India and Israel; India is Israel
February 27, 2009 by Dr. Richard L. Benkin
In a few days, I will leave the United States for a month in India. While the immediate purpose of my visit is to stop the ethnic cleansing of Bangladeshi Hindus—which already has reduced the Hindu population there from one in five to less than one in ten—it is impossible to see that outside of the larger context of our war with radical Islam. The fact that the victims are Hindu is no coincidence. In fact, they are victims because they are Hindu, and their eradication is part of the larger jihad being waged by radical Islam.
India and Israel did not establish full diplomatic relations until 1992, largely due to a nexus of issues related to the ideology that led India’s Jawaharlal Nehru to become one of the architects of the non-aligned movement in 1955. Anti-US and anti-Israel, it is no coincidence that two of its founding fathers were Gamal Nasser of Egypt (the era’s leader against Israel) and Josip Broz Tito (an anti-US communist). But in 1991, the dynamics of geo-politics changed drastically with the fall of the Soviet Union and nations scrambled to re-arrange their alliances.
Sixteen years later, the ever-growing Israel-India relationship has garnered world attention as the two nations work to fend off their common menace of radical Islam. Still, institutional hangovers in India continue to hamper the relationship and force India to carry out a lot of it clandestinely. Certainly, the mainstream media and left of center political parties find it difficult to take pro-Israel, anti-Arab position. But that has been changing, especially among young Indians, many of whom see Israel as a role model for national survival. That means that the Indian government better start recognizing that it is itself another Israel on the world scene, or it will soon find itself ostracized and unfairly demonized by Islamist enemies, Islamic states that give them ideological cover, frightened appeasers in morally weak governments; and European leftists who consider themselves the world’s conscience. Europeans are happy to play that role so long as they do not have to follow their own directives; not with respect to their brutal colonialism or their complicity in genocide from the Nazi holocaust against the Jews and their inactionat murder in Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere.
And when that happens, those same nations push India to support its own beheading to create “Mughalistan.†For that is precisely what happened with their insistence that Israel do the same for a “Palestine.†Prior to the 1990s, the notion of a Palestinian state had little international credibility or support. Palestinians were known as terrorists who knew only how to hijack airplanes and kill unarmed civilians. Before the 1980s unrepentant arch terrorist Yassir Arafat was made to never forget that he was first and foremost a terrorist. Today, historically ignorant appeasers in Europe are doing the same thing their fathers did in the 1930s. Searching for Chamberlain’s “peace in our time,.†they demand Israel must accept and make concessions to a terrorist entity (Hamas) that is sworn to its destruction.
Like Israel, India is surrounded by uniformly dysfunctional countries that deny their people the basic freedoms that India has been protecting since its birth. It is a democracy in a sea of tyranny but is being told to become more acceptable to those neighbors: Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Myanmar—horrible places where freedom dies; war-torn Afghanistan that before a UN invasion, housed the most retrograde and freedom-hating government in the world; Bhutan, thought by the West to be a Himalayan paradise but in reality a brutal autocracy that has been deporting its Hindu population in a covered up bit of ethnic cleansing; even Hindu Nepal has become Communist Nepal and a conduit for terrorists and contraband into India. How is that not Israel? If these parallels are not sufficient to cement the association, consider how India increasingly is being pushed to be passive in the face of attacks, just as Israel is asked to be again and again. Last October, India was brutally attacked by Islamist terrorists sent by, from, and through several of those countries to murder innocent civilians in Mumbai. The terrorists did not even cite a specific event that caused them to take these lives—and even torture their Jewish captives—but tried to justify the attack with general statements about Kashmir. Kashmir, by the way, is India’s West Bank in that Islamists cannot openly call for India’s dismantling, so they have tried to get Kashmir accepted as their temporary goal—just as they have done with Israel and the West Bank.
The United States responded immediately to Mumbai by putting then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on an airplane to New Delhi. The stated purpose of her visit was to “calm tensions.†Calm tensions? Did the US administration calm its own tensions after 9/11? Calm is precisely what the United States did not need then; nor was it what India needed in October. For the “uncalmed†United States went on to destroy terrorist regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; while “calmed†India was unable to secure so much as an admission of guilt from those responsible for the carnage in Mumbai. This has long been the standard US and international response to every incident of terror committed on Israeli soil; to every cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians by terrorists who are cheered as heroes in surrounding countries. Indians should take a good look at that because one day it will be the standard modus operandi they face when attacked by Islamists.
In 1920, the British illegally partitioned their League of Nations mandate for the area designated as a Jewish homeland. They took fully 80 percent of it and awarded it to their World War I stooges, the Hashemites. It seems that their cousins in Saudi Arabia had ejected them violently and the British responded by changing the future of the Middle East forever. They created the Kingdom of Jordan with 80 percent of the Jewish homeland and even let the new rulers make it illegal for Jews to reside in all of that land—a law that remains in effect today. At the same time, they also ripped the Golan Heights from that homeland and gave it to the French colony of Syria. People forget that illegal British act, and history teachers omit it from their lessons, so they refer to all of that land as historically Arabs when it is simply not so. Thus they feel justified in pressing Israel to cede significant portions of the remaining 20 percent of what had been promised to their grandparents.
In 1918, the British occupiers of India, arbitrarily cut Bengal in half to appease their Muslim subjects; and in doing so laid the groundwork for severing “East Pakistan†from the rest of Bengal. Today, Indians are being forced to accept continuous infiltration from Bangladesh that is changing the demographics in the area. Moreover, this severed piece of India is being cited as the eastern edge that will complete a new Muslim state cut out of India’s North. The parallels are striking; the craven behavior by outsiders is the same. If Indians ignore those lessons of history, we better get used to a new reality; and remember that it is pronounced “Mughalistan!â€
Last 5 posts by Dr. Richard L. Benkin
- Is Hindu-American Community Coming into its Own? – October 30th, 2010
- Op Ed Calling India Pariah State odd Choice for Israeli Publication – October 14th, 2010
- Deganga Intifada? – September 28th, 2010
- Islamization of Northeast India no Coincidence – July 5th, 2010
- America’s Future is with Asia, not Europe – May 6th, 2010