Koenraad Elst Quotes

What anti-American Muslims also fail to understand, is the structural economic reason for America's preferring the Muslim world over the fledgling infidel superpower India. The Muslim world is not very dynamic and has a lot of purchasing power, so it is the perfect market for American hi-tech (and low-tech, e.g. agricultural) products. India, by contrast, has only limited purchasing power but is a very dynamic competitor in all advanced industrial sectors. For this reason, and also to compensate the Muslim world for the permanent grievance over American support to "the Zionist entity", America is bound to take the Muslim side in purportedly peripheral conflicts, especially against India. The peptalk about India and the US being "natural allies" as "the biggest and the oldest democracy" has little impact on real-life policies. In practical terms, Bush and Hathaway are the running-dogs (or rather, to borrow another Leninist term, the "useful idiots") of Pakistani jihadism. ... In the Indian subcontinent, there is no danger whatsoever that anyone will get this impression, for the reality is too obviously the opposite. American meddlers, Hathaway among them, consistently turn a blind eye towards Hindu victims of Muslim violence, in India as well as in Pakistan and Bangladesh. America has consistently given material and diplomatic support to the very forces which have been butchering Hindus. If Hathaway wants to thwart religious "charities" promoting both "religious bigotry" and "violence and religious and ethnic intolerance", he can start much closer to home. American Baptist and Evangelical groups are financing the propagation of Christian religious bigotry of the most obscurantist kind in India's Northeast and tribal belts. Much of this bigotry has resulted in armed separatism, terrorism and ethnic cleansing of tribes refusing to become Christians.... The Indian people is not financing movements violently disrupting American society. By contrast, American citizens are financing Church activities in India which often shade over into armed separatism, social disruption of tribal societies and ethnic cleansing. The American state is arming Pakistan, and even if it were to fully stop arms deliveries to Pakistan, it still carries a legacy of having armed the Pakistani Army and trained the Pakistani secret service, agents of terror against Indian citizens and the Indian state. The guilt for keeping Indo-American relations unfriendly is entirely on the American side. If Dr. Hathaway believes in a "new partnership between our two peoples", he had better advise his Government to investigate American private support to missionary-cum-terrorist subversion and to halt every form of American state support to Pakistani jihadism. (Ch. 1)

Hindus have suffered a unique experience of oppression at the hands of Muslim invaders and their successors, including many instances of mass killing. It covered more than a thousand years and a whole Subcontinent.

The very fact that Muslims in India loudly complain about their situation (e.g. about their low educational level, which is 100% the fault of their own mullahs), proves that they are relatively well-off: as I have had the occasion to observe, Hindu visitors or refugees from Pakistan often do not dare to speak of the horrible conditions in which they are forced to live under Muslim rule, because they fear for their relatives, and because the constant terror has conditioned them never to raise any objections against the Muslim master race. Inside these Muslim states, the remaining Hindus are even more careful never to displease the Muslim masters. For unthinking journalists, their silence is proof that all is well for the minorities in Muslim states, and so they prefer to listen to the vocal malcontents who air the Muslim grievances in tolerant India. Whoever shouts loudest, will get our correspondents' attention, if only because India reporting is mostly of a very low professional quality.

The Supreme Court sent the matter on, or back, to the Allahabad High Court, which, after sitting on the Ayodhya case since 1950, at long last got serious about finding out the true story. It ordered a ground-penetrating radar search and the most thorough excavations. In this effort, carried out in 2003, the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) employed a large number of Muslims in order to preempt the predictable allegation of acting as a Hindu nationalist front. The findings confirmed those of the excavations in the 1950s, 1970s and 1992: a very large Hindu religious building stood at the site before the Babri Masjid. The Allahabad High Court has now accepted these findings by India's apex archaeological body. But not everyone is willing to abide by the verdict.

Rahul Chandra documented the situation of the Hindus in Pakistan, mostly Sindh, and why many feel compelled to flee to India. Especially the vulnerability of girls to abduction by and forced marriage to Muslims forces them to flee.

Nonetheless, the Marxist historians had their way. In their shrill manifestoes, these secular fundamentalists slandered the genuine historians who stood by the facts, and they denounced the Hindus' perfectly reasonable expectation that a Hindu sacred site be left in the exclusive care of the Hindus. They did this with such titanic vehemence that the pragmatists were thrown on the defensive.

Apologists of Islam are indeed typically "under- informed but over-opinionated".

Not satisfied with denying the crimes of Islam, the negationists have recently made a big effort to spread the notion that Hinduism itself is guilty of just the same things of which it accuses Islam.... A handful of negationist historians have tried to substantiate the allegations against Hinduism and spared no effort to collect instances of Hindus acts of persecution.

Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”, opposing “multiple truths” and waging a “Crusade against Muslims”, out to “dehumanise” the opposition. Here I confess, I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I think he is referring to himself when he speaks of “rejecting the model of conversation”.

Irfan Habib is also counting on the readers’ forgetfulness concerning one of the central findings in the ASI report: there was a very large temple, the foundations of which far exceed the circumference of the Babri mosque. He wants us to believe that the pillar-bases were actually the floor of the Babri Masjid, but a large part of the foundations was located outside the confines of the mosque and hence cannot possibly be confused with the mosque floor, except by a highly prejudiced mind.

It is bad form and bad scholarship to bypass someone’s arguments to attack his motives, and even worse to replace his stated motives with imputed motives, but this is one phenomenon which outside observers of the debate will have to get used to: Indian Marxism has given wide currency to the approach of “I don’t care what arguments you come up with, I’m going to tell you what your true motives are, you reactionary pig”.

It is only when the interest in Classical culture was revived and when secular modern medicine discovered the importance of cleanliness, that the missionaries started including this un-Christian value in their kit of trinkets with which to bribe the jungle-dwelling Heathens.

The foreign press has not added any extra facts or perspective to the reporting on Ayodhya. It has mostly copied the bias of the Indian press. Time Magazine gave a not too unbalanced report, but quoted two of the JNU historians without telling its readers that these are not neutral academics but highly involved parties in the controversy.

The pogroms in Pakistan and Bangladesh after the demolition of the Babri Masjid left 50,000 Hindus homeless in Bangladesh and triggered another wave of refugees from both countries towards India. In Pakistan, 245 Hindu temples were demolished, in Bangladesh a similar number was attacked, and even in England some temples were set on fire by Muslim mobs.

I have crossed swords with Mira Kamdar, Christophe Jaffrelot, Meera Nanda, Amber Habib, MF Husain as well as his critics, DN Jha, Harbans Mukhia, Wiliam Dalrymple, Edward Said, Ramachandra Guha, Ashish Nandy, Edward Luce, Vikas Swarup, Martha Nussbaum etc. The record shows that I have not limited myself to the gullible and the already-converted.