OPED | Tuesday, June 9, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Strange silence on Islamist terror
Richard L Benkin
Obama
should have spoken up for the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh who
face terrible atrocities. But he has chosen to remain stunningly silent
on South Asia’s ‘Hindu Holocaust’
There is growing concern
in the United States over President Barack Obama’s foreign policy,
especially in South Asia and West Asia. Although Mr Obama still enjoys
media support and spillover goodwill from the election, more Americans
are questioning his policies’ wisdom. He is alienating friends and
trying to woo enemies; pushing away his strongest allies in the war
against Islamist extremism, Israel and India, and pretending that
nations behind global jihad (Iran and Pakistan) will help defeat it.
Even
members of his own party are wary. When Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton recently appeared before the US House Appropriations Committee
to deliver the Obama line on Israel, it was Democrat Nita Lowey (along
with Republican Mark Kirk) who replied that if the Administration was
going to tie Israel’s hands, the House would counter by “restricting
aid to the Palestinian Authority”.
Missing in the debate thus
far has been concern for the developing ‘Hindu Holocaust’ in South
Asia. In several policy pronouncements numerous speeches about the
situation in South Asia, Mr Obama never once mentioned the human rights
disaster that is rapidly bringing an end to the remaining Pakistani
Hindu community. Nor has protecting 13,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus ever
figured in his grand design for South Asia.
While President
Obama speaks of the need for international support and regional
cooperation, he never once suggested that international aid be sent to
care for the thousands of Pakistani Hindus who have been streaming into
Indian Punjab. He has never challenged human rights groups like Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch to investigate regularly-reported
atrocities against Bangladeshi Hindus and the ensuing refugee
nightmare; nor has he ever suggested that Bangladesh’s Vested Property
Act is a racist law that is incompatible with his vision of peace in
South Asia.
To be sure, the destruction of Pakistan’s Hindus has
taken several decades, and it has taken three decades to reduce Hindus
from under one in five Bangladeshis to under one in 10; so, silence
about it cannot be laid at Mr Obama’s feet alone. But in Mr Barack
Obama, Americans have a leader with a grand scheme for what he expects
to be the future of South Asia to be — evidently a South Asia that
tolerates anti-Hindu ethnic cleansing by Muslim radicals. At the very
least, Mr Obama should be demanding help for the victims — no less so
than that given the ‘Palestinian refugees’ who have an entire UN agency
devoted to them.
Evidence of atrocities continues to pour in
almost daily. If the US and India tolerate it, we can hardly expect the
weak civilian Governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh to act. In March,
I interviewed several victims in West Bengal myself. Most poignant was
the testimony of a Hindu family that had crossed into India only 22
days earlier with their 14-year-old daughter who told me about being
gang-raped by Islamist radicals in Bangladesh. The ‘Hindu Holocaust’ is
real and it is happening now. Will an outraged world act or do what it
normally does and cry for the victims only after their death?
In
1941, Western Allies began getting intelligence about the Nazi
Holocaust against the Jews and others. Some initially dismissed the
reports but eventually recognised their veracity. In the end, though,
they said the best way to help the victims was to win the war and so
did nothing. If that’s Mr Obama’s guide, he had better check his
history. Because the vast majority of Holocaust victims were murdered
after the Allies decided to help the victims by ignoring them.
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