Interfaith Strength

Are we about to reap the whirlwind?

Originally published in the New English Review, November 15, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

The 2012 election results convinced me that we—Conservatives—are in the minority, at least among those who voted this year.  It did not, however, convince me that Big Brother socialism and more government will solve our problems at home; and it did not convince me that US weakness and pandering to our enemies will solve our problems abroad.  While, like so many of us, I went into a bit of a shell after the vote and avoided politics and partisanship; events are unfolding too fast and too deadly to let us pretend that they have nothing to do with what happened on Tuesday, November 6.

While an estimated 69 percent of American Jews voted for President Barack Obama, only 14 percent of Americans in Israel did, according to at least one poll that closely mirrors most estimates. My Israeli sources and several published comments made it clear that after Obama’s re-election, Israelis understood that they could no longer consider the United States the reliable ally it once was. Not much more than a week later, the Middle East is in flames and the fire is expected to get worse.

The chattering class will say it happened because Israel took out Hamas’s top military commander, Ahmed al- Jabari; but that came only after the terror group caused thousands of rockets to rain down on Southern Israeli, endangering millions of civilians. Israel is not the cause, we are; specifically, our actions on Election Day emboldened our enemies. Nothing changed on the ground. There was no expansion of Jewish communities, disparagingly called “settlements” by our enemies and those whom Lenin would call “useful idiots.” There was no breakdown of peace talks. Prior to Israel’s defensive, surgical strike in Gaza, there was no Israeli military action. The only change came in the form of a green light from American voters.

Yesterday, terrorist rockets killed a young Israeli couple and a third person. The same cast of Obama, Clinton, and the lot who have been “outraged” and “livid” when Israelis decide to build homes have been reserved or silent. This is the same crew that waxed on mercilessly about how angry a YouTube video made them because it insulted Islam. But over the murder of innocent Israelis, they are content to let the UN take the lead knowing the likely outcome.

What signal does that send our enemies—and we are not even at the start of Obama’s second term? What signal does that send our friends?

Those whose bent is to blame the Israelis for events like these, truth be damned, should turn their attention to another part of the world: Bangladesh. For years, I have been railing against the rise of radical Islam in a country that people still love to call moderate. For years, I have been documenting the government’s involvement in oppressing Hindus and other non-Muslims. For years, I have been writing about how a weak United States is causing people on the fence there to opt for the Islamists. For years, I have warned that a strong United States is the only possible break on those atrocities and on Bangladesh threatening to become a base for anti-India jihad.

Salam Azad is an author out on bail after this “moderate Muslim country” charged him with blasphemy for a book he wrote years ago in India. I have been working with him and periodically check on his well-being. Eight days after Obama’s re-election, he said in response: “If democracy will survive in Bangladesh, I and my family should almost [be] save[d]. But past few days Muslim fundamentalist and their partners hits on police and common people. Many police man and common people wounded by them. I don't know the future of my country. Without democratic Institution people could not survive here. Especially minorities, secular and democracy lover people are not surviving.”

That’s not Israel’s fault; and it’s not Bush’s fault. It is our own.

Dr. Richard Benkin's Success in USA

Originally published in International Unity For Equality, August 25, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin recentlymade a United States Parlaimentarian aware of the 49 million Hindus thathave turned up missing since 1947 in Bangladesh to the present day.  This awareness has sparkedthe drafting of a Bill that will pass through the US government to ensure Human Rights to be applied in areas where religious minorities face viable threats such as rape, abduction and murder.  The current events that have swept across India and Pakistan should surely open the eyes of a public that still remains sleeping in the wake of terror.  We see these events occurring in Mumbai, Bangladesh, Sindh, Islamabad and several other areas in the region.  Dr. Benkin, along with Hindu communities in the United States have made a breakthrough that would seemingly be impossible with so many of the world leaders remaining silent on these events.  Dr. Benkin has written an outstanding article which I feel must be shared with the world.    Ihave also shared a link that mentions Dr. Benkin's personal verification of the validity of the current events in Bangladesh.  Please see the following link:

http://youtu.be/QSk7Lpym7g0
 

One of the most difficult tasks of the advocate for Human Rights is bringing awareness to a public who shows no interest in learning.  Our greatest success is the ability to open the hearts of those who see Hindusas less worthy than Christians to have their events shared.  Hindus struggle daily with terror in their midst.  This is a greater reality than many other nations can attest.  The life of a Hindu is held in little regard to the oppressors in their region.  Understanding about Hindus in the Western nationsis lacking and often shrugged off as an issue that is of little concern to the populace.  The time has long passed as issues of concern.  Now we must ACTand be Pro-active to secure the dignity of all peoples and their right to be free from terrorism in any form

The Middle East Is Just The Opening Act

Originally published in the New English Review, October 2012

The flames have subsided though the smoke and anger remain. The Obama administration has made it clear through its inaction that there will be no response to the murder of its ambassador. Empty threats and assurances of justice never realized do not count as deeds; nor do belated actions carried out months later for political reasons. For the players, it is further confirmation that Islamists can whip up populations, cause deaths among them and their targets, and pay no price for it. Have we shown ourselves to be the “paper tiger” that Mao called us? 

Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa leave little doubt that the foreign policy of President Barack Obama has been a deadly failure. His determination to “engage” the Iranians, and after that failed his refusal to take action that would actually have an impact on the mullahs, has left the Islamic state possibly six to seven months away from nuclear capability. His effusive praise for the “Arab Spring” has given Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and brought us four dead Americans. The murder of Chris Stevens in Libya was the first killing of a US ambassador since Jimmie Carter’s administration. Hmmm.

What happened in the Middle East is serious, but it might only be the opening act to an anti-American drama that could be unfolding for years if we do not change course; not in the Middle East but in South Asia, the land mass between Iran and China with familiar countries including India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The numbers alone are compelling: one in every five people on the planet lives in South Asia; one in every three Muslims calls it home; two nuclear powers angrily eye each other across a common South Asian border; and one of them, India, is an emerging economic giant. In comparison, the Middle East (Israel excluded): is home to only one out of 20 people and less than one in five Muslims; has just one nuclear power, and one nuclear wannabe; and is where economic muscle is but a technological advance away from collapse.

South Asia has its own versions of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is home to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups like the Haqqani network and Lashkar e Taibi. Islamist political parties like Jamaat e Islami carry a lot of weight. And, of course there is the Taliban. The Obama drumbeat of late about “moderates” in the Muslim Brotherhood is a mere reprise of his 2009 call to “reach out” to “moderate Taliban” and it likely will prove similarly naïve and fruitless.

South Asia contains another dynamic missing in the Middle East: Communism. India, the emerging giant that will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation by 2020, faces a violent Maoist insurgency, which has made common cause with Islamists. In 2005, Nepalese Maoist provided safe haven for fleeing Al Qaeda terrorists and were rewarded three years later with the reigns of that country’s government. That same year in the south Indian city of Kerala, Muslim and Maoist leaders agreed to “join hands” in their common fight. The Chinese sponsor already occupies areas of India, including Arunachal Pradesh with its massive hydroelectric resources.

I spend a lot of time in South Asia, primarily to help Hindus in and from Bangladesh. They face a relentless jihad to eliminate them to which the world turns a blind eye. But when doing so, I spend a good deal of time talking with Muslims in the area—good guys, bad guys, and people just trying to scrape by. What they tell me should disturb us all.

In 2005, a young Muslim from South Asia said to me in a message and again over the phone that whenever people need a human rights champion, they looked to the United States—not to Europe, not to Iran, not to China, but to the USA. During South Asian trips in 2007 and 2008, I knew that I was safe in doing certain things principally because I am an American. It is not that people were “afraid” of me or us, but as I was told time and again, people knew that doing something untoward could turn into an international incident. Certainly, they expected a US response and so did their governments.

Of late, what I have been hearing from Muslims is quite different. Leftist and Islamist professors are more aggressive with their anti-American vitriol; not only from the podium but also in private classes and conversations. Islamists have been more active in attacking Hindus in India, carrying their ethnic cleansing jihad across the border from their havens of Pakistan and Bangladesh. This year saw massive attacks in the far Northeast state of Assam; last year and the year before in Deganga near the West Bengal capital of Kolkata. But these high profile actions are not nearly important as that which I and others hear from ordinary Muslims who have not engaged in violence or taken public stances excoriating the United States. What many have told me loud and clear—and what is getting louder and clearer—is that they do not believe that the US is a reliable ally anymore. The most sophisticated among them point to “what Obama did to the protestors in Iran,” encouraging them to stand up then leaving them to face Ahmedinejad’s furor unprotected. They see no US response to blatant anti-American actions by Pakistan, in fact, quite the opposite. While then Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani encouraged Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to ally his country with China once the United States leaves the region; the only US response area Muslims saw was more US dollars flowing into the Pakistanis’ pockets.

The general impression that the vast majority of South Asian Muslims convey to me is that under the Obama regime, the President’s naiveté has led to multiple missteps that have strengthened our enemies. Pakistan is the poster child for that impression in South Asia. “Everyone here knows that all that US money is going into people’s pockets or to fight India,” more than one of them told me. They find it incomprehensible that the US lists Pakistani Intelligence (ISI) as a terrorist organization yet continues to pour billions into the coffers of those who fund it. When I was in India earlier this year, one Muslim told me that they consider Obama’s unqualified embrace of the Arab Spring “a gift.”

Muslims just trying to feed their families and with no ideological axe to grind are finding it less and less appetizing to oppose the radical Islamists in their midst. The rule of law in South Asia is inconsistent at best while massive corruption is the rule. Local officials boast about the amount of graft they get for maintaining open borders. I have seen India’s sacred cattle smuggled to Bangladesh for dinners. I have watched Indian border guards sit by idly while illegal arms, drugs, and counterfeit bank notes flow unabated from Bangladesh and Nepal. Worse, I have extensive testimony about how terrorists and others finds an easy route into the Islamists’ next target, India. Life is difficult for people on both sides of the borders, regardless of religion; and offers of a “job” that involves smuggling contraband or jihad often looks like the best chance of feeding one’s family. Besides, according to area residents and asylum seekers, saying no is not really an option. Many refugees who fled to India from Bangladesh, hoping to find a safe haven now find themselves and their families under attack from the same groups that forced them across the border.

One result has been decided demographic and power shifts in certain areas of India. The isolated northeast states are becoming bereft of their non-Muslim populations. As the same process grinds on in West Bengal, I see evidence in the disappearance of roadside Hindu temples that used to characterize border areas of West Bengal now overwhelmed by Bangladeshi infiltrators. Terrorist attacks in India’s major cities continue almost unabated, and Islamists operate unmolested in the North and in Kashmir.

Encirclement? You be the judge. The countries bordering India are:

•                 Pakistan (Islamic state and hostile to its core; source of terrorist attacks)
•                 China (Communist and hostile—major economic competitor)
•                 Bangladesh (Islamic, hostile, and incapable; source of infiltrators and attacks)
•                 Myanmar (Communist-friendly junta)
•                 Nepal (Communist, poverty-stricken; conduit for smuggling and terror attacks)
•                 Bhutan (Small, weak; passive except for its expulsion of Hindus)

In part, our enemies have taken advantage of policies by the left-center Indian government; but their supercharging fuel over the last three years has been “US policies of weakness.” One South Asian Muslim captured what several have told me. “Look, I have to protect my family and get by. If you were me, would you stick your neck out for someone far away who doesn’t protect its allies; or would you go with the people here who definitely will chop off that neck if I don’t join them?”

Ethnic Cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh, Why We All Should be Worried, and What We Can and Must Do about It

Hindu Mahasabha of America (Hindu Congress of America) Dr. Richard L. Benkin, Houston, Texas Agust 11, 2012

Namaste.

I have been asked to explain how I—a non-Hindu became so passionately devoted to the cause of saving Hindus from ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh.  Several years ago, I was able to free a Bangladeshi political prisoner—actually a Muslim journalist—who was arrested and tortured for exposing the rise of radical Islam in Bangladesh and urging Bangladesh to open relations with Israel.  I was in Bangladesh in 2007, and when I returned I received a fax.  It said roughly, ‘My name is Bikash, and I live near Kolkata.  I am a Bengali Hindu. My parents fled Bangladesh when I was eleven.  My people in Bangladesh are dying.  Please save us.’

Well, you cannot just turn away, and I had heard some things about anti-Hindu persecution in Bangladesh but determined to really learn about it after receiving Bikash’s fax.  And once I did, I knew that I had to do everything in my power to stop the atrocities.

In short, why did I become involved?  Because someone asked.  Because Bikash could not stand by and do nothing in the face of these atrocities against his brothers and sisters.  So because I had gotten the Bangladeshi government to do things it did not want to do, he was hoping I could do it again for his people.  He asked.  He took action.  He did not remain passive.

And his action is a good segue into two stories that say a lot about what we have to do and why we have to do it.

Here’s the first.   Before publishing my book about the Bangladeshi Hindus, I spoke with a New York literary agent who was very taken by the material I presented; so taken, in fact, that she wanted to help get the information to others.  As someone who knows the American publishing and book buying world very well, she found it very compelling and said that all the elements were there for a successful project—all the elements except one, that is.  And remember this person is a friend, an ally, one of the “good guys,” someone who does care and wants to help.  The problem, she said is that ‘I just don’t see people getting real excited over a bunch of Hindus being killed.’  Think about that for a moment and substitute words like “Jews,” “Blacks,” or “Women” for Hindus.  Would people get “excited” about their murders?  Why not Hindus?  This should make everyone in this room furious; and if it does not make you furious, you better ask yourself why; because it hit me—a non-Hindu—immediately.  Now, hold that thought as you hear the second story.

I do a lot of traveling and was in India this past February talking about the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh.  While I had the chance to do this at several universities, much of the time, I spoke to groups calling themselves “pro-Hindu.”  But they must have been calling themselves pro-Hindu in private because in public they always did the same thing.  In every case, I would begin my address by indicating the banner behind me and saying that contrary to what it said, “I did not come here to speak about ‘Ethnic Cleansing in South Asia.’ I came here to talk about the ethnic cleansing of Hindus.”  Unfortunately, it seems that I was the only person in the room willing to say that, to use the word Hindu.  Do other groups suffer from this same ailment?

One more thing: after I returned to America, I received several communications from colleagues in India who were “visited” by individuals from the local police, asking them about me and the purpose of my visit.  One of them even wanted to know my passport number, and my colleague emailed me for it.  My response?  “You can tell the officer that if he wants my passport number, he will have to fly to Chicago for it because I do not give out that information over the internet.”  And that was the end of it.

I understand why the Bangladeshi refugees I know are intimidated; they have reason to be.  But I cannot fathom why citizens of a free society do not have the balls (yes, I did use that word), to simply exercise their right to free speech or tell a petty official to get lost.

So my question to you is:  Do you really think these things are unrelated?

This is not an academic question.  Just last month, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC) in the United States Congress held hearings on “Human Rights in Bangladesh.”  They talked a little about “minorities,” they talked more about labor unions; but they did not talk about Hindus; they did not even address the issue under some other name.  And why should they?  If India—the Hindu nation—doesn’t care why should they?  If Hindu Americans do not care, why should they?  In fact, when I raise the issue, I am often confronted with those very questions.

So, I want us all to think about our personal responsibility for allowing Hindus to be brutalized in Bangladesh and elsewhere, for shrugging our shoulders when Hindu children are abducted and forced to convert to Islam, for looking the other way when Hindu girls are gang raped, for not feeling personally affected when gangs of Muslims desecrate Mandirs and destroy deities; for the fact that even if we are outraged, it seems we’re willing to hold on to that anger without really doing anything to stop these things from happening.  I don’t know.  Maybe people are too busy watching the Olympics or attending seminars.  Well, I can't let that stand, and I hope you can’t either.

I’d like us all to keep these things in mind as we move forward with my talk here, which I have broken into three sections:  the first about what’s happening to Hindus in Bangladesh; the second about why it should scare the pants off everyone here; and the third about what we can and must do about it.

          Hindus in Bangladesh

Some of you have heard me say this before, but I’m going to say it again and again and again until people start taking action:  After India’s partition, according to the Pakistani census, Hindus made up about a third of East Pakistan’s population.  When East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, they were less than a fifth; thirty years later less than a tenth; and according to reliable estimates a bit over seven percent today.   According to Professor Sachi Dastidar of the State University of New York, over 49 million Hindus in Bangladesh are missing.  If anyone is having trouble figuring out where this is headed, just take a look at Pakistan where Hindus are down to one percent or Kashmir where they are almost gone.  Not only has no one explained that, but no one has even tried to explain it; at least not credibly.

Let me give you an example.  On May 25 of this year, I met with Bangladeshi Ambassador Akramul Qader at his country's embassy in Washington. It was not my first trip to the embassy, but it was my first conversation with Mr. Qader. I went there to remind the Bangladeshis of their request for my help; that I can provide what they need, but that I will not do so as long as Bangladesh refuses to protect all its citizens and specifically its Hindus.  (See, I have no problem using that word.)

The meeting went pretty much as I expected, with the man representing 150 million Bangladeshis answering my charges with the most ridiculous denials.  Reality be damned, he insisted again and again that there was “no persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh,” the same thing a cabinet minister nervously said to me in Dhaka a year earlier.  First, Qader denied that there had ever been any problems since 1971. Then, he admitted that, yes, there "were some incidents at the time of [the 2001] elections"; but he said that "all the perpetrators had been punished [and that] I know of no other incidents since then."  Can you believe he said that?  Usually, participants in ethnic cleansing at least try to make their denials seem credible; evidently, the Bangladeshis see no need for that.

“Well then let me enlighten you,” I said and started hitting him with evidence to the contrary.  Okay, okay, he relented.  He told me he could think of “one incident” that occurred but dismissed it as the work of a few "religious fanatics.”  He was referring to riots in Satkhira earlier this year, which were well publicized in the Bangladeshi media and sent hundreds of protesting students into the streets of Dhaka.  So I told him he did not get much credit for admitting that.  His mantra, however, was that if there are incidents, we should blame a small number of extremists who are not supported by the Bangladeshi government.  That is simply untrue, and I told him that.  His supposedly “moderate” Awami League government is as much in bed with Islamist radicals as was the previous BNP government; and their support is what allows them to operate.

I told him that his denials did not even make any sense.  “Look,” I said, “you don't go from a third of the population in 1965, to a fifth in 1971, to between seven and eight percent today simply through 'voluntary emigration,'" which is what he was claiming; but he persisted.  “Oh, yes,” he said.  “This is happening because they [Bangladeshi Hindus] cannot find suitable matches for their children, so they go to India where there are more Hindus."

"You're kidding, right?" I said

No, he insisted; and he expected me to believe that he was serious.  Would anyone buy that nonsense if he was trying to explain why a Muslim population was disappearing; or a Christian one?  And it became clear that the Ambassador was ready to say pretty much anything, no matter how ridiculous.  He knew that the absence of even the semblance of credibility would not stop people from giving him a pass and allowing Bangladesh's ethnic cleansing of Hindus to continue because no one was going to object—or even care.

Ambassador Qader can say such things in part, because it is an article of faith among diplomats, the international human rights industry, media, and other so-called experts and elites that the current left-center Awami League government under Sheikh Hasina Wajed represents some sort of real break from its BNP and military-backed predecessors; that its self-billing as “pro-minority” reflects a commitment to actually being pro-minority.  To make matters worse, Hindu leaders trumpet this fiction.

Shortly after the Awami League was swept into office, I was asked to advise minority groups there on how they should approach the new government, which I did on January 9, 2009.  My opening advice was:  “The worst thing you can do right now is to go back to sleep.”  Yet, that is exactly the course that these community leaders had charted.  The overwhelming consensus was that the Awami League would recognize the role of religious minorities in crafting its landslide victory and secure their protection and rights.  I tried to present them with evidence of Awami League lies—for instance, that it continues to benefit no less so than its BNP rivals did from the Vested Property Act, which has enabled more than 75 percent of all Hindu land to be seized by the government and distributed to Muslims; or it alliance just prior to the aborted 2007 elections with one of the most radical Islamist parties.  They still felt that the best policy was not to upset the new leaders.”

“I would not be as optimistic as some of the other callers,” I said.  “Ending the persecution of minorities must be considered one of the first priorities.  What is more important than that?  [And besides] this attitude of passivity and let's give them a chance; how well has that worked for the minorities and the victims in the past?  Not well.  We are sitting by while people are being killed and tortured!  So, yes, we must give them some time—but not much or we will see that their words are nothing more than words.”

Let’s look at the record and see who was right.

The first thing you have to recognize is that the Bangladeshis are full of crap.  That is, when negotiating with or assessing them, you cannot focus on their words, on what they say.  Whether it is the Islamist-friendly BNP or the make-pretend liberal Awami League, Bangladeshi leaders will say almost anything to get whatever goodies they are looking for you to give them.  If you focus on what they say, you will be lulled into a stupor in which you can believe that up is down and let me know, because there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.  Focus instead on what they do.

Take this example of our “moderate Muslim” nation.  On April 30, 2009, Sheikh Hasina told the visiting French Vice Admiral Gerard Valin, Joint Commander of Indian Ocean forces, that her government would repeal all of the country’s “anti-minority” laws.  That is documented fact that you could have read about it in Dhaka’s major dailies.  The statement’s most striking aspect is that she admitted openly that her nation in fact has anti-minority laws—a pretty big admission for a country that depends on its image as a “moderate Muslim nation.”  Why did she say that without it seems a care in the world?  First, she felt she was really trashing her BNP and military-backed predecessors rather than her country because Bangladesh has what many have called a “zero sum political climate” in which the two major parties (and especially their two leaders) will do almost anything to sabotage the other.  I saw this for myself in 2007.  When I arrived in Dhaka on January 7, I was greeted with the sight of widespread unrest in the streets of the capital and soon the sound of Sheikh Hasina enjoining her followers to “close down the country,” completely ruling out a peaceful resolution to the nation’s electoral crisis.  Three days later, she got her wish when the military stepped in and shut down Bangladesh’s ersatz democracy for two years.

The more important reason she was okay with her admission—which is a deadly one for Bangladeshi Hindus—is that she knew she would not be held to her bravado.  She could repeal those laws or not; either way, it would not change her nation in the eyes of the world.  And, of course, she has not been true to her word.  Today, the laws still stand.  Again, focus on what they do, not on what they say.

Were that the only example, there might still be hope for the Bangladeshis; but there is more evidence of the Awami League’s Islamist base.  You remember my earlier mention of the Vested Property Act (VPA)?  Just before the 2008 elections, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court issued a rule nisi, asking the government to explain why that racist law was not contrary to the Bangladeshi constitution.  The military leaders at the time told me that they were not going to provide a response as it exceeded their mandate to do so, and because a newly elected government would soon take power.  So when the Awami League took office, they had the ability to tell the Supreme Court that the VPA contradicted the constitution, and that would have been the end of it—no political repercussions and a tremendous blow for the cause of justice at the same time.  Is that what they did?  Of course not; they not only let it pass, but they also have allowed their minions to use it to continue dispossessing Hindus, and they have strengthened it as the economic engine that drives ethnic cleansing.

Then in 2011, the Supreme Court tried again to move the country forward by identifying several constitutional amendments passed during the Ershad dictatorship of the 1980s, and asking the government to submit replacements that were in line with basic notions about justice.  The government complied, submitting substitutes for all of the elements the Supreme Court identified except one:  the notorious Eighth Amendment.  The Eighth Amendment was passed to declare Islam the official state religion.  It also mandated that no law begin without homage to Allah, and it awarded special privileges and funding to Islamic institutions, while providing disabilities to those of other religions.

These things all support ethnic cleansing, but we also have verified actions of ethnic cleansing, terrible atrocities, for which the Awami League gives its tacit support.  We know that minorities face attacks pretty much everywhere.  The critical question is whether or not the government supports these actions.  Does it prosecute the perpetrators making it clear that such things are intolerable; or does it send a message that attacks on minorities can proceed with impunity?  Every single Bangladeshi government has sent the latter message.  This is how, by the way, you respond to the dodge that ‘minorities were attacked in the United States. Don’t single out Bangladesh.’  When minorities are attacked here, it is prosecuted as a crime, unlike the situation prevailing in Bangladesh.

Because of the Awami League’s phony pro-minority image, I decided to uncover its role in the ethnic cleansing of Hindus.  There I go using that word again. In order to appear in my book and subsequent writings, all of these incidents had to meet four criteria:

•        They had to occurred under the current, Awami League governmen

•        They were not prosecuted by that government.  In fact, we uncovered many cases in which government agents actually participated in the attacks and subsequent covers-u

•        They had to be verified by two or more independent surces

•        They had to be specifically anti-Hindu and not random

Let us also be clear that these are incidents that I have been able to confirm with my limited resources; many more have been reported that probably meet the above four criteria.  Samir Kalra, Director and Senior Fellow for Human Rights of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), noted “nearly 1,200 incidents of violence directed against religious minorities (mostly Hindus) between 2008 and 2011.”  The HAF’s annual reports have consistently cited a clear pattern of anti-Hindu actions going unpunished in Bangladesh.

Here is some of what we have verified:

•        As documented in my book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, which is available here; during the Awami League’s first year in office, major anti-Hindu incidents occurred at the rate of almost one per week.  They included murder, rape, child abduction, forced conversion to Islam, physical attacks, land grabs, religious desecration; and at least one three-day pogrom that occurred immediately behind a Dhaka police station.

•        My book also documents one 26 day period in 2010, when there were seven major anti-Hindu actions or almost one every three days.

•        Since then, I have confirmed at least 15 similar incidents during the first quarter of 2012; almost one and a quarter every single week.  In at least two cases, local or other officials subsequently warned human rights activists that they better stop investigating the matter or face serious consequences.  And I have the latter’s testimony regarding that

And since then, I have received allegations of more incidents; for instance:

•        According to the Daily Purbaanchal and my own sources, several Muslim males repeatedly raped a child on her way to a Hindu festival on May 25.

•        As reported in the Daily Kaler Kantha and confirmed by my associates, Muslims murdered Samrity Rani in Vingravo village on May 20 while her husband was away.  This involved a home invasion in broad daylight, which indicates how safe the Muslim attackers felt; and according to video testimony, Hindus have been threatened not to continue their demands for prosecution, even though the police have taken no action.

•        As confirmed by Bangladesh Minority Watch, Sanju Rani Dev (28) was gang raped on May 27 at night in Golapgonj Upazila of Sylhet.

•        Julie Sinha (23) was abducted on May 18 at about 11am as she was on her way to class at Sha Jalal University in Sylhet, and has not been seen or heard from since.

These four incidents took place within a nine day period in late May, and the police have done nothing to capture the known perpetrators.  Then just one week ago today, according to Bangladesh Minority Watch and a fact finding team that included a former cabinet minister, thousands of Muslims attacked Hindus in Dinajpur when a Hindu landowner opposed their attempt to forcibly erect a mosque on his land.  A number of women were raped, others humiliated by being unclothed publicly; 50 homes were destroyed; hundreds of livestock were looted, and scores of Hindus were sent to the hospital.  Dinajur is an area from which so many of the victims that I meet flee; and we have evidence that the entire attack was instigated by a local government official.  Do you think you will be seeing that on CNN any time?

I could regale you all day with examples like these, but you probably get them through the mass emails we all receive.  We know what is happening; and there is no use ranting about it and shaking our fists if we are not going to stop it, which is the real aim of this talk.

But before moving on, I want to relate one final incident, that perhaps because I am a father, it hit me particularly hard.  In 2009, I was in Northern Bengal and was told about a family of Bangladeshi Hindus who had crossed into India only 22 days earlier.  When I went to meet with them, they told me how their little patch of family land was overrun by Muslims and how they were thrown off their property while the invaders enjoyed the few creature comforts they had in their home.  They told me about the father being beaten, an uncle killed; but the part that got me was about their 14-year-old daughter.  She kept trying to speak but her mother kept pushing her away. Finally, she was able to start talking—only after I agreed to point my camera toward the ground so she could not be identified.  She kept telling me that “the Muslims chased [her],” all the while looking away, not wanting to meet my eyes, when I asked her what she meant by that and did they catch up to her.  Only when I turned off my camera did she tell me that they caught here and “did bad things to me.”  Do I need to be any more specific?

Since then, I have met with many Hindu women who were gang raped—heard the most horrible things—but that girl in particular continues to haunt me.

Is Moderate Muslim and Oxymoron?

This is a serious question that plagues us as members of a free society.  On the whole, we have a tough time condemning all members of any group; and the suggestion that there is a problem with the group itself brings cries of “bigot,” “racist,” and “Islamaphobe.”  Even if that is nonsense, it is a reality we have to acknowledge; and it stops us from speaking the truth, even if going along with the fiction means allowing the death of millions.  So, let’s talk specifics.  That 14 year-old rape victim I interviewed in northern Bengal was not raped by random miscreants and, oh yes, she happened to be a Hindu.  She was raped because she is a Hindu.  And the rapists did not savage that child and, oh yes, they happened to be Muslim.  They savaged her because they are Muslim and recognized their legally favored position in Bangladesh.  The perpetrators’ and victims’ religion should be an inconsequential matter that does not concern us.  Their religion should not be important, but the perpetrators—not we—have made it important.  And again let’s be clear.  She was not raped by members of al Qaeda or Jamaat, but by her neighbors—ordinary, everyday Muslims, the same sort who carried out that three day pogrom in Dhaka under the protection of the local police.

Any attempt to understand and stop what is happening in Bangladesh—and what is spreading from it—without talking about Islam is destined to be incomplete and ineffective.  The fact is that no matter how much they dress it up, Islam divides the world into two distinctive categories:  dar al Islam (the abode of Islam) and dar al Harb (the abode of war).  Dar al Islam refers to all places where Islam thrives, most frequently defined as places under Muslim rule, preferably Sharia; that Islam reserves the term abode of war for everywhere else gives us a pretty good idea of what Islam enjoins Muslims to do.  Moreover, the dichotomy also has been explained as land where there is submission to Islam vs. land destined to submit to Islam.   No matter how you slice it, the distinction is premised on the belief that Islam and Muslims are superior to other faiths and non-Muslims; and the belief that it is a Muslim’s duty to bring the others under Islam’s rule.  There have been those apologists who try to obscure that by alleging that that as long as Muslims can practice their religion in peace, where they live is not dar al Harb, regardless of who rules it.   That is also absolute nonsense.  Just ask the Israelis whose Muslim citizens enjoy full freedom of religion and more rights than Muslims living in “Muslim” countries.  Islam is thriving so much in Israel that the Muslim agency which administers al Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount had to carve out additional mosques under the Mount to accommodate the large number of free worshippers—something it never needed to do when the Mount was ruled by Muslim Jordan or Muslim Turkey.

And we continue to obscure the real issue of what we face by calling places like Bangladesh “moderate Muslim” countries with very deadly consequences.  Take this example.  Bangladesh has recently arrested a Muslim author, Salam Azad, and charged him with blasphemy for a book he wrote in another country nine years ago.  His life is in danger, and the government refuses to provide him with any sort of protection.  Now, does any of that sound like the actions of a “moderate” country? 

As we just saw, Bangladesh maintains Islam as its official religion, begins every law with “in the name of Allah the Beneficent,” and funds madrassas and other Muslim institutions, but not those of any other faith.  What intellectual gymnastics make that moderate?  And while this “moderate Muslim” nation helps build Muslim madrassas, it supports the destruction of Hindu Mandirs by not prosecuting the perpetrators.  My God, the country has a law that enshrines the seizure of Hindu property and its transfer to Muslims—a law that this allegedly moderate government could have annulled when it took office!

What sort of topsy-turvy world is this when nations can do these things and smile while the rest of us call them moderate?  What sort of upside down place is this when Muslims are allowed to carry on by one set of standards that the rest of us would find objectionable in ourselves, let alone in those who steal our children and our history?

And that’s why it should scare the pants off us; not because of them, but because of us; because of this blindness we carry around like it is some sort of badge of honor.  The fact is that no one with the slightest bit of discernment could possibly believe that if we keep letting these things happen that they would stop at the borders of Bangladeshi.  They are already making their way through India’s northeast.  My colleague in Kolkata, Bimal Primanik, has tracked this for decades and has documented not only the population shift but also its deliberate nature. 

An exhaustive study by the South Asian Research Society noted that “In the days of Pakistan, nearly all refugees coming to West Bengal were members of the minority communities in East Bengal….In the Bangladesh era, however, in addition to the forced migration of members of minority community (the overwhelming majority being Hindus) to West Bengal, there has been large-scale voluntary infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims… to West Bengal and other parts of India.”

Primanik’s own study from 1951 to 2001 showed that in Bangladesh, the Hindu population grew from about nine to eleven million, or 23.16 percent; while the Muslim population grew from 32 to 111 million, or 244.68 percent.  Some of the academics and government officials with whom I have discussed this disparity have attempted to explain it by saying that many Hindus simply decided to move to India as it is a Hindu-majority country with greater economic prospects than Bangladesh; in other words, that the population shift has been driven by “economic refugees.”  Even if we accept their premise, however, the Hindus’ economic dislocation was in many cases brought about deliberately through illicit seizure of assets under the Vested Property Act, religious discrimination, persecution, and so forth.  Perhaps they  might then move to Ambassador Qader’s mind numbingly stupid theory that Hindus are leaving Bangladesh to find matches for their children.

Moreover, if this was simply a voluntary population transfer, we would expect it to be reflected in population figures for the Indian state closest to Bangladesh and whose population is composed of the same ethnic group, namely West Bengal.  So what do we see?  West Bengal had about 19 million Hindus in 1951 and 58 million in 2001, an increase of 198.54 percent.   Its 1951 Muslim population of approximately five million Muslims grew to more than 20 million in 2001 or by 310.13 percent.  Moreover, Pramanik’s study indicates that during this period the Muslim growth rate exceeded that of Hindus in each individual district of West Bengal, even those that receive the lion’s share of Bangladeshi Hindu refugees.

I saw the results of this in the Deganga region where three days of anti-Hindu violence raged in September 2010, only 40 kilometers north of the West Bengal capital. And contrary to what you might have read in the media, people were attacked, and many fled their homes and huddled in terror.  I know; I spoke with too many of them for them all to be making up the same story.  Beyond that, with my own eyes, I saw how terrified the Hindu population is, how women and girls are not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied now because of what will happen to them if they do; and I saw several Mandirs destroyed or desecrated.  West Bengal BJP member Tathagata Roy visited the area twice since the violence began and noted, "This was a well-thought-out, well-executed pogrom whose objective was to terrorize the Hindus no end….The ultimate intention can only be to cleanse the area of Hindus with a view to totally Islamize the area." While Indian troops ultimately stationed themselves on the area’s main road, they did not follow pogromists into the nearby Hindu villages and settlements that I visited and where they were able to do a great deal of damage with impunity.

I saw them again in the village of Norit, also in West Bengal, where a mother plaintively begged me to help retrieve her daughter who was abducted by Muslims some weeks before and not seen since.

I saw them in a tiny village further north, where Muslim men and boys from the area have set up perches where they watch the Hindu women while they bathe undressed. And when confronted, they said that all Hindu women are “there for our amusement.”  When elders from the Hindu community asked the police to help, they said that it was up to the two communities to resolve the matter.  Any guess how that turned out?

And all of us are still seeing the consequences of this in Assam.

So what is it about these blatant atrocities that people still like to pretend that there is no human rights crisis for the Hindus of Bangladesh?  I have a theory.  Even if the world turns away when we talk about anti-Hindu actions in Pakistan, they still react, ‘well, you know, Pakistan is one of those radical Muslim countries.’  Or if we raise the issue of Saudi Arabia, people will shrug their shoulders and say, “oh, those nasty Wahabis!”  But when we make them face the facts of ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh and its support by every one of its governments, we are attacking their cherished assumptions and their world view.  They cannot admit that Bangladesh could be doing these things because the more we investigate the more we see that the only thing moderate about Bangladesh is that people call it moderate.

If Bangladesh is engaging in the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims, if it maintains laws meant to discriminate against Hindus and others, if it refuses to do anything about it, and if it supports radical Islamists; can it be called moderate? And if Bangladesh is not moderate, is any Muslim country?   Acknowledging that might force them to wake up and stop leading us all into the next Dark Ages!  Acknowledging that might cause them to wonder if there is anything to this silly dichotomy of moderate and radical Islam.  Dar al Islam and dar al harb—now that’s a useful dichotomy; but moderate vs. radical means nothing, our hanging on to that fiction certainly will doom Hindus in Bangladesh.

While people can advance several good reasons for the lack of action to stop the ethnic cleaning of Hindus in Bangladesh, I believe that is the biggest one.

Just to be clear, many of us know moderate Muslim individuals; I can think of two who have been arrested for blasphemy and put their lives in danger.  They’re not only moderate, they are heroes.  While that might be true, however, as applied to countries, the phrase “moderate Muslim” is indeed an oxymoron—impossible to maintain outside the world of theorists, ideologues, and ostriches with their heads in the sand.

And as long as people like us sit quietly while this deadly lie is perpetrated, we better be scared, and we might fit our daughters for a burqa while we’re at it.

What we must do

So what do we do about it?

If something is done to save Bangladesh’s Hindus, it will come from here, the United States of America.  Bangladesh will not change; they have shown themselves immune to cries for justice and appeals to decency.  Europe?  Don’t make me laugh.  And India?  While I love that country, political correctness and pseudo-secularism rule out that country unless it can be motivated differently.  So, it is up to us.

First of all, I cannot be the only one angry enough to do something.  All of us should be furious—with the same furor our troops have as they fight tyranny.  I mean, really angry; angry enough so we cannot stand it and cannot sleep soundly at night knowing what could be happening to a Hindu child as we lay comfortably in our warm beds.  Let the images attack you every time you decide to relax and watch TV.  Because remember what the Dalai Lama said:  “It is not enough to be compassionate.  You must ACT.”

Secondly, we have to call out our religious and community leaders who always run away from controversy; who tell us that they do not want “to be political.”  No matter who delivers the message, this is not political.  It is moral; it is, in fact, a moral imperative.  If some self-styled leader stands in the way of saving lives, call that person out as a moral coward, for being more concerned with his or her own image than those Hindu women and children who were raped.  And, by the way, why is this not an issue that the feminist movement is all over?

Temples should take the lead and lend their moral authority to community outrage and action.  Those of us who were around in the 1970s and 1980s  will remember that back then, you could not pass a synagogue without seeing a large banner proclaiming, “Save Soviet Jewry.”  Our people were being persecuted in the Soviet Union, whose leaders wanted to eradicate their Jewish religion and identity.  A few, like Natan Sharansky who later became an Israeli Cabinet Minister, got some attention, but most suffered silently.  The American Jewish community saw their persecuted brothers and sisters and recognized their obligation to save them.  Moreover, it acted on that obligation.

We lobbied Washington and our local officials; prevailed upon other religious bodies to recognize the atrocity and let Washington know their position.

Average Jews who you might see at the office or in the supermarket—people just like you—went to Russia at their own expense to smuggle in religious books and other Jewish artifacts at considerable peril to themselves.  Jewish children reaching their Bar and Bat Mitzvah were “twinned” with Soviet children who did not have the freedom to celebrate this most important rite of passage; we did it for them.  And before it was over, we helped get 1.2 million Jews out of that communist hell.   It strengthened our identity, and every Jewish child who was part of that effort never forgot it or their own sense of Jewishness.  We also realized that we could in fact stand strong for our people, that the only thing that could stop us is ourselves.

Let the Bangladeshi Hindus be your Soviet Jews.  Recognize what is at stake and mobilize around your Mandirs.

Bangladesh is a pretty lame country.  It is not like we have to force a change in China or Iran.  This is Bangladesh, a country known for two things: overcrowding and natural disasters.  If we cannot do something about Bangladesh, what hope have we against countries like China and Iran, or even North Korea and Venezuela?

Bangladesh is also a country inordinately dependent on two things for its economic viability:  exporting readymade garments and providing peacekeeping troops for the United Nations.  That’s right; Bangladesh and Pakistan keep trading places for the most and second most UN peace keeping troops—even while neither cankeep the peace at home.

In fact, while in Bangladesh during the 2007 coup, I was told by impeccable sources that concern over the UN pulling these peacekeeping troops is what finally caused the military to move.  Besides losing the money, they also had to think about having thousands of angry, unemployed, and armed young men flooding their already volatile country.  Can you blame them?

Also, the only significant lobbying group in Bangladesh is the BGMEA or the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.  They have influence on the government, and what happens to their industry will affect the lives of most of those 150 million people.  A drop in exports of only several percent points means millions out of work—also angry and in need of government assistance.

Now, guess who is their second largest customer?  The US.  And guess who funds those UN peacekeepers to a large degree?  US again.  If we get our elected leaders to act, Bangladesh will have to stop the ethnic cleansing of Hindus and get rid of their terrible laws; or face disaster.  About a year and a half ago, by the way, the current government told me how bad they need to make a good showing for their people if they want to get re-elected in 2014.  We have a terrific opportunity to put them in a bind whereby they have to stop the atrocities or lose the election and a lot more.

So let’s start thinking strategically.

In 2010, I began working with the Hindu community in the Chicago area to support a few specific candidates for Congress and the Senate.  While no one would suggest that we were responsible for their victories, the candidates and their staffs knew that we at least contributed to them.  Our goal was to show our elected officials that the Hindu community here is a significant electoral force whose concerns need to be taken seriously.  And I think that worked.

These were good people; people who supported us before and whom we would want to see elected.  But we might want to take just a little pride in the fact that one of the individuals we supported in 2010 and are working to elect again is Congressman Robert Dold who very early in his first term raised the issue of the Bangladeshi Hindus from the floor of the United States Congress—and did so without burying it in words like minorities.  He identified it clearly as anti-Hindu and demanded we do something to stop it.  I know Bob well and can tell you that he really feels the pain of the Bangladeshi Hindus and will do everything he can do to help us stop that pain.

Now we are in another election cycle, and several people are engaged in this sort of effort.  I understand you are seizing the initiative as well.  Quite a few Congressional candidates have come to recognize the importance of the Hindu vote. While our modest effort focused on three candidates in the Chicago area, Representatives and would be Representatives nationwide now are courting the Hindu vote.

Consider the following.  There are perhaps a million less Hindus in the United States than Muslims, and in many districts the Hindu population outstrips the Muslim.  But think of how our lawmakers react to CAIR, the Congress on American Islamic Relations, compared to how they would react to the Hindu American Foundation.   Or think of how many Washingtonians who were silent about the anti-Hindu stereotypes in schoolbooks and elsewhere would make outraged speeches if they were made aware of similar anti-Muslim stereotypes.  Shalli Kumar, who founded the National Indian American Coalition, has been doing this sort of thing longer than I have and is having a real impact now.  He often points out that the Hindu population is about half that of the American Jewish community and that Hindu Americans should be active enough to command half the attention of our elected leaders that my own Jewish community does.  With that sort of political power, we can accomplish a great deal in the next Congress.

And that’s one big key:  once we get people to recognize that we cannot be ignored, what do we do with that power.  Well, there’s a lot we can do; and the limits of that depend on us and us alone.  We can contribute to electoral success and then go back in our shell, the way those Bangladeshi Hindu groups did after they helped elect the Awami League; or we can press our advantage with a Congress (and perhaps an administration) that recognizes the justice of our claims, large and small.  For instance, if you are a Muslim and your child receives a school lunch, you can get a halal meal; if you are an Orthodox Jew, you can get a kosher one.  But if you are a Hindu requesting a vegetarian meal, you might be told to just take the hamburger that is, beef, off the plate with no understanding of the offense that is being committed.  So recently, we began working with Congressman Dold to change that in Illinois schools.  It’s a matter of civil rights and justice; a small victory but one that recognizes Hindu power in this society.

We also can push for real human rights hearings about the Bangladeshi Hindus, not the sort of hearings by the TLHRC that have been flaccid at best, anti-Hindu at worst; and we can lobby (with facts) to have the US Commission on International Religious Freedom downgrade Bangladesh’s status to a nation we identify as one that does not support its citizens’ religious freedom.  Many of the Congressmen we know are on committees that have power over trade and tariffs.  That would be an incredibly productive area to work on next year.  Let’s see how many elected officials want to go on the record of supporting ethnic cleansing and the gang rape of young girls!  If we have the will, we can make it that sort of choice.

The other big key is to make people realize that ultimately, this is a problem for us—all of us Americans—not something that is just a faraway problem.  When you start talking to people about Bangladesh, they start looking at their watches; but if they hear about what we are seeing already in India, we will indeed grab their attention; and if they see this as part of a larger problem threatening all of us, they will take action.  At least a lot of people will.

Again, make it clear that this is an American problem, not something remote and unrelated to us.

Right now, there is a lot of anti-UN sentiment in this country—and for good reason as it so often seems that the UN represents interests in direct conflict with those that we hold dear—like ethnic cleansing.  I do not think we would have too much trouble conditioning some of our taxpayer dollars on keeping Bangladesh off peacekeeping missions.

In other words, if we are recognized as having the power of the vote, our human rights arguments become things that can no longer be ignored.  The question is how we make the most of it in each district.  We’re working non-stop in Illinois.  And we can push our agenda forward tonight when we have dinner with the Member of Congress whose district has the nation’s highest percentage of Indian Americans.  And I promise you that I will make sure Congressman Pete Olson leaves with an understanding of what is happening to Hindus in Bangladesh.

There is so much more we can do even without the government:  tell companies who buy Bangladeshi goods that they are supporting the rape of children and the murder of innocents.  I do not like the word boycott and believe they are in the end self-defeating; but everyone knows it is not good business to associate oneself with ethnic cleansing and gang rape.  Some of Bangladesh’s biggest customers in the US include Wal-Mart, Hanes, GAP, J.C. Penney, Nike, Levis, and Tommy Hilfiger. The thing to remember is that there are a lot of countries that sell the same products, and if Bangladeshi goods become too expensive—whether through higher tariffs or bad publicity—there are several countries standing in line to gobble up the market.  And the Bangladeshis know from experience that once that market segment is lost, they are unlikely to get it back when they later decide to join the community of decent nations.

There are ways to publicize that, to start letter writing campaigns, meet with executives, and if necessary, demonstrate in front of the stores.  We also can organize monthly, weekly, or even daily demonstrations in front of the Bangladeshi embassy in Washington, charging those inside with murder.  I ask Mahasabha leaders to work with me and help us get numbers of people for these efforts.  We have contacts ready to move nationwide, and the Houston community should be one of the leaders.  Street theater, legal cases, protests, and on and on. 

When all is said and done, however, it all comes back to that 14-year-old girl I met in North Bengal and the millions of other victims.  Every day we delay, every excuse we make brings Hindus in Bangladesh that much closer to extinction; and it brings their murderers that much closer to our own homes, our streets, and our children.

I’ll be fighting this fight in Washington and anywhere else I have to regardless, but we will have a better chance of succeeding in time if we are hundreds strong.  And if we do not act, if we are content to allow these things to continue can we really call ourselves decent human beings?

Dhanyavaad.

Sounds of Silence: The Decay, Paralysis, and Lost Paradise of Ethnicity in Bangladesh 

RITUPARNA MAJUMDAR

 Title: A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh's Hindus
Author: Dr. Richard L. Benkin
Publisher: Akshaya Prakashan, New Delhi

Year of Publication: 2012

ISBN-13: 978-81-88643-39-4

Available at this web site.

‘A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus’ is not just a repertoire on the human rights violation of a community, it is a book that pans a world of struggle and government control and atrocity where the urge and voice of a few is unheard and unreciprocated due to their religious affinity and cultural supremacy. It strikes a major blow against the silence that has kept one of our age's worst human rights abuses off the international radar, which is the mass homicide of Bangladeshi Hindus because they were considered a threat to the dominant culture of the country. The book is an extensive experience done on the ground for why this terrible atrocity is happening, what are its roots, and how as terrible as it is. It is only a precursor to what will happen to the rest of us if we allow this thing to proceed with impunity and even our tacit approval.

Millions killed, Billions silent

While I was browsing the net to find related articles on the plight of Bangladeshi Hindus, it was quite interesting and at the same time appalling to find out a browser link which took me to a video game on ethnic cleansing, the contents of which may instigate racial segregation and conflict amongst its users. In the game the player runs through a ghetto killing black people and Latinos, before descending into a subway system to kill Jews. Finally he reaches the Jewish Control Centre, where Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister of Israel, is directing plans for world domination. The player must kill Sharon to win the game. It is disturbing where in the advancing virtual world, such discrimination and horror too exists.   

Of course every society, however small and large has been part of ethnic cleansing or ‘removal of an unwanted group from society, either by genocide or forced migration’. We have case studies of Europe, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Germany,France...practically no country, region or state has been sans it. So who decides the status of these “unwanted groups” in a society – the people, the government, the political leaders, the religious fundamentalists or someone else. Bangladesh over the past decade has been in news for number of issues like the buzzing textile export market due to its lower wages (one of the lowest in the world), the unhealthy safety conditions in Bangladesh factories which has been responsible for many fire mishaps lately, the labour unrest, the India-Bangladesh ties and so on; however one piece of news which seldom got news space were the mass killings of Hindus in the country which form a sizeable minority (if can be used as an oxymoron). Although the issue of ethnic cleansing have garnered quite a lot of attention in academic pursuits, a book delineating the Hindus of Bangladesh (which probably is a first of its kind in academic literature) is refreshing and accurately timed.

The Critique

Human Rights activist Richard Benkin in his book highlights that Bangladesh had 30% Hindus in 1941 and less than 8% in 2001. By deliberate targeted acts of ethnic cleansing, the Islamic fanatics have aided and were abetted by their government which explains the deteriorated numbers of the Hindu population and yet there is no outcry, nationally or internationally. While in a similar case, the statistics in Pakistan of today show Hindus were 20% in 1941 and less than 2% in 2001. Such ethnic cleansing has not been noticed by anybody. Why? While according to one author Subramaniam Swamy (Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out, 2007), the Hindus lack the mindset to retaliate against atrocities against Hindus, thus terrorist attacks against India are growing because we seem today incapable of retaliating in a manner that deters future attacks. Benkin on the other hand fails to bring out the analysis of Hindu population downfall in the country and instead recounts the heart-warming cases of violations which Benkin also connects through various catalogues of atrocities all over the world in the name of ethnicity and race.

The book provides deductive reasoning taking recourse to major ethnic genocides in the past and bringing out metamorphic relation to the happenings in Bangladesh with the Hindus. The book compiles many intriguing yet sensitive voices of people affected in the region and brings about an analogy of events and issues of the impact of human rights violations in the Muslim predominant nation. It is interesting to also note that probably when Barack Obama was an elementary school kid, Indira Gandhi was the PM of India and no one had ever heard of AIDS, internet, Windows or cellular phones, the Bangladeshi Hindus were being raped, robbed and murdered. Even with the passing of decades and advancing information, communication and technology no traces of news are found in the matter. Thus this contrast brought about through the gradual technological advancement and the increasing deterioration of humanology has been portrayed as pathetic and heart-warming. Certain sections are quite heart-rending like where Benkin remarks ‘Bangladeshi police advised them to leave that country rather than pursue a case against the perpetrators’, or ‘it took one brave woman to break that wall of silence’ in the absence of any vocal feminist groups brings, to a reader a sense of remorse and anger at the same time.

Benkin is also quite courageous to unabashedly call Stalin and Mao as two great mass murderers; proudly proclaiming the adversaries afflicted by Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh, or calling the process of ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh a regularised political move. This indeed deserves lot of kudos to the writer who doesn’t minces words to express the truth and in fact engages in self mockery while saying that ‘anti-American rants happen far more frequently within the United States than elsewhere’.

The book therefore rightly speaks for the unheard voices lying silent through decades, engages in first-hand research of those avenues which haven’t been searched before and very successfully brings out facts which were probably lying under the carpet for centuries and decades. As a novice in the matter of religious and minority identity, I strongly recommend this book to readers both in the expert area to get hold of a book which talks about something which is practically extinct in literature and also to those outside the area of expertise since it is not only informational and inspirational, it opens one’s mind and heart to an act which needs to be heard. The beauty of the book also lies in the fact that it doesn’t want to convince the reader in any dramatised characterisation but state things as they are.

Hindu Jewish Forum of USA formed: aims at strengthening ties globally

(Originally published 8/1/2012 in News Bharati)

New York, August 1: A number of intellectuals from the Jewish and Hindu communities have come together to form The Hindu Jewish Forum of USA with the objective of further strengthening the ties between the two communities.

The ties date back 2,000 years ago, when Jews fled the Holy Land and settled on the coast of Naugaon, in Maharashtra, India, where the local Hindu population treated them well. There are barely 5,000 Jews left in India, mostly in Mumbai and Thane, whereas about 70,000 are settled in Israel.

The committee consists of Dr. Richard Benkin as President; Chairman will be Dr. Babu Suseelan. Prof. Nathan Katz and Dr. Anilkumar Bhate wll be the Vice Presidents. Dr. Yashwant Pathak and John Perry will act as Secretary for the newly born organisation.

Dr. Benkin is a leader in the fight to stop ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh and was honored by the U.S. Congress for his work. He is active on several front and is a sought after speaker and writer. His books include "A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladeshi Hindus." Dr. Suseelan is a well known Indian community leader and a professor of Clinical Psychology at Maywood University and Director of Addiction Research Institute, PA. He is a writer whose articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Islam Watch, Organizer, Hindu Voice etc.

Prof. Katz is a professor of Jain Studies and Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami, FL, where he is also the Director of the Program in the Study of Spirituality. He is a leading authority on Indian Jewish communities and involved with Jewish/Hindu/Buddhist/Jain studies for over 3 decades.

Dr. Anilkumar Bhate, a former faculty member of IIT, Mumbai, was a Professor in an American university and is involved in the study and research of Vedas, Old Testament and other Hindu scriptures.

Dr. Yashvant Pathak is the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, College of Pharmacy, University of South Florida. He has also studied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

John Perry is a veteran Indo-Jewish journalist and known well among both the communities. He was an editor and publisher of a group of newspapers and produced television shows. He earlier reported from India and Israel for decades. He has covered the Gulf War, United Nations.

A similar organization does exist in England whereas in Mumbai, they are in the process of registration.

Beginning of the End to Ethnic Cleansing?

Originally published in News Bharati, July 2, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

Philosopher Edmund Burke is thought to have said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”  Evil has been triumphing in East Bengal, taking its Hindus from a third of the population to less than eight percent, while the evidence is still being kept from those “good men.”  Getting the facts to people in power is the first step in knocking down the wall of silence and that of inaction which follows from it.

The process began on May 25 when I met with Bangladeshi Ambassador Akramul Qader at his country's Washington embassy; and Bangladesh had better take notice.  Our meeting went as I expected. I told Mr. Qader that I could provide Bangladesh the benefits they requested of me last year in Dhaka, but would not as long as Hindus are being persecuted there.  He insisted—often in ridiculous fashion—that there was no persecution, leading to an angry exchange.  Qader finally retracted his denial but claimed he knew of no incidents since those occurring "at the time of elections years ago [and that] all the perpetrators had been punished.”  His tactic surprised me since practitioners of ethnic cleansing at least try to seem credible. "Well then let me enlighten you," I said and presented evidence that the supposedly “pro-minority” Awami League government remains as complicit in anti-Hindu ethnic cleansing as its rival BNP.

Forced to admit that violence long-ago was not the end, he mentioned the “incident” in Satkhira—an anti-Hindu pogrom outrageous enough to send hundreds of students into the streets of Dhaka; but called it the work of a few "religious fanatics" who he claimed have been arrested.  “Not so,” I countered and cited ongoing murder, rape, beatings, arson, land grabs, religious desecration, and more; and so he challenged me to send him evidence.  Thank you, Mr. Ambassador, because I also sent it to US Senators and Members of Congress, who now hold documented evidence of anti-Hindu violence in this supposedly “moderate” Muslim country.  One of them, Congressman Robert Dold, has already raised the issue in Congress.  Now that the facts are circulating on Capitol Hill, will they be equally dismissive of US lawmakers who control foreign aid and tariffs on Bangladeshi goods?

Have Bangladeshis reached a point where they are flailing about for denials, no matter how ridiculous?  Are they overconfident or desperate?  Judge for yourself.  I finally told Qader that "you don't go from a third of the population in 1965, to a fifth in 1971, to between seven and eight percent today simply through 'voluntary emigration'" His response: "Yes, it can because they cannot find suitable matches for their children, so they go to India where there are more Hindus."

“You’re kidding, right?” I replied.  He wasn’t.

But he was confident that disinterest in the lives of Hindus will allow these deadly actions to continue with impunity.  As decent human beings, we must prove him wrong.

Is “Moderate Muslim” an Oxymoron?

Originally published in the New English Review, July 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

Is “Moderate Muslim” an Oxymoron? As applied to individuals, absolutely not. Those of us who know individual Muslims will testify to that all day long. Our Muslim friends and colleagues are no different than our other associates, and we find it difficult to hear blanket statements categorizing all Muslims as open or closet jihadis. Condemn all Muslims that way, and you do more to condemn yourself. And that’s one of the reasons for all the distortions we encounter: our values make us uncomfortable condemning any religion or large group of people because of their adherence to it. But our existential struggle is not about individuals.

The disingenuous and politically-motivated use of the phrase “moderate Muslim” without regard to reality leads us to make deadly decisions; deadly not just for jihad’s immediate victims but ultimately for us as well. Case in point: Bangladesh.

When you start talking about Bangladesh, people start looking at their watches; but Bangladesh is the only nation that ranks among the world’s ten most populous and ten most densely populated countries—like cramming every second American into the State of New York. It also has the world’s fourth largest Muslim population—more than Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia combined. It is a country poor in significant resources except one: an excess of people who are learning to live with radical Islam. Bangladeshi jihadis have surfaced in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere. In 2007, I spent a day in the Bangladeshi capital with another: a former Mujhadeen commander who fought in Afghanistan. The nation’s current left-center government, the Awami League, which took power from a military-backed caretaker at the end of 2008, defines itself with words like moderate and secular, pretending to stand apart from people like him; and few people bother to check reality.

The UN formally recognized Bangladesh as a “moderate Muslim democracy”; and a recent CNN report began:  “Muslim and moderate. Two words that describe Bangladesh.” Bangladeshis play the moderate card every chance they get and trumpet their nation as “a model of religious harmony and tolerance” on their US web site. More to the point, a recent Congressional Research Paper said that Bangladesh is the “partner of choice for the United States in many of the foreign policy priorities of President Obama.” But do those words reflect reality?  Who is this country that the Obama Administration has made a “partner of choice”?

In 2009, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told visiting French naval commander Gerard Valin that her government would repeal the nation’s anti-minority laws—a rather curious thing to say as she was admitting that this supposedly moderate Muslim-majority country indeed has anti-minority laws. That was three years ago, and the anti-minority laws remain in force. One of them, the Vested Property Act, allows the government to declare Hindu property “vested” on the flimsiest of pretexts and distribute it to the crones of its choice—about 2.5 million acres so far or about 75 percent of all Hindu-owned land. Is that indicative of a moderate Muslim country?

The same Awami League, whose moderate reputation is an article of faith among diplomats and other elites, passed on an opportunity to repeal that law with no fanfare or repercussions immediately on taking power; just as it did when challenged by the Supreme Court in 2011 to re-write several constitutional provisions, including the notorious Eighth Amendment that declares Islam to be the official state religion and provides for its favored treatment. Does that sound like the actions of a moderate Muslim country?

Sources on the ground in South Asia have told me that the Awami League has recently made common cause with the nation’s Islamists, agreeing to allow the latter to implement elements of their radical agenda in return for support in the 2014 election, much as it did in advance of the aborted 2007 elections. Since elements in the party recently approached me as well with their concerns about the next election, the cynical deal with Islamists rings true. But press reports about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit there were effusive with her positive comments and pledges of more aid and cooperation. It seems she had no time to address this disturbing move by her hosts. And if my sources could uncover it, is there much doubt that her sources did, too?

Less than a month after Clinton's departure, a Bangladeshi court issued an arrest warrant against author Salam Azad charging him with blasphemy for a book he published in 2003. All it took was a general allegation, according to the petitioner’s attorney. “We told the court that the book contained slanderous remarks against the Prophet Mohammed and Islam. The judge accepted the petition and issued a warrant of arrest.” According to the author, a senior official of that supposedly moderate party was behind it. I became "his target once I protested his getting of Hindu property via the Vested Property Act,” he said. Azad told me that while he is out on bail, he receives regular death threats over the phone and a faces a public campaign by Islamists calling for him to be hanged. The government has not tried to stop any of that or provide the author with protection.  Nor is Azad the first Bangladeshi writer to face that charge. In the same year Azad published his book, Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury was arrested for writing about the rise of radical Islam in the country and urging relations with Israel. After an intense 17 month long effort, we won his freedom, but it took the intervention of then Congressman (now Senator) Mark Kirk (R-IL); and though Choudhury remains free, the blasphemy charge remains, too.  Does arresting writers for blasphemy sound like something that happens in a moderate Muslim country?

The deadliest ramification of the moderate label, however, is our continued tolerance for the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh. Hindus used to comprise almost a third of the population, according to East Pakistan’s 1951 census. When East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, they were under a fifth; 30 years later less than a tenth; and according to reliable estimates, less than eight percent today. Throughout that time, reports of anti-Hindu atrocities have poured out of Bangladesh; atrocities including murder, rape, religious desecration, land grabs, property destruction, beatings, child abduction, and forced conversion to Islam. (While forced conversion to Islam is not a crime there, Bangladeshis who have converted from Islam have been killed with impunity.) In the first quarter of 2012 alone, there were at least 15 anti-Hindu atrocities. Perpetrators are rarely brought to justice. Refugees from Islamist terror in Bangladesh continue to pour across the border into India; so does jihad, which has now taken hold in that giant’s Northeast.

Yet, the Obama administration continues to make us complicit by propping up the fiction of Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim country. This is in line with Obama’s 2009 search for “moderate Taliban,” and his current insistence on the wonders of partnering with “moderates” in Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood. There is a clear pattern here the end of which is not good for any civilized individual.

So, yes, when applied to nations, moderate Muslim is an oxymoron; and we better hope that our political leaders catch on to that soon.

Ethnic Cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus continues in 2012

Originally published in Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, May 18, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

 The numbers tell the story - or at least part of it.  After India’s Partition, Hindus were almost a third of the East Pakistan population, according to Pakistan’s 1951 census.  When East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, they were under a fifth; 30 years later less than a tenth; and according to reliable estimates, less than eight percent today.  Throughout that time, there was a steady flow of reports on anti-Hindu atrocities there; atrocities that include religious desecration, land grabs, property destruction, beatings, forced conversion to Islam, child abduction, rape, and murder.  Bangladeshi governments not only refused to prosecute the perpetrators, but also maintained openly discriminatory laws.  One, the Vested Property Act, is an anti-Hindu law taken in whole cloth from Pakistan that allows the government to seize minority land and distribute it to Muslims

It has been the economic engine that powers ethnic cleansing.  Another, the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, declares Islam to be the state religion with numerous consequences that elevate Bangladeshi Muslims and denigrate all other citizens, especially Hindus.

With the election of the Awami League in 2008, a nexus of elites worldwide waxed endlessly about how things would now be different; ignoring the Awami League’s full participation in the Vested Property Act and other clear signs of its collusion in ethnic cleansing.  As I document in my book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, the Awami League enabled major anti-Hindu actions to occur with no letup.  During its first year in office, they occurred at the rate of one per week, and they continued unabated in 2010 and 2011; with no prosecution of the perpetrators.  This even included a horrifying anti-Hindu pogrom that took place right behind a police station in the capital, saw a Mandir destroyed, sent several people to the hospital, and left dozens homeless.  Not breaking with the practice of its predecessors, the Awami League government did not prosecute the perpetrators and allowed the seizure of Hindu property to continue.  The pogrom’s cover up went at least as far as the Dhaka Metropolitan Chief of Police and Awami League parliamentarians.

 
Land Grab: Sign announcing seizure of Hindu land

Yet, political correctness lives on longer than truth, and on April 9, 2012, the New York Times published a puff piece that reprised the erroneous assertion that Bangladesh under the Awami League is living up to the empty claims of its constitution; that its war on Hindus is over.  The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) continues to gather evidence of anti-Hindu actions there; and it Director of Human Rights, Samir Kalra, wrote a response that debunked the piece and cited “nearly 1,200 incidents of violence directed against religious minorities (mostly Hindus) between 2008 and 2011.” The Times never published it. 

15 major anti-Hindu incidents during the first quarter of 2012 :

My own nexus of informants and human rights activists were able to confirm at least 15 major anti-Hindu incidents during the first quarter of 2012 : 15 major incidents in 12 weeks including murder, rape, religious desecration, forced conversion to Islam, and more.  Multiple newspapers reported the events, and Rabindra Ghosh, tireless advocate of the Bangladesh Minority Watch, investigated and confirmed them.  The New York Times’ assertion, that “Hindu traditions are respected” in Bangladesh, would be comical if it was not so tragic.  Somehow, the “paper of record” missed this incident:  On January 31 at about 9am, five or more named, Muslim men abducted a 20 year old Hindu woman into a microbus while she waited at a bus stop on her way to college. She has not been seen or heard from since, and police had to be prodded into taking even perfunctory action; which is all they have taken.  And this one:  On February 13, around 7pm 11 known Muslim perpetrators grabbed an 18 year old Hindu woman as she went to fetch water outside her house.  The next day, her body was found on the railroad track 500 yards from a rail station with multiple injuries including those indicating sexual assault.  Police arrested one man, who is essentially free at this time, and have taken no further action.  The police took no action in ten of these 15 incidents, arrested and released known perpetrators in three, participated in one; and only made arrests in the Satkhira pogrom—an attack so massive that it sparked protests in the capital that shut down parts of it.  In at least two of these cases, police warned human rights activists to stop their investigations.
 

 
Hindu family stands over devastation of their home destroyed by Muslims during Satkhira pogrom

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s relatives behind driving off more than 100 Hindu families

Nor have things slowed down.  One of my own informants recently sent me evidence of more anti-Hindu actions.  In Khulna, for instance, the local official substituted his own image for that of a deity on a poster announcing the Chorok Puja festival.  When Hindus protested the desecration, police and others attacked them.  In Pangsa Village in Bagerhat, the government declared the area an “industrial zone,” and has used the declaration as a pretext for seizing Hindu land and driving off more than 100 Hindu families.  He reports something similar in Gololgonj, where 100-150 Hindu families have been driven out.  There, however, my informant charges that one of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s relatives, Sheika Maruf is behind the expulsions and profiting from them.  It is unclear where the New York Times got its information, but mine comes from people on the ground who have been able to back up their charges with documented evidence. 
 

 
Temple grab: Shuttered Temple with sign announcing its seizure.

Are my resources greater than those of the New York Times and other media?  Has the Hindu American Foundation documented atrocities that are beyond the ability of media giants to uncover?  Rather it seems that the New York Times and other media giants are content to ignore facts that upset their world view even if their willful ignorance results in death and destruction.

Dr. Richard L. Benkin is a human rights activist who has been fighting to stop the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh.  His book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, is available at http://www.interfaithstrength.com/TEMP.html for US readers and at http://www.akshayaprakashan.com/index.php?p=aquietccaseofethniccleansingthemurderofbangladeshshindus for readers in India and elsewhere.

On Accepting Village Proclamation Commemorating Days of Remembrace 2012

Dr. Richard L. Benkin At Village of Mount Prospect, Illinois Meeting, April 8, 2012

Thank you, Mayor Wilks, Trustee Matuszak, and the rest of the Mt. Prospect village board.

When General Dwight Eisenhower entered the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, he ordered the military photographers to immediately start documenting what they were witnessing because, as he said, one day someone would come along and try to say that these things did not happen.  By standing together again, as we did last year, we as Mt. Prospect are remembering the Holocaust’s victims and raising our voices for them to overcome those other voices that today are indeed trying to deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

While the Holocaust is most closely associated with the Jewish people, its message is universal; as Trustee Matuszak reminded us last year when he shared with us how his family, too, was victimized in the Holocaust.  The promise that we brought out of the ashes was “Never Again”; which certainly meant that never again would we allow this to happen to us.  More importantly, it was a promise that never again would we allow this to happen to any people.

And that is why I have dedicated myself to stopping the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh; victims of the same sort of hatred that drove the Holocaust.  Forty-nine million Hindus missing!  Fifteen million Hindus still at risk in Bangladesh!  And so I am presenting Mayor Wilks with a copy of my book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: the Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, which documents these atrocities and is part of my effort to spread the word about what is happening to these people.  Maybe by remembering one Holocaust, we can stop another.

Thank you.  I’m very proud to be part of this community.

Red Academics Carry On

Originally published in Canada Free Press, April 10, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

While people’s attention necessarily remains focused on the 2012 election and the domestic issues that animate it, leftist academics are moving at break neck speed in their efforts to poison young minds the world over against the United States.  I had a chance to see and confront that head on during a recent trip to India when I was invited to address a seminar at Gautam Buddha University (GBU).  The title, “The Marginalized and Excluded in Society,” suggested the same leftist tinge that most academic exercises have, but I had reason to hope that this one would be different.

By inviting me, the university signaled that the seminar would not shrink from identifying victims of Islamic hegemony, as I have done that time and again at universities and elsewhere in India and the organizers knew it.  And my topic, the ethnic cleansing of Bangladesh’s Hindus, took no prisoners in calling out Muslims as the perpetrators.

The seminar began with a grand plenary session and announced Professor Gopal Guru of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as the keynote speaker.  His introduction was glowing.  Evidently in India, as in the US, the academic left showers its own with self-congratulatory awards and honors in order to dismiss anyone who might dare take a contrary position as lacking credentials.  Seated in the front as an honored guest from a foreign country, I nevertheless determined to listen politely.  It was not long, however, before his hard left bias put that to the test.  Much of his speech was a rambling attack on capitalism as the source of all marginalization and big government as its solution.  He coupled this with an unremarkable treatise about margins and centers so arcane and divorced from reality that it was the sort of thing that could keep audience members in their seats only in academia.  Still I sat quietly in deference to my hosts—until he started in on the United States.

He said that America marginalizes “Blacks,” and no litany of individual success stories can change that conclusion.  His individual example:  Michael Jordan.  Academics tend to be several decades behind the times anyway, and we might expect most people looking for a successful individual of color in the US today to chose, oh let’s see, maybe President Barack Obama.  Choosing the sports superstar, however, better fit the left’s narrative of limited opportunity for African-Americans than selecting the President, current or past cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, or captains of industry would.  Then he asked how Michael Jordan “could accept all of that when 90 percent of his brothers are languishing in prison.”

Perhaps I have too much of a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve.  He had to notice my eyes open wide and my mouth form the words, “that’s bulls@@t,” because he stumbled around for a moment and finished his address in rather short order; though it was not the end of it as far as I was concerned. American hating academics regularly throw out misinformation about the US without much fear of being challenged about it.  So, I did challenge him during the tea break that immediately followed his speech by saying, “While I can’t say with certainty how applicable your comments are with respect to India, I can tell you that they are entirely inapplicable to the United States.”  He smiled, then after a moment responded with surprise, “Did you say inapplicable.”  I told him I did, and the debate was joined.  Without exact figures at hand, I pointed out that there are about 30 million black people in the US, and that it was physically and economically impossible for us to have 27 million of our citizens incarcerated.  “The very statement is ridiculous on its face,” I said.

And that was the key to winning over the academic crowd.  Had I tried to make an ideological argument, the few people who might agree with me likely would be too intimidated to speak up about it.  If I came across as someone “defending” the US, the academic crowd would at the very least pigeonhole me if not dismiss me entirely.  Gopal Guru’s reputation and ability to continue spewing his lies would have been left intact, and the stakes are too high to let that happen.  And so I asked him:

“Where did you get your figures?”

“Where did you get yours?”

“No, no.  I’m not the one who stood up in front of a room full of students and represented what I said as objective truth.  You did.  So, I ask again:  where did you get your figures?”

“I’ve seen the records.”

He uttered the last statement dismissively with a wave of his hand, and no matter how much I pressed him, he refused to cite a single reference in his defense.  “Have you spent much time in black communities in the US?”  I asked him; because, I added, I spent years in places like the West and South sides of Chicago, North and West Philadelphia “and I can tell you that 90 percent of their population was not in prison.”  When he insisted that blacks in the US are marginalized and cannot find success, I offered him to accompany me into the offices and even boardrooms of major US companies where he will see black people in positions of leadership.  But when he responded to that with a wink and a nod to the crowd and a “now we know what you are” to me, a funny thing happened.  His lame recourse to ideology helped sway the crowd in my direction.  I said that there were quite a few people there who spent a lot of time and hard work to research their topics and justify their positions; and whether or not we like or dislike their conclusions, none would have Guru’s temerity to disrespect this university and its students with misinformation so simplistic that a first year student paper would not pass with it.

With faculty and staff focused on academic integrity instead of ideology, they looked at Guru for a response, but none was forthcoming.  As one colleague noted to me, “you spoiled his party.”

I followed up with a formal complaint that provided hard figures on US incarceration, as well as their sources, and noted that “came from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Justice Statistics [and] are easily accessible to anyone with online access.  If Professor Guru cared a fig about being intellectually honest with his students, he would have at least done that minimal amount of research before dropping his misinformation bomb on GBU’s unsuspecting students; but he did not.  I do not mind ideological differences; variety of thought is a key element to the maintenance of a free society.  I do, however, find intellectual dishonesty reprehensible….Whatever standing Professor Gopal Guru has, it certainly does not give him leave to play fast and loose with the facts, providing students with authoritatively-sounding but blatantly erroneous statements, and evidently put ideology over intellectual truth.”

The complaint is working its way through channels, but I frankly have no illusions about its ultimate disposition.  JNU is known as a hotbed of leftist activity, and when I speak there I am the one who is “marginalized.”  But my actions will be ineffective only if they are isolated and we continue to give those who hate the US, free markets, and free people free reign to direct the minds of young people at home and abroad.

Quiet Jihad

Originally published in the New English Review, April 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

Why quiet jihad? It certainly is not because the victims do not scream. It is not because Temples make no sound when destroyed. And it is not because cries of Allahu Akbar do not accompany the carnage. It is a quiet jihad because we have allowed it to proceed, quietly, for decades; victimizing more people than all the jihadi terrorism in all the 9/11s that have come to define jihad for most people today. We tend to associate jihad and the radical Islamist threat with events that are by design loud, violent, and attention grabbing. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States come to mind almost immediately. So too do the constant drumbeat demonizing Israel with false data and counterintuitive arguments, the violent terror attacks that go along with it, and the adamant refusal to accept the very notion of a Jewish State while making it sound like self-defense to the uninformed. High profile terror attacks from London to Bali, Mumbai to Chechnya; the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of Afghanistan’s ancient Buddha statues; the deadly riots by Muslims worldwide over cartoons of Mohammed; and even the image of Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini all represent jihad in its most blatant and aggressive incarnations. But the threat facing all civilized and decent peoples goes well beyond that.

If those violent attacks were all there was to jihad, western and other militaries could crush it without much effort or concern about geo-political complexities. It would be a battle between good and evil so blatant that even the most reflexively cultural relativists would not attribute the terror attacks to some variant of local color. President Barack Obama’s 2009 “Af-Pak” speech was an excellent example of why jihad needs more to succeed than the Sturm und Drang of radical Islam. The problem with this major policy speech was not that Obama failed to recognize al Qaeda and the Taliban as our enemies. In fact, he has done a fairly good job of that during his tenure. The problem, as I wrote at the time, was he assumed that aside from those groups, everyone else in Pakistan (and you can broaden this to other countries) was our friend. That is the amoral convenience that quiet jihad allows. Recognizing that additional and critical component is the real “inconvenient truth” of our time.

“Quiet Jihad” is complimentary to Robert Spencer’s important concept of “Stealth Jihad”; as both recognize a less obvious form of jihadi terror than what the media and others allow most decent people to see. In his 2008 book, Stealth Jihad, Spencer wrote that “terror attacks involving bombings and shootings are not the sum total of terrorist aspirations, but are just one component of a larger initiative. The goal of that initiative is the imposition of jihadists’ ideology over the world.”[1] Spencer goes on to tell readers that jihadis will use a variety of methods to accomplish their goal; in fact, for them, the particular method is not very important. The goal of Islamist hegemony is. Quiet Jihad refers to one method in particular: the progressive elimination of non-Muslim populations from areas under the control of an Islamic government. Please take note of the fact that Quiet Jihad does not require an Islamist government, like the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan or the mullahs in Iran. Compliant Islamic governments generally do the trick.

To take one example, after the 1947 partition of India, Hindus were just under a third of East Pakistan’s population. In 1971, when East Pakistan became Bangladesh, they were fewer than one in five; 30 years later less than one in ten; and they are estimated to be less than eight percent today. During that same period, regular reports of anti-Hindu atrocities have poured out of Bangladesh and continue to do so even under a self-styled “pro-minority” government. Serious anti-Hindu actions occurred at the rate of almost one a week on its watch in 2009; and they have continued without let up in 2010 and 2011. Professor Sachi Dastidar of the State University of New York calculates that well over 49 million Hindus are missing in Bangladesh.[2] This puts every one of Bangladesh’s remaining 13-15,000,000 Hindus at risk; and the problem has spread across the border into West Bengal, India, threatening millions more.[3]

I have been studying this “quiet case of ethnic cleansing” for years, through on-site investigation in South Asia’s refugee camps, universities, and along its open borders, among other venues, and developing reliable networks of allies and informants who independently have verified these atrocities. For three days in 2009, for example, there was an anti-Hindu pogrom in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka—immediately behind a police station. You might have read about it on my web site or in an article I published in one Indian newspaper Hindu; but that is probably it, despite the fact that victims were hospitalized, many rendered homeless, a Hindu Temple and deities were destroyed; and all under the watchful eye of police who were present during the attacks and allowed them to proceed.[4]

Are my resources really that much greater than CNN’s and the rest of the media’s? I would not think so, and that underscores the complicit nature of major media and others in promoting quiet jihad by ignoring it and assiduously maintaining the fiction that only a small number of radicals are the problem.

The perpetrators of that pogrom might have been driven by radical ideology, but they were not radicals themselves; nor are the countless others that have violently driven millions of Hindus from their ancestral lands. They are “average” Muslims, and that makes this especially chilling. For history shows that the most successful cases of genocide occur when a cadre of true believers incites average citizens to engage in heinous acts against a targeted minority; acts they otherwise would not dream of committing. There might be no Gestapo or Janjaweed in Bangladesh, but its Hindu community is facing a similar process of destruction at the hands of the Bangladeshi majority. Welcome to quiet jihad.

If quiet jihad’s only victims were the Bangladeshi Hindus, it still would be human rights atrocity with victims numbering more than the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur combined. Unfortunately, the problem is worse than that. Non-Muslim communities are disappearing wherever Islam has gained hegemony. Christian communities dating back to Jesus’ time are being systematically eliminated in a new Middle East that not only refuses to let them live, but is trying to erase their history so as not to allow even the thought that Islam’s roots go back to a time of conquest and are not ordained by God. The same is true for Middle Eastern Jewish communities with even earlier origins dating to the sixth century B.C.E. Ten of the 14 countries identified as the worst abusers of religious minorities by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom are Muslim-ruled. They all impose a form of Sharia on their people; and three are officially “Islamic States,” as well. Coincidence?

Try again. It seems almost unbelievable that on the eve of World War I, the Turkish capital of Istanbul (then called Constantinople) had a population that was about 50 percent non-Muslim. Today, with a population well over 90 percent Muslim, it has the aspect of any Muslim capital that is increasingly hostile to an intimidated non-Muslim population; and that is after seven decades of being hailed as a model of secularism.

That is an extremely important point. Up until the last few years when Turkish policies became more openly Islamist, most western diplomats, journalists, and other leaders and opinion makers continued investing a lot of personal and more tangible capital in supporting the Turkish regimes, even while they allowed the progressive diminution of their non-Muslims citizens. Similarly, no one will ever confuse Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina with the Ayatollah Khomeini or even her political rival and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia with Mullah Omar. Yet, both have allowed their Hindu citizens to be murdered, chased from the country, or forcibly converted to Islam (which is not a crime; and the first two crimes are not prosecuted when the victims are non—Muslim).

Hebron is a city near Jerusalem and the location of one of Judaism’s holiest sites. The Cave of Machpelah is regarded as the burial site of Judaism’s patriarchs and three of its four matriarchs. According to the bible, it is also the first piece of land that Abraham purchased after coming to modern-day Israel almost 4,000 years ago. The site is also claimed by Muslims. Hebron had a continuous Jewish presence from Abraham’s time until 1929. In that year, Hebron and vicinity’s entire Jewish population was either massacred or driven out in an anti-Jewish pogrom by Arabs. Every mosque and imam in the region incited and supported the atrocity. “House to house, they went, bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews…Religious books and scrolls were burned or torn to shreds [and] the carnage went on for hours, with the Arab policemen standing down – or joining in. Blood ran in streamlets down the narrow stone staircases outside the buildings."[5]

In 1967, Israel reclaimed the area, prior to which Jews were barred from the area, and thereby deliberately prevented from paying homage or praying and this very holy site. Israeli Jews, who now could return to Hebron for the first time since the pogrom, observed that almost four decades after the 1929 massacres, traditional Jewish amulets, or mezzuzot, were still affixed to many doorposts. Some years later, as the Arab population concentrated in the city itself while Jews lived in the surrounding areas like Kiryat Arba, people observed that the mezzuzot had been removed, but one could still see their outlines on the doorposts. Eventually, Israelis noticed that the doorposts themselves had been replaced, especially as the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the area became ever more intense and there was a decided attempt by Arabs to deny that Jews had any title to the area; thus their effort to erase all trace of the ancient Jewish community in Hebron. And now after the Arabs essentially falsified the historical record, the world has the utter gall to call the descendants of the victims “settlers” and those of the attackers Hebron’s rightful owners![6]

It is again significant that this process of deliberate attempts to de-Judaize Hebron and its history did not proceed under an openly retrograde Islamist state. Rather, each of the responsible parties was lionized by western leaders and opinion-makers as an epitome of tolerance and a partner for world peace. First, it was the Ottoman Turks whose capital was only half Muslim; then, the very “moderate” Jordanians; and finally, those “peace partners” in the Palestinian Authority.

Whether or not one attributes these phenomena to something in Islam itself is not even the point. The fact is that one cannot even join the debate in the West or try to explain the historical record without facing charges of being Islamaphobic, racist, or bigoted. Perhaps that will change when we are told that London’s Old Bailey was established to enforce Sharia law and the Eiffel Tower was built in homage to Allah. Preposterous? Ask those who put mezzuzot on their doorposts in Hebron, built Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or Hindu temples in Bangladesh.

[1] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs. (Regnery Publishing, Inc.:  Washington, 2008), pp. 4-5.

[2] Dastidar, S. (2008) Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and other Minorities. (Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited).

[3] Richard Benkin, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: the Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus. (Akshaya Prakashan:  New Delhi, 2012).

[4] Richard Benkin, “A Terrifying Existence, “The Daily Pioneer, July 21, 2009.

[5] Edwin Black, The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance during the Holocaust (Dialog Press:  Washington, DC, 2010), pp. 205-206.

[6] Also see Richard L. Benkin, “The Modern Destruction of the Temple Mount,” Bible and Interpretation, May 2003.

Islamists Get a Pass for Ethnic Cleansing

Originally published on Austrailian Islamist Monitor, April 20, 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

It is a “quiet case of ethnic cleansing.” Certainly, the screams of the victims do not make it so; nor does the hatred dripping from the lips of their victimizers. Rather, it is the silence of the “civilized world” that characterizes this terrible atrocity; an atrocity that has been proceeding with little break for decades. Bangladesh’s Hindu population is dying. This is not opinion or the ravings of an ideologue: It is a fact. At the time of India’s partition in 1948, they made up a little less than a third of East Pakistan’s population. When East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, Hindus were less than a fifth; thirty years later, less than one in ten; and several estimates put the current Hindu population at less than eight percent. Professor Sachi Dastidar from the State University of New York estimates that about 40 million Hindus are missing from the Bangladeshi census.H If it is still not clear where this is going, just take a look at Pakistan where Hindus are down to one percent or Kashmir where they are almost gone. Then take a look at the future of Bangladesh’s Hindus if we do not act.

For much of that time, there have been regular reports out of Bangladesh documenting anti-Hindu incidents there including murder, gang rape, assault, forced conversion to Islam, child abduction, land grabs, and religious desecration. And while Bangladeshi officials might object that the perpetrators were non-state actors, government culpability rests, at the very least, on the fact that it pursues very few of these cases and punishes even fewer perpetrators. During Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971, Pakistani troops and their local, Islamist allies slaughtered two to three million predominantly Hindu Bangladeshis. Known as the Bangladesh Genocide or Bangladesh Holocaust, the atrocity sparked no Nuremburg-like trials, and it is only now almost 40 years later that the Bangladeshi government is getting around to

Bangladesh Massacre, 1971, est. 3,000,000 largely Hindus, ethnically "cleansed", 200,000+ rapes

“talking about” holding the perpetrators responsible. In the meantime, the guilty have continued to hold positions of authority over the victims’ relatives. Successive Bangladeshi governments—whether the openly Islamist BNP, the civilian or military caretaker, or the supposedly pro-minority Awami League—all have been passive bystanders, refusing to exercise their sovereign responsibility to protect the life and security of all their citizens; and thus they have sent radical Islamists and common citizens alike a clear message that these acts can be undertaken with impunity.

Yet, in this world of moral cowardice and political correctness, it is the victims and their defenders who have to prove that there is something wrong. One would expect justice to demand that the Bangladeshis explain why they should not be charged with complicity in eliminating an entire people numbering in the tens of millions. My personal commitment since 2008 has been to provide that proof to media, government officials, and even to the general population in order to stop the atrocity. This has included regular missions to India, and Bangladesh when that government does not bar my entrance to gather evidence from victims and others of the ongoing atrocities.

I have spoken with hundreds of Bangladeshi Hindu refugees living in largely illicit colonies throughout North and Northeast India. In describing the attacks that forced them to leave their ancestral homes, they made it very clear that their attackers were not necessarily radicals, but neighbors; common, everyday Muslims. They also reported with near unanimity that when they went to the police and other officials for help, they were advised to drop the subject and “get out of Bangladesh.” Last March, I interviewed a family that crossed into India only 22 days earlier. They told me about an uncle being killed, the father beaten, and their small farm invaded by a large number of Muslims. I also looked into the eyes of their 14-year-old daughter as she talked about being gang raped, not by al Qaeda or other radicals but simply by Muslims who lived in the area and knew they could have their way with the family, seize their land, and get away with it. And that is chilling because history has shown that the most “successful” cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing occur when a small cadre of true believers incites average citizens to engage in heinous acts against a targeted minority that they otherwise would not dream of committing. There might be no Gestapo or Janjaweed in Bangladesh, but its Hindu community is facing a similar process of destruction at the hands of the Bangladeshi Muslim majority.

In December 2008, Bangladesh ended two years of military-backed rule by electing the left-center Awami League to lead the country in a landslide victory. The diplomatic and “official” human rights community worldwide hailed the election not only as a victory for democratic rule but also as an event that will usher in a new era in Bangladesh, in which government protects religious minorities against those bent on their destruction. While the Awami League’s record on that score has been less than dismal, those international groups remain committed to their fiction of “hope and change.”

Dr Benkin with refugee kids - Northern Bengal

Over the years, I have established a network of informants throughout India and Bangladesh to verify the unending stream of allegations of anti-Hindu atrocities. If anything, we err on the side of caution in our presentations so the perpetrators and their apologists cannot focus on one questionable allegation to distract us from the many other true ones. During the Awami League’s first two months in office, for instance, we verified without doubt one and a half anti-Hindu incidents every week. In January alone, we verified the following.

• Kidnapping a 14-year old girl.
• Breaking into a home and abducting an eight-year-old boy.
• Beating a member of the local Hindu council “senseless so that the victim was hospitalized.
• Attacking a funeral site and destroying the nearby Temple.
• Seizing land for a Hindu Temple and building a madrassa (Muslim school) on it.
• Destroying another Temple.
• Seizing land and retaining the land.

In every one of these cases, the attackers were Muslim and the victims Hindu; and in every one of these cases, the Bangladeshi government refused to pursue a case against the perpetrators. Incidents continued to occur throughout 2009 and into 2010. On three separate days last spring, what can only be described as an anti-Hindu pogrom occurred in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. Residents of the poor neighborhood were beaten to the point of hospitalization, a Hindu Temple was ransacked and destroyed, Hindu-owned land was seized by the attackers, and several homes were set ablaze and destroyed leaving dozens homeless to this day. The area, known as Sutrapur, was located directly behind a police station, and police stood by during the three raids, supporting the case of the Muslim attackers and allowing Hindu residents to be victimized at will. Subsequent investigation by my own informants as well as several human rights groups confirmed a conspiracy to prevent action against the perpetrators involving the Dhaka Police Chief and at least one Awami League Member of Parliament.

Hindu refugees - Northern Bengal

While the world—albeit too late—has recognized human rights atrocities in Sri Lanka, Darfur, and elsewhere; they have not done the same for these Hindu victims of Islamist ethnic cleansing. The task of getting world media and governments to acknowledge atrocities with has no concentration camps or killing fields has proven near insurmountable thus far (although we have made significant progress toward that goal). “Progress,” however, still has allowed them to proceed without a murmur of protest, quietly and relentlessly, for decades.

We recently founded a new NGO, Forcefield to help. Board Members, besides me, are from Australia, India, and Bangladesh; the latter being anti-jihad Muslim hero, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. In addition to continuing to defend Shoaib Choudhury and trailblazing work to expose the rise of Islamists, complicity by Bangladeshi authorities, relations between Bangladesh and Israel, and general support for the war against Islamic extremism; Forcefield is committed to stopping the ethnic cleansing of Hindus and other minorities by in Bangladesh. It has several initiatives currently under development to change people’s understanding about what is happening to the Bangladeshi Hindus so that it will spur concrete and effective action to stop it. They include:

My regular missions to South Asia to continue gathering verified information, educate various publics there and in the West about this matter, and strengthen our network of informants.
A documentary film about the Bangladeshi Hindus, which professionals have agreed to join and victims have agreed to testify.
An online newspaper geared toward Westerners to provide well-documented and verified news, data, and expert opinion about the spread of radical Islam in South Asia, its impact on Hindus and religious minorities, and the threat it poses worldwide. We have correspondents standing by in various key venues in South Asia.

Dr Benkin taking an Islamist interrupter to task. On stage: (right to left) Kanchan Gupta, editor The Daily Pioneer; Mark Sofer, Israeli Ambassador to India, and Eli Belotserkovsky, Deputy Chief of Mission for the Israeli embassy in India.

Forcefield is non-agenda driven, which means it is not committed to any leftist ideology, network of supporters, or “flavor of the week” issues; and it is most definitely NOT anti-Israel. It is recognized as a not-for-profit by the governments of India and the United States, which makes all contributions fully tax deductible under US law. Dr. Daniel Pipes and his Middle East Forum already have given Forcefield their generous support. Unlike Amnesty International and the other large human rights NGOs, Forcefield is brand new and does not have the network of funding they have. We are looking for our initial support from those good people who are with us in the battle to save our world from the scourge of radical Islam. The Forcefield Board greatly appreciates any donation people can give. While we still do not have our own web site, you can donate to Forcefield online (by credit card or Paypal) by going to mine, http://www.interfaithstrength.com; click the “Donate” button. Donations will allow us to continue the struggle against the anti-US, anti-Israel, Islamist propaganda machine that is advancing the cause of our adversaries and taking the lives of our friends.

Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” That 14-year-old rape victim—that child—I met in Northern India was no statistic, and God help us if we make her one.

Ethnic cleansing in neighbourhood

Originally published on India Politik, March 10, 2012

A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing

Author : Richard L Benkin

Publisher: Akshaya,

Price:360

Hindu population has dwindled in Bangladesh primarily due to Government-tolerated murder, rape, forced conversion, land grabs, etc. Learn more about this from Benkin’s book, writes BB Kumar

Partition in August 1947 was preceded, as well as followed, by unprecedented riots in the regions covering today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh, and as a reaction in other parts of India. Almost a million people were butchered; many millions crossed the newly created international boundary and became refugees. As a result, there was sharp decline in the Hindu population of West Pakistan — from 19.687 per cent in 1941 to 1.531 per cent in 1951 (Religious Demography of India, JK Bajaj and others). After Partition, as per Richard L Benkin’s latest book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: The Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, Hindus were a third of East Pakistan’s population; they remained less than a fifth in 1971 when East Pakistan became Bangladesh; and, today there are fewer than eight per cent Hindus in that country. Thus, says Benkin, the population of Hindus continuously dwindled, as they continued to face “Government-tolerated murder, rape, abduction, forced conversion, temple attacks, land grabs, and more.

It’s not that what happened in Pakistan and Bangladesh was not predicted earlier. Shaukat Hayat Khan, the then Prime Minister of undivided Punjab, foresaw that Hindus might not be allowed to stay in Pakistan. Savitri Devi — a Greek convert to Hinduism — in her book, A Warning to the Hindus, wrote about a decade earlier than Partition about the “riots worse than any of those India has seen in the past”. She predicted: “It is Hindus as a nation who are in danger of extinction, at least in certain parts of India”.

Benkin aptly details the scenario of millions killed, millions at risk, and billions silent. He goes to the roots of ethnic cleansing, describes how it is taking place, and how the Government colludes with Islamists to get the minorities eliminated. Two appendices list incidents of tolerated attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus.

The book calls for action to end this silent but decisive ethnic cleansing. It also exposes the hypocrisy of the powers that be: Whereas almost a fourth of the population of Bangladesh was thrown out, the world remained silent. The United Nations and the international community were nowhere to be seen.

Contrary to the popular perception that the condition of Hindus under the ‘secular’ Awami League Government would improve, the situation has remained practically the same. Here, it needs to be mentioned that Pakistan was once thought to be a rare phenomenon when it declared its Hindu minority enemy and had legal provision for vesting their property (Enemy Property Act). Free Bangladesh, rather than repelling the same, rechristened it as ‘Vested Property Act’ (VPA); it did not return the confiscated property to the minorities.

Benkin describes in detail vast appropriation of Hindu-owned land under the VPA, thus forcing the minorities to migrate from Bangladesh. Another shocking fact is that Hindu refugees, who came to India during the Bangladesh liberation war, found their lands and properties occupied by Muslims when they returned back to their homes in free Bangladesh.

Benkin systematically analyses various other factors, apart from VAP, responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh, such as the increased radicalisation of the Bangladeshi polity, complicity of the corrupt Government officials and rampant failure of the state to defend the victims. The Awami League Government has declined to repeal the eighth amendment of the Constitution, recognising Islam as the official state religion; radical Islamist parties, such as Jamaat-e-Islami, are allowed to communalise the polity.

India has miserable failed to safeguard the interests of Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan. After all, this was the basis of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and the Indira-Mujib Treaty. This is certainly a moral lapse on the part of the Government of India.

Benkin has not sacrificed hard facts for political correctness. He details the converging interests of the Islamists and the Maoists in their endeavour to break India. However, the book could have been more interesting had it dealt with Islamic negationism, creation of victimhood literature, competitive vote-bank politics and, of course, Hindus’ failure to understand Islam and its true nature. After all, one finds it difficult to differentiate between the treatment meted out to Bangladeshi Hindus and what Prophet Mohammed himself did to Beni Kainuka, Beni Koreiza and others.

The reviewer is the editor of a quarterly journal, Dialogue. He has also edited a book, Illegal Migration from Bangladesh

Culpability on part of Bangladesh govt goes well beyond tacit approval of Hindu ethnic cleansing

Originally published in Pravasi Today, 

In an interview to Pravasi Today, human rights activist DR. RICHARD BENKIN speaks about the state of the Hindu community in Bangladesh and much more

What are the basic human rights concerns of Hindus in Bangladesh?

I cannot comment on the concerns of Hindus in Bangladesh, but I can tell you that there must be an immediate end to continual oppression of a nature that should not be tolerated by any people. Almost every day brings incidents of murder, rape, assault and battery, arson, abduction (including child abduction), forced conversion to Islam, land grabs, and religious desecration. My book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: the Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus, provides detailed documentation of these constant attacks, even under the supposedly (but not actually) “pro-minority” Awami League. I verified major anti-Hindu actions in the Awami Leagues first year of rule to the tune of almost one per week. And it has not let up since. In one three-week period in 2010, there were seven confirmed major anti-Hindu attacks. So, we are talking about basic survival rather than any level of human rights concerns over and above that.

The other matter is that these actions are given a green light by whatever government is in charge in Dhaka. Unfortunately, attacks on minorities occur worldwide; the key question is what the government does when they occur. Do they prosecute them as crimes, or do they allow them to continue with impunity? The litany of incidents documented in the book, as well as others, include only crimes that the Bangladeshi government has actively allowed to occur. In many, local police or other officials participated in the carnage. Although Hindus are formally citizens of Bangladesh, normal legal protections are suspended for them in that country.

How are these different from the problems faced by Hindus in other parts of the world?

I cannot speak authoritatively about the conditions faced by Hindus worldwide, although their oppression in places like Pakistan, Malaysia, and so forth are rather well known. Culpability on the part of the Bangladesh government goes even well beyond the tacit approval of Hindu ethnic cleansing noted above. There are at least two laws that provide the ideological justification and economic engine for ethnic cleansing.

The first is the Eighth Amendment to the Bangladeshi constitution that declares Islam the official state religion. In doing so, it marginalizes all non-Muslims in the country. Imagine how Indian Muslims would react if this country declared Hinduism the official state religion. Imagine how any European Muslims would react if their nations officially declared themselves Christian nations. Yet, they (nor anyone else) see the problem of Bangladesh (and many other nations) marginalizing all non-Muslims by declaring their states officially Islamic. The Eighth Amendment declares that no law shall contravene the law or spirit of Islam; it allows for funding of madrassas and other Islamic institutions, but not those of non-Muslims. If, in fact, the very constitution pronounces non-Muslims marginal, how far are we from justifying their lack of rights, powerlessness to prevent physical attacks and plunder of their property? The clear implication of the Eighth Amendment is that non-Muslims are somehow not quite fit to be full citizens of Bangladesh.

The other is the Vested Property Act, which allows the Bangladeshi government to seize the land of non-Muslims on the flimsiest of pretexts and distribute it to Muslims of their choice. It is an exact duplicate of Pakistan’s Enemy Property Act, which was past as retaliation against Hindus for Pakistan’s embarrassing defeat at the hands of India in 1965. In my on-site research, countless refugees told of how their property was invaded by local Muslims, and when they went to the police, they were told to leave Bangladesh. Once they left, their property was declared “vested” and given to their attackers. A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing: the Murder of Bangladesh’s Hindus details the role of the Vested Property Act in a three day anti-Hindu pogrom that took place in Dhaka in 2009.

The Awami League, in stark and cynical contrast to what it claims to be, had opportunities to get rid of both laws but refused to do so. Just before its election, the Supreme Court issued a Rule Nisi that asked the government to show why the Vested Property Act was not in contradiction with the Bangladeshi constitution and should not be rescinded. The existing caretaker government left it to the elected government, the Awami League, which never responded, allowing the law to stand.

In April and May, 2011, the Supreme Court declared several provisions of the Constitution problematic and charged the Awami League dominated parliament to submit new ones. It did for every problematic law cited—except the Eighth Amendment. In Bangladesh, Hindus have been told to expect no justice from the government of Bangladesh, no matter which party is in power.

Share with us the history of ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus.

According to the 1951 Pakistan census, Hindus represented just under a third of the East Pakistan population. When East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, they were just under a fifth; 30 years later less than a tenth; and according to several reliable estimates under eight percent today. Anti-Hindu ethnic cleansing took its first great leap forward under the government of Sheikh Mujibar Rahman whenit passed the Vested Property Act in 1974; and another shot in the arm when the Ershad regime passed the Eighth Amendment in 1988. As noted above, the anti-Hindu atrocities, documented in my book and elsewhere continued and continue unbroken.

But perhaps the worst blow for Hindus came when they looked to the new Awami League government to keep the promises they made to Hindus and stop the ethnic cleansing. As noted above, they have only re-affirmed it. It should also be noted that in April 2009, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told a visiting French naval commander that her government would “repeal all anti-minority laws in Bangladesh.” That is, she admitted that hers is a country with anti-minority laws. Why has no one said or done anything about that. What would happen if the Indian prime minister said the same thing; or the US president?  And, by the way, no anti-minority laws were repealed.

How have you helped in restoring the basic rights of Bangladeshi Hindu refugees in West Bengal and other parts of India?

Until the ethnic cleansing stops, I will consider none of the small victories we won worth anything. It is not for me to restore the rights; they are the people’s rights and no one has the power to take them from or give them to the people! The day we settle for anything less than complete victory is the day we accept injustice as something that is all right.

You have termed Kashmir as South Asia’s West Bank. Explain.

The parallels are uncanny.  The first is a matter of incrementalism. The ultimate focus of the forces of international jihad is not Kashmir or the West Bank (more properly, Judea and Samaria) per se. They have targeted India and Israel alike as kaffir nations that must come under Islamic rule. Strategically, they would find little support for calls that both nations be dismantled. In fact, their “negotiating” positions suggest that their goal is some sort of peaceful co-existence between the two peoples involved. But that is nothing more than a façade. With regard to Kashmir, demands for “self-determination” and disingenuous claims that they lack of it is a violation of human rights did not surface until the Hindu population of the valley was ethnically cleansed. If their concern was self-determination, they would have raised them earlier; but that is not their concern. Regarding Judea and Samaria, Arabs could have had an independent state on that territory with Jerusalem as its capital any time between 1948 and 1967. First, they rejected it when the UN offered it. Then, during the Arab occupation of those territories, first the fiction of a Palestinian people had to be created. Then, they could have petitioned the occupying powers—Jordan and Egypt—for their own state. Instead of doing that even once, their charters called only for the destruction of Israel, which was settled on territories they now claim have nothing to do with the so-called occupation. If it was a matter of their self-determination, the conflict could have been settled over 60 years ago and saved a lot of lives around the world. But that is not their concern.

The second parallel is that the international talking heads and left-leaning racketeers in the media, diplomatic corps, and academia have without regard to historical fact taken up the faux claims of Islamists without any modicum of critical thought. That has put constant pressure on both Israel and India to justify their continued national well-being, not to mention unwarranted charges of violating human rights.

What steps have been taken by the Bangladeshi government in providing right to quality to the Hindu community?

As noted above, they have taken none. Moreover, they have passed on the easy chances they had to do so. At most, all we ever have gotten from the Bangladeshi government regardless of party is empty words.

How can we even consider that the government has done anything when such atrocities continue unabated and with the government’s complicity?

Create awareness amongst Indian Diaspora about human rights: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

(Originally published 24, Feburary 2012 in Pravasti Today)

New Delhi, February 24: The second international conference on human rights concerns of Indian Diaspora was inaugurated by founder of Art of Living, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in Hindi Bhawan here. Speaking on the occasion, Ravi Shankar said that there have been many instances of violations of human rights of Indian Diasporic community members in different parts of the world. He cited an instance of how temples in Malaysia have been destroyed. He said that there is a need to generate awareness about human rights values amongst the Indian Diaspora. He stressed that their grievances should be given proper attention, but was concerned that there is not a proper platform where they can vent their pent-up anger. He also added that there is a need for an organization which serves as a security system or acts as a support mechanism.

Ravi Shankar was glad to say that Indians have come forward while speaking on the issue of human rights. He also stressed that it is the duty of both the people and administration to honour the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Speaking on how the Supreme Court slammed the police action against yoga guru Baba Ramdev in the early hours of June 5 last year in Ramlila Maidan, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar said that it was not only the case of police excess, but also how “people behind police” failed at the time. He indirectly blamed senior ministers for the crackdown.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar said that along with human rights, it is paramount to cultivate human values. He also applauded the job done by Human Rights Defense (India). “It is a great act of humanity. Their work will get my support and cooperation,” said the ambassador of peace. Gouri Shankar Gupta, an educationist and social reformer and Additional Solicitor General of India Amarjit Singh Chandhiok were also spoke during the inauguration.

Prominent human rights activists Dr. Richard Benkin, P Waytha Moorthy, Ram Singh Sodho and a Swami from Dera Dhuni Baba camp were honoured by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for their works in defending human rights of Indians abroad.

Dr. Benkin is an independent human rights activist who has worked towards the correction of injustices worldwide. He has been presented a ‘Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition’ for his “commitment and dedication to preserving human rights in the case of Shoaib Choudhury (a Bangladeshi journalist)” by US Congressman Mark Kirk. Waytha Moorthy is a Malaysian lawyer of Tamil origin who has fought for the human rights concerns of Malaysian Tamils. Ram Singh is a well-known politician from Pakistan’s southern Sindh province who resigned in 2011 and has since moved to India. Dera Dhuni Baba society facilitated shelter for Hindu refugees from Pakistan and worked towards their amelioration.  

Speaking on the occasion, ASG Chandhiok applauded the efforts of HRDI on being a proper platform paying heed to the human rights concerns of Indian Diaspora. He also put stress on the fact that it is important for the central and state governments to discuss the legal aspects and lay out plans to resolve the human rights violations of Indians spread across the world.

Dr. Benkin said that the lives of around one and a half million Hindus is in danger in Bangladesh. He also said that the ruling Awami League, which claims to a pro-minority government, has not been able to protect the rights of Hindus in the country. 

During the inauguration of the conference, M N Krisknamani, President, HRDI, said that human rights violations of Indian community members in a cause of grave concern. He also added that proper attention have not been given to the cases of human rights violations of Indians in countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka on international forums. 

Highlighting the work done by HRDI for thousands of migrant families from Pakistan, organization’s General Secretary Rajesh Gogna said that it has presented protest-petitions and intervention papers to the government of India with regard to human rights issues. He also added that next year’s conference would be held from January 5-6.

Chairman of the organising committee Gopal Agarwal highlighted the pivotal role played by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in conflict resolution and spreading the cause of interfaith harmony across the globe. He also said that the second day of the conference will have dedicated sessions to discuss human rights violations of people of Indian origin in countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Bangladesh among others. The second day of the conference will be held in Indian Law Institute.

Datuk A Vithilingam, president of Malaysia Hindu Sangam Association, Mahendra Utchanah from Mauritius, Bimal Kedia, Prasanna Chaturvedi among other were also present during the conference. 

Ethnic cleansing of Bangla Hindus is on

(Originally published 21 Feb 2012 by Express News Service)

TIRUPATI: US-based human rights activist Richard Benkin, who has been tirelessly fighting for the cause of Bangladeshi Hindus, urged all humans across the globe to 'recognise' the silent ethnic cleansing of Hindus going on unchecked in Bangladesh and raise their voice against atrocities on the Hindus there.

Speaking on 'Ethnic Cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh' jointly organised by Madabhushi Institute of Public Affairs (MAIPA) and Bhavan’s Kendra, here on Monday, Benkin expressed deep anguish over international community, human rights organisations, people and government of India keeping quiet on the ordeal of Hindus in Bangladesh, which he said was emboldening radical Islamic elements.  
These elements continued their crimes against Hindus terrorised them forced them to flee from the country.

Stating that Hindus who were one third of East Pakistan's population, at time of partition of India in 1947 had dwindled to nine percent in 1971 when Bangaldesh was created and further down to 7 percent now.  He stressed on exposing Bangladesh government's complicity abetting crimes against Hindus, forcing them flee the country or covert to Islam.

Citing that Jews in United States in one voice had raised alarm on  atrocities on Jews in Communist Russia in 1971, he wanted firstly the citizens of India to be made fully aware of silent ethnic cleansing of hindus in Bangladesh, raise their voice louder and louder, start a movement here to build up a strong public opinion to halt what he called "government tolerated murder, rape, abduction and forced conversion of Hindus to Islam in Bangladesh.

Later answering a question, he said that the UNO could do anything to save the hindus and added that it is the Indian government which has to act fast to stop atrocities on Hindus. 

In this connection, he said that Australian government had promptly acted on attacks against Indian students, there, which saw attacks come down and accused Bangladesh government of totally supporting radical elements to continue their crimes against Hindus.
On the occasion, MAIPA chairman and former speaker, Agarala Eswara Reddy spoke and released the book 'English Blues' brought out by The New Indian Express.

Ethnic cleansing of Hindus on rise in Bangladesh.

(Originally published 26, Feb 2012 in The Sunday Standard)

HYDERABAD: A missing population of 49 million religious minorities over 64 years has been the elephant in the room Bangladesh and its neighbours choose to ignore. Calling it a case of ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus, US-based human rights activist Dr. Richard Benkin has worked hard to expose the Red-Green alliance of communists and radical Islamists in South East Asia. “During its first year in office when the Awami League party came into power in 2007, the cases of violence against Bangladeshi Hindus averaged at one attack per week during. Till 2010-2011, it continues to be one anti-Hindu case every three days,” observes Benkin who addressed students at the Osmania University Centre for International Programme here and later at the Madabhushi Ananthasayanam Institute of Public Affairs in Tirupati. Stating that Hindus who were one third of East Pakistan’s population at the time of partition of India in 1947 had dwindled to 9 per cent in 1971 when Bangladesh was created and further down to 7 per cent of the current population.

Known better for securing the release of Bangladeshi journalist and editor of The Weekly Blitz, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, in 2006 due to his pro-Zionist comments and criticism of rise of radical Islam in Bangladesh, Benkin currently works with the Bangladeshi Hindu refugees in India. “These refugees, who have settled in various parts of West Bengal, Assam and in transit camps in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, are not officially identified and since they do not receive any aid, they are usually squatters who scrimp for a living,” says Benkin. The driving force for the exodus are chiefly the ‘government-tolerated’ cases of rape, arson, murder, deliberate religious desecration and forced conversions of the Hindus in Bangladesh. “It is not just the radical Islamists who lead the attacks. The reluctance of the Bangladeshi government to take cognizance of the crime and initiate criminal proceedings against the perpetrators has resulted in increase in local attacks. The Vested Property Act that gives the government power to distribute the land of religious minorities among its people once they flee the country threatened by terror has led to forced and violent eviction of Hindus by their Muslim neighbours. The economic engine drives the ethnic cleansing,” observes the human rights activist.

India’s reluctance to speak up against the atrocities has been puzzling for the rights activist. “When I present my case to the US government, they ask me that if the problem were so big, why India doesn’t say anything. I often wonder, are my resources greater than that of the Bangladeshi and Indian government put together, the RAW and CIA, the media of the world put together, that no one seems to notice the crimes being committed against these religious minorities?”questions Benkin who has been tracking instances of human rights violation against Bangladeshi Hindus since 2007.  He pointed out that the UNO could not do anything to save the Hindus and it is the Indian government which has to act fast to stop atrocities on the meager 15 million Hindu population in Bangladesh.

“No one is too small to make a difference,” is the motto that has kept the rights activist going, who believes that it is time Bangladesh and its neighbours took cognizance of the ethnic cleansing and put a cog in the wheels of the licensed acts of violence.

A strong case for defence of minorities.

(Originally published  Feb 19, 2012 in IBN Live)

HYDERABAD: A missing population of 49 million, all belonging to the same religious minority, Hindus, have been victims of a systematic ethnic cleansing in the neighboring Bangladesh. Human rights activist and writer Dr Richard Benkin highlighted the apathy of Delhi and Dhaka in taking cognizance of this targeting of Hindus in Bangladesh during his address at the Osmania University Centre for International Programme (OUCIP) as part of the monthly lecture series, Samanvaya, on Thursday.
“I often wonder, are my resources greater than that of the Bangladeshi and Indian government put together, the RAW and CIA, the media of the world put together, that no one seems to notice the crimes being committed against these religious minorities?” questioned Dr Benkin who has been studying the incidents of human rights violation against Hindus in Bangladesh since 2007.

“Multiple incidents of violence against the Hindus took place in Bangladesh since 2008, the time when the Awami League came to power. These incidents include murder, land grabbing which is legalized by the government under the Vested Properties Act, rape, deliberate religious desecration, arson and forced conversions which is lawful under the Bangladeshi Constitution. The worst part is that the government does not initiate proceedings against these crimes perpetuated against religious minorities,” observed Dr Benkin who was responsible for freeing Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury who was imprisoned by the government for his articles warning against the rise of Islamic radicals in his country in 2006.
The rights activist also mentioned gruesome accounts narrated by Hindu Bangladeshi refugees in India in West Bengal and Assam who are squatters and do not receive aid from humanitarian organizations or the government.

“For the remaining 15 million Hindus in Bangladesh, let us try to save them. My book, A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing, released last month aims to bring out the issue so that no one can pretend anymore that the trouble does not exist,” concluded Benkin.

Book on ‘atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh’ presented to CM

Gandhinagar, 15 February, 2012

USA-based Jewish leader Dr. Richard Benkin paid a courtesy visit to Chief Minister Narendra Modi today and acquainted him about his study regarding the atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh. Mr. Benkin also gifted to the Chief Minister his recent book ‘A Quiet Case of Ethnic Cleansing’, which throws light on the bloodshed of Hindus in Bangladesh.

Mr. Benkin has dug into the facts regarding the incidents of massacre, atrocities, coercive proselytization of Hindus into Islam, abducting and sexual assaults against Hindus in Bangladesh. He wants Indian and American governments to come up with the policies to stop such serious incidents to protect human rights in true sense.

Dr. Benkin regretted that the Central government believes Hindus don’t have any issues in Bangladesh. According him, the atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh can spark the sentiments of any humanitarian.

Dr.Benkin has put this matter before the American senate and has also got support of human rights groups. He is also in try to initiate a movement for the Hindus living in Bangladesh through NGO of America. Gujarat and India should wake up for the cause of human rights of Hindus in Bangladesh, he appealed.

Dr.Benkin also expressed interest in developing ties between Israel and Gujarat.

India and Israel
20 Years of Possibilities and Potential

Originally published in The Diplomatist, January 2012

Dr. Richard Benkin

The rise of radical Islam created a unique bond between India and Israel.Both are democratic republics; both are secular despite being associated with particular faiths; both have similar-sized Muslim minorities that harbour violent elements associated with foreign and antagonistic entities; and while Islamists might call the United States the “great Satan,” there are no two countries they are intent on destroying more than Israel and India.Both nations also have similar parochial disputes with hostile neighbours  

It seems inconceivable that India and Israel lacked any relationship for most of their relatively brief histories and established full diplomatic ties the same year Israel and China did (1992). Yet by 2003, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, acknowledged that the relationship was already second in importance “… only to Israel’s relations with the United States.” Today, the Israel-India relationship stands as one of the most important bilateral ties of the 21st century and arguably the most important in the fight against radical jihad, impelled by the altered geo-political landscape in the 1990s.

End of Alignments; Beginning of New Partnerships

The fall of the Soviet Union required nations to re-assess their alignments. The Americans and their allies were Israel’s major supporters; the Soviets and theirs were its major antagonists. Ever since Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s reign, India was aligned with the USSR. Even his ‘non-aligned movement’ was adamantly anti-American and anti-Israel. 

The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 ended those alignments. The rise of radical Islam created a unique bond between India and Israel. Both are democratic republics; both are secular despite being associated with particular faiths; both have similar-sized Muslim minorities that harbour violent elements associated with foreign and antagonistic entities; and, while Islamists might call the United States the “great Satan,” there are no two countries they are intent on destroying more than Israel and India. Both nations also have similar parochial disputes with hostile neighbours. Kashmir is India’s ‘West Bank,’ because many would sacrifice both territories in land-for-peace formulae that few believe will bring genuine peace. In those struggles, both nations are regularly accused of human rights violations by nations that ignore the ethnic cleansing which preceded the often-disingenuous charges.

A Blossoming Relationship between Natural Allies

In this changed geo-political landscape, the Israel-India relationship has blossomed in hitherto unseen ways; most obviously in the military and security fields, with special attention on the Islamist threat. For almost a decade, Israel was India’s second largest defence supplier until 2009 when it became the largest. The decline of Russia, India’s main supplier for decades, provided the major impetus and imperative for India to seek a new trading partner. An unnamed Indian official told me that the tipping point was the 26/11 “Al Qaida-aligned attack on Mumbai (and our inability to retaliate), which highlighted India’s weakness in air and naval surveillance.” Turning to Israel, India bought Israel Aerospace Industries’ EL/M-2083 radar system valued at $600 million to “be deployed along the Pakistani border.” Since then, Israel and India have moved beyond the earlier stage of one-way military trade to joint projects in developing both offensive and defensive weapons.

Aside from security cooperation, Israel’s Rural Development Organization, with the goal of empowering India’s rural poor, has produced schools, income generating projects and environmental efforts, and trained locals to carry out the program independently. Israel also sent emergency teams to help Indian earthquake victims and provided aid during other disasters, both natural and man-made. Israel continues to maintain programs to improve medical care and agricultural technologies in rural India.

Numerous points of cultural similarity have also emerged since the lid was taken off. India rapidly replaced Turkey as Israelis’ favourite tourist destination because, as noted in Reform Judaism, “Israelis feel an instinctive affinity for India (whose) history is virtually devoid of anti-Semitism.” That cannot be overestimated for Jews, who seem to be walking on territory watered with the blood of the people everywhere; but not in India. I recall being in the holy Hindu city of Rishikesh recently, where large numbers of young Israelis had come to drink in the spirituality offered there and in nearby Haridwar.

Overcoming Critical Obstacles

A significant obstacle remains, however, to the countries’ virtually unlimited economic, military, security and cultural cooperation. Despite the advantages both countries have accrued, the vast majority of India’s media, academics, and ‘old guard’ in government cling to outmoded philosophies that do not reflect 21st century reality. 

For instance, the Indian government supported the Palestinian Authority’s attempt at UN recognition—though the majority rejected it as counterproductive; supported the anti-Israel Goldstone Report—though its author and many others subsequently repudiated it as biased; announced support for Syria’s Bashir Assad in his fight with Israel—though even fellow Arabs recognize him as a despot and international pariah.

India’s mainstream media claimed in 2009 that Israel “massacred 40 Palestinians”—later proven false but never retracted. In 2010, the media reported that Israel’s defensive attack on the Gaza flotilla was “an act of piracy of state terrorism”—though a generally hostile UN vindicated Israel.

Further, anti-Israel sentiment on Indian campuses manifests itself in regular anti-Israel attacks. There are attempts to hijack our human rights agenda to an anti-Israel one; professors pushing an anti-Israel narrative as objective truth, as faculty and students consistently report; and, by offering Arab or Islamic studies while rejecting classes on Israel or Jewish history not taught from an ideological and anti-Israel perspective.

The elites’ international counterparts, rather than their fellow Indians, comprise their reference group. Their enforced political correctness, if unchecked, will prevent Israel-India relations from yielding their potential for the peoples of both nations. Fortunately, there are signs of their grass-roots rejection and growing pro-Israel sentiment among the populace. As one journalist for a major Indian news outlet told me, “there is something of a generation gap between the editors and publishers” and today’s younger professionals. The disconnect, he and others told me, exists because of the fast pace at which realities and relationships have changed. Other journalists report similar pressure from the top and change among the masses. Pro-Israel groups are galvanizing students on several campuses, and openly pro-Israel students won three of four posts in Delhi University’s 2010 Student Union elections. Students and faculty I have spoken with over the past several years display a consistent hunger for information about Israeli technology, its life in general, and its success against terrorism.

Overcoming this last vestige will enable even greater cooperation. The Israeli Space Agency is looking to coordinate its program with India’s. Israel is being considered as a location for Bollywood productions. It is looking to apply cutting edge chemical and technological advances to help irrigate arid and unproductive farmland. Both nations with deserved reputations as technological innovators are planning joint efforts for state of the art military technology.

Without doubt, India and Israel are natural allies with overlapping interests that increase every day.