on February 26 in Balakot caused no deaths and casualties…Hopefully, so will be about other false Indian claims [such as] surgical strike of 2016, denial of shooting down of two Indian Air Force [IAF] jets by Pakistan Air Force and claims about F16…Better late than never.”

 

Afterwards, journalists visited the targeted site of Balakot and Islamabad also released a video which exposed the false statements of New Delhi that IAF fighters targeted the camp of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and killed 350 militants.

 

In fact, the false flag terror attack in the Pulwama district of the IOK, which killed at least 44 Indian soldiers, was election stunt of the BJP. Exploiting that episode, a wave of jingoism was created by the BJP-led fanatic parties against the Muslims and Pakistan to win the general elections 2019.

 

Therefore, as regards the elections 2019, on May 23, 2019, National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won 352 out of 542 Lok Sabha seats, with the BJP sweeping up 303 seats on its own—21 seats more than it won in the 2014 elections. Across most of North and Central India, BJP candidates also won with bigger vote shares and wider victory margins than in 2014.

 

Owing to the huge mandate of the BJP, violence has been let loose, with “Jai Shri Ram”–a slogan that roughly translates to “Hail Lord Ram”. As Modi was named as the leader of the NDA for a second time, minority communities especially Muslims have made to live in fear by the extremist Hindus.

 

In this respect, in the aftermath of the election results, news reports have highlighted different cases in which Dalits and particularly Muslims were violently targeted for reasons as varied as allegedly possessing beef, protesting against caste-based discrimination or simply being Muslim. Especially, various incidents of arrests and violent assaults on the Muslims by the Hindus have been recorded.

 

In an incident, a Santhali teacher in Jharkhand was arrested for a two-year-old Facebook post defending the right of Adivasi communities to eat beef.

 

In Begusarai district, where Hindutva hardliner Giriraj Singh won the 2019 Lok Sabha seat, a Muslim youth Mohammed Qasim was shot at by a Hindu Yadav on May 26 after his attacker discovered his religious identity.

 

25-year-old Mohammad Barkat from Gurugram in Haryana was accosted by a group of Hindus who ordered him to take off his skullcap. According to a report of “The Hindu”, the group of men abused Barkat and told him that skullcaps were not allowed in that area. When Barkat told them that he was returning from the mosque after prayers, one of the men slapped him. Barkat told ‘The Hindu’, “When I refused, he threatened to feed me pork…The men also beat me with a stick and tore my shirt before driving away on a motorbike.”

 

Tabrez Ansari, 22, was caught by a crowd in the BJP-ruled state of Jharkhand on suspicion of stealing a motorcycle on 18 June. He was tied to a tree and beaten within an inch of his life. And while he was being thrashed, the crowd established his religion–Muslim and then began the demands for “Jai Shri Ram”. Ansari was then arrested and taken into judicial custody. On June 23, he died in a local hospital after he complained that he felt unwell.

 

In the West Bengal, a 26-year-old Muslim teacher Hafeez Mohammad Shahrukh Haldar was attacked by a group of Hindus on June 24 and was pushed off a train in Kolkata for not chanting “Jai Shri Ram”.

 

In the run-up to May’s general elections and after the results were declared, Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of Bengal, was constantly heckled by BJP mobs to shout, “Jai Shri Ram”.

 

Nevertheless, persecution of the Muslims continues unabated in India and the BJP-ruled central government has been largely silent in this regard.

 

In this connection, Hindu-Muslim communal tension flared up in Old Delhi’s Hauz Qazi on July 1, this year after 3 or 4 Hindu boys, including 45-year-old Sanjeev Kumar Gupta tortured a Muslim boy Aas Mohammad (20) on alleged wrong parking of motorbike on night of June 30, 2019, outside his house next to the temple. Muslims of the area observed shutter down strike. During the protest, another scuffle took place between Hindus and Muslims, which resulted in increased tensions. A group of Muslims damaged two Mandirs in the area. However, no casualty took place.

 

India’s Central Reserve Police (CRPF) cordoned the areas of Darya Gunj, Pahar Gunj, Lal Kunwan, Jamia Masjid and Chandni Chowk with the unannounced curfew-like situation. New Delhi has ensured a complete black-out of the incident in print and electronic media.

 

According to India Today, “Politicians giving a communal spin to the incident: Sanjiv Kumar, man involved parking scuffle in Delhi, speaks to India Today…Reiterating that there was no intention to give the Hauz Qazi incident a communal colour…Politicians end up giving communal colour to everything. Whether it is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Congress or Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), there is no exception.”

 

It is notable that even foreign print and electronic media and analysts opined, “Modi’s election win is a victory for far-right Hindu nationalism…India’s secular democracy is under threat…BJP’s record in 2015-2019 has been divisive, to say the least. The party has marginalized religious minorities, especially Muslims, from public life with many, as a result, being lynched by Hindu nationalists in the name of cow protection…Jingoism and Islamophobia have propelled the BJP to an even stronger showing than in 2014. A Modi victory puts India’s 200 million Muslims in danger…Modi is part of the large Hindu supremacist family…In his home state of Odisha, he furthered India’s sectarian divide, pushed the idea of Hindu supremacy and with that, violence against Muslims, Christians and other minorities…Modi is radicalising Muslims.”

 

Undoubtedly, we can that the Constitution declares India to be a secular state, granting equal rights to the religious minorities, but in practice, the ideology of Hindutva prevails. Hindu politics and culture, dominated by the extremist Hindu parties have been propagating Hindutva agenda. After the election victory of the BJP and its coalition parties led by the fundamentalist Prime Minister Modi, Muslim anxiety in India is increasing owing to the fact that like the previous elections, during the election-campaign of 2019, Hindu majority was mobilized on the anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim slogans. 

 

Sajjad Shaukat writes on international affairs and is the author of the book: The US vs Islamic Militants, Invisible Balance of Power: Dangerous Shift in International Relations

 

Email: sajjad_logic@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                              

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6 Rules Of Islamophobia In America by www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 Rules Of Islamophobia In America

The Huffington Post tracked Islamophobia in the U.S. throughout 2016.

Here’s what we learned.

After the 2015 terror attack in Paris, when Donald Trump and other GOP presidential candidates were ratcheting up their anti-Muslim political speech, we started a running list of Islamophobic acts. Sadly, in less than two months, the list became so long the webpage often wouldn’t load.
This made us recognize the very real surge in anti-Muslim incidents sweeping the nation — a surge many wanted to deny was happening at all. (Think Fox News host Eric Bolling saying he “hadn’t heard of any” anti-Muslim hate crimes.)
So we developed The Islamophobia Project, and committed to tracking anti-Muslim violence, vandalism, discrimination, public policy and political speechjam throughout 2016.

CAIR-St Louis
America, 2016. A man with a gun screams at a Muslim family near St. Louis. “You Muslim?” he allegedly said. “All of you should die.”
The timing of the incidents we collected helped reveal patterns. We discovered that Trump supporters attacked, harassed, or plotted to kill Muslims at least 13 times during the election cycle, proving a potential link between Trump’s rhetoric and the actions of supporters. We documented apparent surges in anti-Muslim incidents during Muslim holidays.
It’s now been a year, and our project is a sad and seemingly endless scroll through nearly 400 stories of Muslims in America being attacked, threatened, scapegoated, and profiled, seeing their places of worship vandalized and their faith denigrated.
An email address we set up as a source for tips — islamophobia@huffingtonpost. com — generated hundreds of responses. Many people expressed gratitude for the project. One email led to a story about a Muslim Army veteran who found the word “terrorist” written on his locker. Mostly, we received anti-Muslim hate mail.
Our reporters and editors were attacked on anti-Muslim hate group sites and trolled relentlessly on Twitter ― signs that the project was making waves.
And, if you scroll through the tracker to March 10, 2016, you’ll read about the then-frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary saying: “I think Islam hates us.”
So much cynicism and misinformation was packed into those five words. That Trump could say them and go on to get elected president of the United States underscores just how successfully Muslims have been designated the “other” in this country.
When a group is an “other,” it’s easier to attack them, or to strip them of their civil rights. Our tracker documented this time and again.
But in another sense, Islamophobia isn’t something that can ever be tracked comprehensively. There’s too much of it, and not every instance becomes a headline.
It’s ubiquitous in the daily lives of Muslim Americans. It’s when a Muslim mom tells her daughter to maybe not wear the hijab today. It’s a Muslim father having to explain to his children that no, they’re citizens, they can’t be deported. It’s how almost every Muslim in a movie is depicted as a terrorist, and it’s why cable news channels only ask Muslims if they condemn terrorism.
With the rise of Trump, the silver lining is that now, more people seem to be paying attention to anti-Muslim hate. Media organizations are covering the subject more robustly. The nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica has launched its own project, called “Documenting Hate,” and The New York Times has started a weekly column on the subject called, “This Week in Hate.”
This year, we won’t be updating the Islamophobia Tracker. The story is so much bigger than a dataset now. But we will continue telling stories of hate and extremism. And we will pay close attention to the new presidential administration that seems hell-bent on vilifying Muslims and persecuting them.
Having tracked hate for a year, we’re able to see that people who disparaged Muslim Americans are mostly reading from the same old script. It’s possible even to look at our project as a kind of how-to guide for anti-Muslim bigotry ― a list of six “rules” of Islamophobia in America.
And if we’re going to help protect our Muslim neighbors, coworkers, friends and family, these are six “rules” that desperately need to be dismantled and destroyed.

Rule 1: Muslims are not American.

Mark Wilson via Getty Images
“Go back to your country,” a man screamed at worshipers leaving a Connecticut mosque. “C**t, you don’t belong in this country. Go back to your f****** country,” another man shouted at a Muslim woman and her family in Ohio.
“Get the hell out of the country you bitch-ass Muslims,” a woman screamed at a Muslim mother and daughter in Maryland. “You’re not even from here, motherf*****! F*** you and your family, you terrorist!” a man yelled at a Moroccan Uber driver in Queens, New York.
“Get out of America, bitches,” a woman in Brooklyn, New York, screamed at two Muslim women pushing their babies in strollers. “This is America — you shouldn’t be different from us.”
And when pundits and politicians decried San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem, they were quick to baselessly blame this alleged act of unAmerican-ness on the influence of Kaepernick’s Muslim girlfriend.
Muslims just can’t be from here, the thinking goes ― even though Muslims fight in our military and die in our wars, and even though a United States without Muslims has never existed.

Rule 2: All Muslims are terrorists.

A hate-filled voicemail left at the San Francisco chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“You’re a terrorist,” a woman yelled at a Muslim woman inside a New Mexico grocery store.
“We don’t want niggers and terrorists here. #Trump,” read a note taped to the door of a Muslim family’s home in Iowa.
Mohamed Abbas, a 32-year-old Iraq War veteran and American citizen with PTSD who happens to be Muslim, found “terrorist” written on his locker inside a California Marine Corps base.
“When you say the word ‘Islam’ to Mike Goodman, it means ‘terrorist,’” Goodman, a member of a Massachusetts town commission, said of himself. “When you say ‘Muslim,’ it means a person. Islam is nothing but full of terrorists.”
That’s just not true, Mike.

Rule 3: Pork is to Muslims as a crucifix or garlic is to vampires.

A Texas anti-Muslim militia group dips bullets in pig’s blood. Why? To send Muslims “straight to hell.”
In Florida, a man allegedly trashed a mosque with a machete before leaving bacon on the front doorstep. At mosques in Nebraska and Las Vegas, men wrapped bacon around mosque door handles. In Raeford, North Carolina, a man carrying a handgun left packages of bacon at the mosque and threatened to kill worshippers.
In Philadelphia, someone left a severed pig’s head outside a mosque. And outside a mosque in Lawton, Oklahoma, someone dumped a whole pig carcass.
And then there’s Trump, who in 2016 was fond of telling an apocryphal story of how a U.S. general killed Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.
Like Judaism, Islam generally prohibits its followers from eating pork. While these pork-based acts of hate are undoubtedly meant as insults, the perpetrators also seem to ascribe mythical or inhuman qualities to Muslims, as if pork could magically fend them off, or send them straight to hell. As one anti-Muslim activist told comedian Samantha Bee on her show this year: “A pig head to Muslims is like a crucifix to a vampire.”
Muslims, of course, don’t believe this. Most don’t eat pork ― and that’s about the extent of it. As one Muslim HuffPost employee put it recently after reading about the pig carcass in Oklahoma: “I swear I need to spread a rumor that Muslims don’t eat cupcakes.”

Rule 4: All brown people are potentially Muslim, and are therefore potentially terrorists.

Courtesy of the Jabara family
Khalid Jabara, an Arab-American Christian, was fatally shot by a neighbor who often called the Jabaras “dirty Arabs,” “Aye-rabs” and “Mooslems.”
Simran Jeet Singh was running in the New York City Marathon when he said someone called him a “dirty Muslim.” Harmann Singh said a man called him a “f****** Muslim” inside a Cambridge, Massachusetts, store. “You’re trying to blow up this country, I should (expletive) kill you right now, you know,” Balmeet Singh said a man told him outside a California burger restaurant.
All three Singhs, who are not related, wear turbans and are Sikh, not Muslim. Sikhs are commonly perceived as Muslims in the U.S., and are targeted in anti-Muslim hate crimes, even though Sikhism and Islam are completely different religions ― not that it should matter.
In Oklahoma in August, a 61-year-old ex-convict named Stanley Majors allegedly shot and killed a 37-year-old man named Khalid Jabara outside his home. Majors reportedly had harassed the Jabara family for years. He called the Jabaras “dirty Arabs,” “Aye-rabs” and “Mooslems.” The Jabaras are Christian immigrants from Lebanon.
This phenomenon is sometimes called the “racialization of Islam,” and it helps explain why nearly 30 percent of Americans, including possibly Trump, still think the country’s first black president is secretly a Muslim.

Rule 5: Islam is not a religion, it’s a violent ideology.

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser and an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, saying that Islam isn’t a religion.
Islam “is an ideology posing as a religion. Islam is intolerant and deceitful, and its adherents are ordered to overthrow our way of life and to replace it with ‘Sharia’ law,” Republican New Hampshire state Rep. Ken Weyler wrote in testimony submitted to the state House.
In Pennsylvania, a school board member said that Islam is “not a religion” and is “not only godless, but pagan.” In Virginia, a member of the Republican State Central Committee tweeted that Islam is a “death cult organized by Satan” and “is not a religion of peace but an ideolgy (sic).”
And in Utah, the state’s third-largest political party called for outlawing Islam altogether, arguing that because it’s not a religion, it’s not protected under the First Amendment.
Merriam-Webster defines Islam as “the religious faith of Muslims including belief in Allah as the sole deity and in Muhammad as his prophet.” It is practiced by 1.6 billion people and is the world’s second-largest religion, after Christianity. It is no more inherently violent or peaceful than any other religion.
Rule 6: There’s a secret Muslim plot to take over and/or destroy the United States and/or Western civilization from within.

Richard Ellis/Getty Images
Frank Gaffney, an advisor to Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, has long pushed the “civilization jihad” conspiracy theory. In a press release for a bill that could destroy American Muslim groups, Cruz cited “civilization jihad.”
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson warned of a “civilizational jihad” against the U.S., wherein “jihadists” who “disguise themselves as moderate Muslims” would “infiltrate, multiply and take positions of power” in order to “replace our Judeo-Christian values with Islam.”
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann described the influx of Muslim migrants and refugees into Europe and the U.S. as a “planned invasion” meant to destroy “western Christendom.” It’s part of a “civilization jihad,” the tea party Minnesota congresswoman explained, aimed at “Islamizing” the West.
The news site The Hill published an article by Frank Gaffney, an adviser to presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in which Gaffney wrote that Muslims in the U.S. have a “civilization jihad” aimed at “destroying Western civilization.” This Muslim conspiracy, he explained, uses “stealthy, subversive means like influence operations to penetrate and subvert our government and civil society institutions.”
The idea of a “civilization jihad” is a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. But it’s also a popular one that has contributed to this country’s dim view of Muslims. A recent survey revealed that Americans think there are 54 million Muslims in America. There are only about 3 million.
“If you’re promoting anti-Muslim bigotry and your theory is that a small percentage of the population is going to take over, it doesn’t work very well,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told HuffPost recently. “You have to create the impression that there’s a flood of Muslims taking over America.”

 

Reference
Preview YouTube video Armed and Vigilant: In Fear of a Muslim Uprising in Texas

Armed and Vigilant: In Fear of a Muslim Uprising in Texas

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