Today Israel, tomorrow India: Why American protesters’ path to ‘salvation’ goes from Gaza to Kashmir

Rutgers University in the United States has agreed to the demands of protesters on the campus to club Kashmiris with Palestinians in the list of “occupied people”. Are we surprised? No, if we have not blinded ourselves to the campus realities of the West. Innate anti-Israel and anti-Jew sentiments are as strong in the Western colleges and universities as anti-India and anti-Hindu feelings.

First, let’s look into the anti-Israeli/Jewish sentiments in the West. If one thinks anti-Israelism on Western campuses is a post-Gaza war phenomenon, then rest assured you have already been misled and misinformed. For, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war has only opened the lid on the thriving anti-Israeli/Jewish ecosystem on these campuses.

But here again, there’s a difference between America and Europe. Though we are today witnessing the worst of protests on US campuses, the situation in the rest of America is largely unaffected—just the same way the azaadi and tukde tukde voices in some of the top Indian institutions had no echo outside the campuses a few years ago. The situation in Europe, however, is far worse. The anti-Israeli/Jewish sentiments have entrenched deep in European society, thanks to the rise of the Far Right in the West and, more importantly, the massive, largely uncurbed immigration of Muslims from the Middle East and north Africa.

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Manfred Gerstenfeld, in his book Demonizing Israel and the Jews, quotes a 2011 study in seven countries by the University of Bielefeld on behalf of the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The study “illustrates that viewing Israel as having genocidal intentions towards the Palestinians—which is tantamount to Israel being a Nazi state—has profoundly permeated the mainstream of European societies”. The study found that 63 per cent of Poles think that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians”. The lowest figures in the study, writes Gerstenfeld, concerned Italy and the Netherlands, where 38 per cent and 39 per cent of the population think so, respectively. “In Hungary, Great Britain, Germany, and Portugal, between 40 per cent and 50 per cent hold these deeply anti-Semitic views,” he adds.

No wonder Europe has for long been witnessing anti-Israeli/Jewish hate incidents on a regular basis. Though one often hears of the French encounters with such hate crimes—maybe France’s non-compromising stand on secularism makes it stand out—it’s the Scandinavian region that is worst hit by anti-Israeli/Jewish sentiments.

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The authorities in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are often ready to crawl when merely asked to bend by Islamists. In 2012, Arthur Avnon, the then Israeli ambassador to Denmark, was quoted as saying to AFP, “We advise Israelis who come to Denmark and want to go to the synagogue to wait to don their skullcaps until they enter the building and not to wear them in the street, irrespective of whether the areas they are visiting are seen as being safe.” He also advised visitors not to speak Hebrew loudly or wear visible Stars of David jewellery.

Gerstenfeld is scathing in his assessment of these Nordic countries, which often sit in judgement over the state of democracy and liberalism in other countries and continents. “A broad range of cases of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism in Scandinavia show how these countries are falsely considered as model democratic societies,” he writes.

In recent years, things have only worsened in Europe, which many observers believe has almost moved to the point of no return in its prospect of becoming ‘Eurabia’. One can sense the institutionalisation of anti-Semitism in Europe and on European campuses from the fact that the UK police in 2016 advised Jewish and pro-Israel students “to not publicly announce the locations of their events”.

In contrast, American society largely remains pro-Israel. A new survey suggests that four out of five Americans support Israel in the ongoing Hamas war. But American campuses remain pockets of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, thanks to the massive influx of Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money into these institutions. What one is seeing is the creation of a rainbow coalition these anti-Semitic forces have made with progressive, Left-wing, feminist, and ethnic minority groups, as well as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists. This has resulted in providing a social justice halo around the Islamist cause.

The destruction of Israel has, thus, become synonymous with the struggle against injustice and oppression. The river to the sea slogan has now become a rallying point for both Left-‘liberals’ and Islamists.

The merger of the Left-wing cause with the Islamist agenda has resulted in the creation of a cocktail that is dangerously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The book, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech and BDS, edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron S Ben-Atar in 2018, explains how “the new campus orthodoxy sees” Israel as “an apartheid regime founded on racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialist imperialism”. Zionism, it believes, “can be neither defended nor corrected, because the very idea of a Jewish state in that region depends on the dispossession of others and because the concept of Jewish democracy is an offensive oxymoron that can only perpetuate the unjust and discriminatory status quo. Israel and Zionism are thus cast as illegitimate, incorrigible abominations”.

India, Enemy No. 2

Let’s come to the Kashmir issue now. One may wonder what Kashmir has to do with a crisis on US campuses that apparently owes its origins to Gaza. Kashmir, after all, isn’t Gaza by any stretch of the imagination.

Historically and civilisationally, Kashmir has always been a central part of the Indian narrative. It, in fact, for most part of the ancient times heralded India’s cultural, literary, and religious blossoming. Kalidas regarded Kashmir as “more beautiful than heaven”, while Kalhan called it “the best place in the Himalayas”.

As the legend goes, the Kashmir valley was originally a lake that was created after a part of Sati’s dead body fell in Kashmir during Shiva’s cataclysmic dance (tandav), creating the Satisar lake. The places where other body parts fell came to be known as Shakthi Peethas. One day, a great sage (rishi) called Kashyap arrived and he drained the water, and thus emerged a beautiful valley out of the lake. The Rishi was so enchanted that he invited saints and scholars from other parts to populate this valley, which got named after its founder, Kashyap Rishi, as Kashyapsar, Kashyapmar, or Kashmir, meaning the house of Kashyap.

Given this association with Shiva and Sati, the region has historically been a hub of ‘Kashmir Shaivism’, though Buddhism too found its base here. Such had been the spiritio-cultural-intellectual aura of Kashmir that even Adi Shankaracharya, after his visit to the valley, conceded the predominance of Shakti in his Advaita philosophy and composed poems in praise of the Goddess.

There’s a fascinating story about the ancestors of Kashmiri Pandits who, before coming to the valley at the insistence of Kashyap, lived on the banks of the river Saraswati. They were therefore called Saraswat Brahmins. As the story goes, there was a great famine, and Saraswati fed her son Saraswat with fish so that he would survive and keep the knowledge of the Vedas alive. Other Brahmans, not that lucky, could not study, and the knowledge of the Vedas was lost to everyone except Rishi Saraswat. This could also be the reason why the Brahmins of Kashmir, Bengal, and Saraswat Brahmins of Mangalore traditionally are fish eaters. The story is also a reminder to all those who tend to confine Hinduism to a particular food habit.

So, any narrative to project India as an occupation force is both dishonest as well as ahistorical. But, more importantly, the plight of Kashmiri Pandits has exposed the hypocrisy of Left-‘liberals’ of the West—and India.

It’s ironic that the forces in the West that have been projecting themselves as vanguards of democracy, human rights, and liberalism—those who get overwhelmed by the idea of ‘homeless’ Palestinians—have for the past three decades not uttered a word in favour of Kashmiri Pandits, who have been living in an exile in their own country since 1990. If one argues in favour of the displaced Palestinians, then it’s hypocritical not to take up the cause of Kashmiri Pandits. Instead, these global eminents talk in favour of the rights of those who actually unleashed the genocide on the minorities in Kashmir.

The answer again lies in the Qatari-Saudi-Chinese money being flushed into Western institutions largely controlled by Leftist intelligentsia. After all, the one thing that is common between the two ‘Godless’ and ‘God-fearing’ ideologies is the hatred for India and Hinduism. Remember the ongoing caste controversy in the West, with sinister designs to give it a racial colour.

Such is the revulsion that even the meritocracy of the Indian Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) institutions is being attacked by calling them the “structures of Brahminical patriarchy”, with one professor of anthropology at Harvard accusing Brahmins of being the “cultural capitalists” and IITs “their mechanism for the production of more upper caste engineers”. Meritocracy—the foundation on which modern Western civilisation rests—has now become, in the Indian context, “a Brahminical conspiracy” to keep Dalits down and out!

It is these instinctive anti-India, anti-Hindu sentiments that ensure India is targeted in the West in the name of democracy, liberalism, secularism, et al. What’s ironic is that in no other culture or civilisation do these democratic-libertarian values find themselves so deeply entrenched as in India. But then, how can one expect the followers of Stalin and Mao to forward the cause of democracy? And now these undemocratic, illiberal forces have joined hands with Islamists.

If not checked in time, the result could be devastating for India, which might soon find itself in Israeli shoes, and Indians could become the new-age Jews of America, especially in the workplace and on its campuses. Are the recent killings of Indian students in the US an indication of things to come? Maybe… Maybe not. But it’s always better for the country and its people to prepare for the worst. Especially when an American university like Rutgers has on its roll a known India critic and Hindu baiter who unapologetically invents a secular Aurangzeb and calls for the dismantling of Hindutva.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.