Whenever I tell people I “do human rights
work,” they automatically assume I am some sort of leftist. People
who know me find that hilarious; but it is rather tragic at the same
time because it reflects the fact that the left has imposed its own
definition of what does and does not constitute human rights. For
several years, I have been working with activists on the ground in South
Asia primarily; people like anti-jihadist Muslim Salah Uddin Shoaib
Choudhury, who was imprisoned and tortured by the Bangladeshis after
exposing the rise of radical Islam in that self-styled “moderate Muslim
country.” Most of these dedicated individuals have sacrificed their
comfort, their relationships, their security, some even their lives to
defend the victims, and when asked will tell you that they would do so
again. Among the hundreds whom I work, we would be hard pressed to
find any who are not politically conservative or who do not recognize
the left as one of human rights’ two greatest opponents, the other being
Islamists. Thus, the current international zeitgeist will
not allow their efforts—or more important their causes—to be recognized
as true human rights battles. Perhaps it is because they are openly
pro-US and pro-Israel, perhaps because they are fighting the Red-Green
alliance of leftists and Islamists. Perhaps it is because the left
cares more about ideology than people—which is only one reason why
conservatives are far better suited to advocate for the downtrodden.
Recently,
they have seen this double standard on display with the manufactured
furor over the Gaza terror flotilla. While the United Nations,
European Union, Muslim world, and the talking heads in the mainstream
media are up in arms over the killing of nine “activists,” with suspect
ties and motivations, they have not wasted a single breath over the
destruction of Hindu communities in Kashmir, Pakistan, and now
Bangladesh by Islamists who have been allowed to operate freely by
complicit governments and an uncaring world whose silence tells the
perpetrators, “Go ahead, they’re only Hindus.”
Between
1941 and 2001, the Hindu population of Kashmir dropped from 15 to one
percent, with the most precipitous drop coming around 1990 at the hands
of Islamic militants. From about 1965 to 2001, Pakistan’s Hindu
population went from almost one in five to one percent, and I saw many
of them streaming into India recently ahead of the advancing
Taliban. The Bangladeshi Hindu population fell from almost one
third at the time of India’s partition to nine percent in 2001; and
13-15 million remaining Hindus face ongoing murder, gang rape,
abduction, forced conversion (to Islam), assault, dispossession of their
ancestral lands, and religious desecration—even under a new government
that the left, the media, and the diplomatic corps have declared
“pro-minority.”
Reports
of these atrocities come to us daily, and we have developed a strong
network of informants and investigators to confirm or refute the
allegations. Our conclusions are made with caution, so we recognize
that even what we can confirm is likely just the tip of the
iceberg. During just the first two months of this new government’s
tenure, we confirmed major anti-Hindu atrocities at the rate of one and a
half per week; in Spring 2009, we confirmed an anti-Hindu pogrom behind
a police station in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka; and in a 25 day
period this March and April, we confirmed at least eight anti-Hindu
incidents: rape (including child rape); abduction; forced
conversion to Islam; beatings that sent critically injured victims to
the hospital; attempted murder; and more. The government took no
action in any of these cases with cover-ups reaching the ruling party’s
upper echelons.
What
makes it more chilling is that these attacks are not carried out by al
Qaeda or other terror groups but by the victims’ neighbors, who acted
knowing they could do so with impunity. Millions have been killed
or otherwise violated; and State University of New York’s Professor
Sachi Dastidar estimates that some 49 million Hindus are “missing” from
the Bangladeshi census: the murdered, those forced to immigrate or
convert to Islam, and those never born. While there has been no
outrage about this atrocity—aside from those of us fighting it, the
victims, and their families—the international left never tires of
calling for strenuous action on behalf of Palestinians whose living
conditions are like royalty’s compared to the squalor and illicit
refugee camps in which most victims live. I know; I have seen
both.
History’s
most successful cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing have occurred
when a committed cadre of true believers convince masses of common
people to commit heinous acts—that they otherwise might not even dream
of committing—against a targeted minority. That is what is
happening in Bangladesh where there might be no Gestapo or Janjaweed,
but where the Hindu population will disappear, perhaps within our
lifetime, without immediate action. Yet, when the left demands that
we act with such immediacy, it is for nine people who purposely put
themselves in harm’s way to support a terrorist entity that lobs
missiles onto schools in Southern Israel.
Perhaps
they would help us if we said “Zionists” are killing the Bangladeshi
Hindus.
Posted on 06/08/2010 4:48 PM by Richard L.
Benkin
