Ten years after nineteen Muslim terrorists rammed two planes into the twin towers at Word Trade Centre, the Americans still pretend that the Muslims had nothing to do with it. Barack Obama, US President, says that they were terrorists who happened to be Muslims, not Muslims who happened to be terrorists. And he says that their fight is not with Islam, not even with Muslims, but with terrorists who happen to be Muslims.
How foolish can you be! It is like saying that the last World War was not against Nazis, or against Nazism, not even against Hitler, but against a country which happened to be run by Hitler and his Nazis. For nearly seventy-five years, the West has been fighting against communism, but if you go by Obama’s logic, the fight was not against communists, not even against communism, but against some people who happened to be communists!
Not all Americans talk this kind of nonsense. Rudi Giuliani, who was New York’s Mayor at the time of 9/11, and is credited with providing firm leadership after the attack, which killed nearly 3,000 people, does not make any distinction between Islam and Islamic terrorism, whenever he speaks about the attacks. In a recent interview with the BBC, he was asked whether it was true that the Muslim community in New York was being shadowed by the secret police, and whether it was right to do so. Giuliani said there was nothing wrong in it. “We know there is a close connection between Islamists and terrorism, and it makes perfect sense to shadow Islamists and Muslims if you are to control terror.” This foxed the BBC man who was asking this stupid question, for the main thrust of his argument was whether it was right to shadow a particular community in a democratic country. “Nothing wrong in it,” said Giuliani, who is likely to be a candidate for Republican Party nomination for the presidency.
Let us be absolutely clear: just as the fight against communists was also a fight against communism — for you cannot have one without the other — the fight against the Islamic terrorists has to be, whether you like it or not, a fight against Islam. You may say that you cannot fight against a particular philosophy, particularly in a democratic set-up, but if that particular philosophy gives rise to terrorists, who, in the name of that philosophy, terrorise the whole community, you are perfectly justified in fighting that philosophy.
This is what we all did when communism was riding high, had a powerful country like the Soviet Union behind it, and was totally unscrupulous in furthering its interests. Soviet Union – or Nazi Germany – were certainly not democratic countries, nor were their ideologies democratic. This is true of Islam too. Islam was not invited to India. It came here and used force to subdue our country. India succumbed because it was peaceful and weak. America is peaceful but not weak. I do not see why it should not use its strength to keep authoritarian and anything-but-peaceful ideologies at bay.
I do not see any difference between communist and Islamic ideologies, Communism, like Islam, is also a religion, and is organised, or was organised, before it collapsed, like a religious order. Almost everything we were told about communism was false – it was not peaceful, it was not equitable, it was not democratic, and it was bent on subverting and commanding the whole world. Can anyone say that Islam is or was peaceful, equitable and democratic, and not bent on subverting the whole world? it was the aim of Marxists to take over the entire world, and at one time it nearly did. It has also been the aim of Islam and Islamists to take over the entire world and subdue it. If we fought communism, why should we not fight Islam?
People like Barack Obama say that you cannot fight Islam; you can only fight Islamic terrorism. This is sophistry of the kind we used to see when communism was a living threat to India, but the fellow travellers and their newspapers and magazines used to offer clever but dishonest arguments to further their interests. And there were foolish men like Jawaharlal Nehru who swallowed them and ultimately made a laughing stock of themselves.
How many times were we told by Nehru and his apologists that communist China was our friend – in fact, more than a friend, a brother (bhai) – and it was a peaceful neighbour. And who was the man dealing with China? A fellow traveller called Krishna Menon, who for all you know, may have been a card-holder of the communist party. The Chinese were threatening us all the time, sending signals that it was bent on trouble, bhai or no bhai, and ultimately when it attacked us, we were found tiddling our thumbs. Chinese were realists, and, for them, the only reality was power. When told that the Pope had condemned communism as an ungodly philosophy, Stalin asked, with a smirk on his face, “the Pope, how many battalions does he have?” And he proceeded to destroy the remaining churches that had escaped his goons.
As I have said, I see no difference between communism and Islam. Both are aggressive philosophies, bent on conquering the world. Communists destroyed churches, parliaments, universities. Islamists destroyed temples, kingdoms and universities. They have their own laws and own armies to enforce these laws. So do Islamists. To say, therefore, as Obama and others do, that they have no quarrel with Islam, only with Islamic terrorists, is like saying that we have no quarrel with generals, only with foot-soldiers.
There can be no wars without generals, and there can be no terror without terrorists. There can also be no Islamic terrorist without Islam, just as there can be no communists without communism. It is silly to say that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, as if the latter hangs in a vacuum without any means of support.
Osama bin Laden was not just a terrorist; he was an Islamic terrorist, just as Joseph Stalin was not just a dictator, but a communist dictator, and did whatever he did on the basis of communist philosophy. Why is it that all the terrorists Barack Obama and his boys have destroyed since 9/11 have been Muslims, and there is not a single Hindu or Christian among them?
We Hindus do not steal planes and go out and ram them into buildings with a specific purpose of killing those who work there. All the nineteen men who were responsible for 9/11 were Muslims. If Rudi Giuliani can understand this simple thing, and Barack Obama cannot, we can only pity him.
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