Hamid Dabashi on All the Terrible Things Being Done to Muslims (Part Three)

Hamid Dabashi talks exclusively about Hindu violence against Muslims, saying that the “systematic Muslim massacres” (he means massacres of Muslims) is “gruesome.” But he leaves out the much more frequent, and much deadlier, massacres of Hindus by Muslims. Are we to forget the terror attacks in Delhi (many times), in New Delhi (many times, including an attack on the Indian Parliament), in Mumbai, in Hyderabad? Are we supposed to overlook the mass killings of the Kashmiri Pandits, with hundreds murdered at a time, which led to 99% of the Hindu population of Kashmir fleeing in terror, so that where there were once 300,000-600,000 Pandits, there are now 3,000? What about the 1998 Chamba massacre, the Wandhama Massacre in 1998, the 2000 Amarnath pilgrimage massacre, the 2002 Fedayeen attacks on Raghunath Temple, the 2002 attack on Akshardham Temple attack perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Godhra train, full of Hindu pilgrims, set on fire by Muslims in February 2002, and the 2006 Varanasi bombings? And consider how many hundreds of Muslim attacks we have had to leave out. If we go back in time, we find that in the several hundred years of Mughal (Muslim) rule, according to such respected historians of India as K. S.. Lal, between 70 and 80 million Hindus were killed by their Muslim masters. But Dabashi doesn’t mention any of this. For him, Muslims can only be victims. What sort of “ethnic cleansing” is he talking about? Is he perhaps thinking of the Arabs — now called “Palestinians” — who began leaving Mandatory Palestine in late 1947, in order to get out of the way of what they were sure would be victorious Arab armies, and planned on returning when the Jews had all been killed or expelled? Is he thinking of all those forced mass expulsions of “Palestinians” by the Israelis — of which not one single instance is known to exist? There are Arabs living all over Israel, in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, Safed, Hebron, in every city and many villages. Where is this ethnic cleansing? Have the Israelis driven the Arabs out of the West Bank, as the “Palestinians” have made clear they will do to Jews in any future “Palestinian” state? They have not.

There have been cases of “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine, but these have all been of Jews by Muslims. In Hebron, where there had been a continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years, the Arabs killed or drove out every last Jew in 1929. In the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1949, the Jordanians drove out every remaining Jewish inhabitant, making the Old City Judenrein for the first time in its history. None of this “ethnic cleansing” is mentioned by Dabashi

As for Dabashi’s claim that Israel is “a European colonial enclave,” he ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews not from Europe, but from Arab lands. These Jews are indigenous to the Middle East. How is Israel a “colonial enclave”? Is it filled with people who were settled there by a colonial power, to strengthen that power’s presence? If anything, the Jews of Israel had to fight the colonial power that mattered most, Great Britain, which as the Mandatory authority frequently betrayed the solemn promises it had made to the Zionists, most notably in reducing the territory assigned to the Jewish National Home by 3/4. Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, or attempting to get to Palestine from D.P. camps after the war, were blocked by the British, who were always seeking to please the Arabs by severely limiting the numbers of Jewish immigrants. The British simply ignored Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, which called for the Mandatory authority to facilitate Jewish immigration into Palestine and “close Jewish settlement on the land.”

The Jewish commonwealth was resurrected in modern times by the Jews themselves, not by, or with any significant help from, any colonial powers. They were not, could not be, “colonists” in their own land. They were returning to Eretz Israel, the land that had made them, the land where their history unfolded. As for the impolitic tweet by Netanyahu’s son, that he wished all the Muslims would leave Israel, that is not, as Dabashi claims, a call for “genocide.” There was no statement of the genocidal sort, as “I think we should kill all the Muslims/Arabs/ ‘Palestinians.’” Dabashi should be reminded that true genocidal remarks can be heard all the time in the “Palestinian” and Arab media, directed at the Jews or or at all Unbelievers.