Normally, the atheist Left should be the sharpest opponent of religious obscurantism and dogmatic adherence to anti-universalist belief systems like … - Koenraad Elst

This is already clear if we limit our count to the 20th century, omitting all the killings and other crimes against humanity since the first (failed) naval invasion in 636 or the first occupation of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in 712, and all that happened in the intervening centuries. In the Partition of 1947, the Hindu-Sikh death toll easily amounted to 1 million+ in West Pakistan alone. In East Pakistan, it ended up becoming a similar number, though the killing there was drawn out over several years. In 1971, in the repression campaign that led to the war that led to the country’s liberation and recreation as Bangladesh, the Pakistanis and their Jamaat-i-Islami allies killed nearly 2,4 million Hindus, 80% of the total death toll of some 3 million (as per the government of Bangladesh itself). Add the great killings of many thousands in the Moplah Rebellion of 1920-21, the Direct Action Day of 1946, the many recurring pogroms in East Pakistan, the large-scale riots in India (admittedly with a two-sided death toll), the constant petty terror in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the expulsion of the Pandits from Kashmir (1990), and you get very close to the 5,3 million estimated for the Holocaust.

Demography is a bigger concern today because Islam is fighting for its survi­val, if not for world supremacy. Muhammad Samiullah is explicit about the good reason for natalism: "There is no denying the fact that the politi­cal prest­ige and military strength of a country depends upon the size of its popul­ation. (...) In the Islamic context greater populat­ion has a double sig­nifica­nce because one cannot wage an effective Jihad without an expanding popula­tion."

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?