Though Muslims are not a monolith and there are as many diverse kinds of believers in Islam as there are heretics, dissenters, and reformers seeking to bring in a Muslim Renaissance, the general perception is that Muslims never object to the atrocities committed in the name of their God, their holy book, and the Prophet. Due to the advent of technology and social media, the honest and rational Muslims who do raise a voice have started becoming visible, but their numbers are not considerable enough yet. So even though a sizeable number of them acknowledge the atrocities committed by the likes of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terror groups, since the brutalities are so nauseating even for radicalised people, when it comes to violations committed in day-to-day lives by perpetrators of Muslim origin, there is denial en masse.
It is also true that some Muslims fear that acknowledging atrocities committed by members of their faith might lead to stigmatisation or negative stereotypes affecting the entire community. Hence my consistent insistence on the existence of the silent majority in the Muslim population everywhere who have elected mutism in the face of the fear of ostracism. Yet this penchant for denying violations by one of their own does more harm in the long run, especially in a country as diverse as India, where 20 crore Muslims must coexist with the Hindu majority.
Post 9/11 a whole industry of apologia and revisionism appeared in mainstream media and left-dominated campuses across continents. Every time there was a Charlie Hebdo massacre or a Mashal Khan stoned to death or an honour killing or a case of regressive practices like FGM in Islamic countries was brought to the fore, a Mehdi Hasan, a Hasan Minaj, or a Reza Aslan was recruited to deflect the criticism of Muslim radical behaviour and theological ambiguities in the Scriptures. This obscurantism has not gone unnoticed by non-Muslim communities and cultures across the world and due to the advent of technology, they are calling out the hypocrisy and pushing back against the Muslim-dominated narratives of persecution under the garb of victimhood.
This obscurantism has been visible across Muslim-majority countries and conflict zones involving Islamic issues for decades now and a clear pattern has emerged. Many Muslims deny the culpability of their terrorists, their strong men, and their civilians too, as is the case in the atrocities committed by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists in Kashmir, the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, or the exploitation of Hindu women in West Bengal by the TMC-associated goon Sheikh Shahjahan, also known as “Bhai”. The useful idiots from Hindu/non-Muslim heritage are as usual busy appeasing the regressive Muslim groups for their vote bank politics or intellectualising terrorism as decolonization.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe dissenters of azadi in Kashmir were the first ones to bring attention to the atrocities being committed by local, or Pakistan-ISI-trained Islamic jihadis. I recall during the UN Survey on Children Affected in Armed Conflict, 2001, in Kupwara, the participants (my colleagues) became aware of a few Kashmiri women who had been abducted by the jihadis and taken across the border. The families of these women were not even visited by the ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ with their human rights shops and atrocities tourism. The families of these women faced ostracism in the hamlets they resided in. No one raised a voice about these women’s human rights, and they were conveniently forgotten, often excused as sacrifices to the “noble cause” of the communal azadi (tehreek).
Similarly, on October 7, Hamas terrorists along with Palestinian civilians, journalists, and photojournalists attacked several kibbutzim and a music festival. The horrors of that day are still being revealed every week as the Israeli counter-offensive intensifies, and Gaza is reduced to rubble. The Israelis have painstakingly documented the atrocities and postmortems for the international press, and the details from the testimonies of their forensic experts are chilling. The apologists of the atrocities committed by Hamas started their narrative on social media even before the IDF had a plan of counter-offensive in place and they managed to brainwash the wokes in Western universities with their Left-liberal denial that no Israelis were held hostage and that babies beheaded by Hamas was fake news.
That is the extent of denial, now evident in the alliance between the Islamists and the regressive Left, and the Liberal wokes. So much so that the wave of anti-Semitism that swept Nazi-occupied regions in the 1930s and ’40s was revisited in 2023 on the streets of Britain and US university campuses. The Muslim denial of the October 7 attacks is not abating as their “Intifada factory” finds creative ways of maintaining the narrative of “decolonisation”, “resisting occupation”, and “breaking free out of prison”. It has turned so ugly that posters can be seen reading “Rape is Resistance” in rallies. For those of us who grew up watching the Kashmiri Intifada factory intellectualise terrorism, this is familiar.
Cut to February this year when news from Sandeshkhali finally made it to mainstream media, despite the efforts of the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government to curb press freedom and arrest journalists reporting the exploitation of Hindu women at the hands of “Bhai”. The women belonging to Sandeshkhali, a village in the North 24 Parganas district, have disturbing accounts of abduction, sexual abuse, rape, torture, and harassment in addition to claims of police apathy and inaction.
The Left-liberal denial, such as the article published by Shekhar Gupta in The Print is a continuation of this pattern since the 1990s and the Red-Green Alliance of useful non-Muslim idiots and Muslim communalists which burgeoned after 9/11. It is almost always women who bear the brunt of this denial, gaslighting, and obscurantism, be it the Hindu women of Sandeshkhali, or the Israeli women of the music festival and various kibbutz, along with those four Kashmiri women of Kupwara district in North Kashmir.
If Muslims want to be taken seriously over the socio-religious issues they may have, or their economic woes, then they need to come clean in large numbers. Goons like Sheikh Shahjahan need to be condemned as should the October 7 atrocities by the Hamas terrorists. The end goal is co-existence with other cultures, communities, and religions, but if we never look in the mirror and self-reflect, how are we to evolve, develop, progress in the 21st century and build a society based on justice, tolerance, inclusiveness, and critical thinking with dignity and freedom? Only by acknowledging that some of our perpetrators are of Muslim origin and their bad behaviour called out — every single time.
The author is a writer and an educationist from Srinagar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.