Koenraad Elst Quotes

They themselves of course can get away with blatant lies, because they are shielded by a politically motivated press against any criticism that would threaten their eminence. But real scientists do not count on such exemptions.

The primary fact in India's religious conflict is that Hinduism is fighting for its survival in its only homeland, while the "minorities" (in fact the Indian branch of powerful and wealthy multinationals) are only angling for additional conquests.

In his article "Why the riots always start with attack on Hindus" (Organiser, 13/1/1991), P.S. Yog builds a strong case for the assumption made in the title. He also quotes F.K. Khan Durrani (Meaning of Pakistan) saying : "The creation of Pakistan was necessary as a base for conquering the rest of India", and Jayaprakash Narayan remarking that the aim of communal riots seemed to be to secure a second partition of the country.

Before independence, the term adivasi was already useful as an ideological tool for relatively justifying the foreign occupation of a country, as it implied that the country had been ruled by “foreigners” since thousands of years. But it was after independence, when colonization had become a dirty word even in its source countries, that the term adivasi would get its full impact. 165-6

Simi­larly calculating from the available figures for the three coun­tr­ies, the Hindu per­centage had come down to 65.15% in 1991. To evaluate the trend of the Hindu percentage, we must take into account that the pre-Indepen­dence census always had a tentative category "trib­al" or "animist", variously defined and therefore making odd quantitative jumps (but always between 2.26% and 3.26%), from 2.57% in 1881 to 2.26% in 1941. After Indepen­dence, this category was included in the Hindu categ­ory. So, putting everything on the post-In­dependence deno­mi­nator, we include the "animists" in the Hindu percentage to get a total Hindu percentage of 77.35% for 1881, 71.72% for 1941, and 65.15% for 1991. Here again, we see a long-term ac­celerat­ion of the ob­served trend: a decrease of 5.63% in the sixty years between 1881 and 1941, and a larger decre­ase of 6.57% in the shorter period of fifty years bet­ween 1941 and 1991.

Let us only note that the missionaries are responsible for associating Hinduism with Sati much more prominently than would be fair. The missionary assault on Hinduism dramatized the practice of Sati, which had been “an ‘exceptional act’ performed by a minuscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries”, of which the occurrence had been “exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and Anglicize India”. (p.xix)

Indeed, no amount of history rewriting can alter the fact that India was partitioned (over nearly a million dead bodies) under Muslim pressure, and that what was carved out of India was an Islamic state. And no amount of hermeneutics can interpret this as an act of loyalty towards India. From the viewpoint of pluralistic and democratic India, the 93% Muslim voters just before Independence who voted for the Muslim League wit its one-point programme of partitioning India and creating Pakistan, were effectively traitors.

The physical danger in writing against the temple is imaginary; by contrast, it is dangerous to uphold rather than oppose Hindu activist positions. It is a fact that throughout the 1990s, many office-bearers of the RSS, the BJP and their Tamil affiliate Hindu Munnani have been murdered; but that was more because of the demolition and other political matters than because of any statements on the historical background of the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. At one point, the publishinghouse Voice of India, which has published the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s statement and several other writings on the Ayodhya evidence, has had to seek police protection for a few days, but the threats had to do with “insults to the Prophet” and not with the Ayodhya evidence.

The secularists had made all these shrill predictions that a BJP government would open gas chambers for Muslims, throw them in the ocean, etc. But for four years, in spite of numerous massacres of Hindus by Muslim terrorists, the Indian Muslims were left alone. Islamic terrorists killed forty BJP activists, allegedly "Hindu Nazis", in Coimbatore. What would real Nazis do in that case? ... By contrast, the BJP did not retaliate at all. Hindus were being killed with great frequency in Jammu, even the parliament buildings in Srinagar and Delhi were attacked, yet the Muslims remained unharmed. So, the secularists were losing credibility day by day. They needed the Gujarat carnage, they thanked Allah when it finally materialized. They were suddenly back in business, getting invited all the way to Washington to tell their scare stories. .. What real knowledge of the religio-political situation have those theories ever added? Read those books and you will see that "constructs" and "conceptual tools" fill the pages that should have contained real information instead. Such scholars collect just enough primary information to prove that they did get in touch with their topic, or more often they borrow even that minimum of information from like-minded publications, and then they put these raw data through the theory machine, yielding a theory sausage peppered with a few data selected for their fitting into the theory's expectations. Most of them borrow not just data, but also opinions and judgments without critically examining them. At the same time, they manage to disregard pertinent data which stare every normal observer in the face. .. If I am right then they are wrong, so their prestige may stand or fall with the elimination of my position from the debate... Indian secularism is systematically dishonest in its assessment of the religions hostile to Hinduism. Thus, after the Staines murder, which apparently resulted from the well-attested resentment of the tribals against the divisive effect of conversion on their communities, the secularists massively denied that the Christian missionaries are in India for purposes of conversion. In reality, the project of converting all mankind is intrinsic to the Christian religion. In Catholic school, I always learned that the missionaries provide medical and educational services primarily in order to make the targeted communities receptive to conversion. Staines' own bulletin to his Australian sponsors proved he was doing conversion work. The Southern Baptists reconfirmed in 1999 that Hindus are doomed unless they become Christians. The Pope himself came to Delhi to say in so many words that the Church intends to "reap a harvest of faith" in India. Yet this self-evident fact is still dismissed by vocal secularists as a figment of Hindutva paranoia.

Perhaps he doesn’t realize the implication of his own position, viz. that by these standards, proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam, even without counting crusades and jihad, are ipso facto intrinsically “intolerant”. That point has indeed been made often enough by apostate Christians and Muslims, but in India it is usually vetoed as “Hindu communalist propaganda”.

It is all very well for intellectuals in their air-conditioned offices to bemoan the unbelievable impact of either mean-spirited or silly rumours in the genesis of communal riots among the common folk. But in this instance, in their own reports on and analysis of communal violence, factual data were just as shamelessly replaced with invention, rumours and conspiracy theories. In this respect, religious extremists such as the Shahi Imam have behaved themselves better than the secularist campaigners who pose as the guardians of modernity and the scientific temper. Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers. Internationally influential media like the Washington Post copied from an Islamist website rumours about Hindu provocations behind the Godhra carnage, falsely claiming a Gujarati journalist as source, and never publishing a correction when the journalist in question denied ever having put out such a story. With such media, who needs rumors?

According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.

He was essentially a Western-educated man, and had imbibed some of the condescending incomprehension so typical of westernized Natives. Yet, among this class of Western-educated Indians, there is hardly any who has to such extent freed himself from pervasive prejudices and fashionable beliefs, such as the claim of a racial basis of caste. Because he himself had suffered the humiliation which many caste Hindus kept on inflicting on the untouchables, it is not abnormal that he was intemperately bitter against Hinduism. Nevertheless, he remained loyal to Hinduism in the broad sense, and rejected eager offers to take his followers into mass conversion to soul- greedy and imperialist religions.

In writing about India, it is all too common to starkly ignore the Hindu voice. .... The only Hinduism which they like is museum Hinduism; any Hinduism that displays a will to survive is treated with the same horror that would be aroused if a mummy were to show signs of life. (p. 73-74)

This shows what accomplished liars the Marxists are: they posit not just one lie, as amateurs would, but also all the ramifications of that lie.