Tarek Fatah henviser til dette uddrag fra den yderst anbefalelsesværdige “The Story of Civilization”

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicatecomplex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they hadadopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in.For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came. The firstMoslem attack was a passing raid upon Multan, in the western Punjab (664 A.D.) Similarraids occurred at the convenience of the invaders during the next three centuries, with theresult that the Moslems established themselves in the Indus valley about the same time thattheir Arab co-religionists in the West were fighting the battle of Tours (732 A.D.) for themastery of Europe.But the real Moslem conquest of India did not come till the turn of the first millennium afterChrist. In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of thelittle estate of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young andpoor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious.Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry, he swept across the frontier with aforce inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar,slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away theaccumulated treasures of centuries.Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewelsand unbored pearls and rubies shining like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, andemeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.”

Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amusedhis men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richerthan before.

At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted withprecious stones, and emptied its coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewellery; heexpressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labour of two hundred years, and thenordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground.

Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, therichest king that history has ever known.Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold asslaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could befound to offer more than a few shillings for a slave.Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of Godupon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years andhonours, Moslem historians ranked him as the greatest monarch of his time, and one of thegreatest sovereigns of any age.

Seeing the canonization that success had brought to this magnificent thief, other Moslemrulers profited by his example, though none succeeded in bettering his instruction.In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan, invaded India, captured the city of Delhi,destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish theSultanate of Delhi- an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, andchecked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-ud-Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind -fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts, as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “werebestowed by hundreds of thousands, and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.”In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand mencame under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.”

Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, removing their skins, stuffing these with straw and hanging them from the gatesof Delhi. When some Mongolian habitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted toIslam, attempted arising, Sultan Ala-ud-din (the conqueror of Chitor) had all the males -from fifteen to thirty thousand of them - slaughtered in one day.

Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a greatscholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy,surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to therebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste withpillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle.He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly infront of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging” the victims“and putting them to death in crowds.”

In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and leftit a desert; and hearing that a blind man had stayed behind in Delhi, he ordered him to bedragged from the old to the new capital, so that only a leg remained of the wretch when hislast journey was finished.

The Sultan complained that the people did not love him, or recognize his undeviating justice.He ruled India for a quarter of a century, and died in bed. His successor, Firoz Shah, invadedBengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age of eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for threedays whenever the number of defenceless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reachedtwenty thousand.

These rulers were often men of ability, and their followers were gifted with fierce courageand industry; only so can we understand how they could have maintained their rule among ahostile people so overwhelmingly outnumbering them. All of them were armed with a religion militaristic in operation, but far superior in its stoicalmonotheism to any of the popular cults of India; they concealed its attractiveness by making the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply intothe Hindu soul.Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, andengaged artists and artisans–usually of Hindu origin– to build for them magnificentmosques and tombs; some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse with historians,poets and scientists.One of the greatest scholars of Asia, Alberuni, accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India,and wrote a scientific survey of India comparable to Pliny’s “Natural History” andHumboldt’s “Cosmos”.

The Moslem historians were almost as numerous as the generals, and yielded nothing tothem in the enjoyment of bloodshed and war. The Sultans drew from the people every rupeeof tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straightforwardrobbery; but they stayed in India, spent their spoils in India, and thereby turned them back into India’s economic life.Nevertheless, their terrorism and exploitation advanced that weakening of Hindu physiqueand morale, which had been begun by an exhausting climate, an inadequate diet, politicaldisunity, and pessimistic religions. The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Ala-ud-din, who required his advisersto draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.”

Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers hadtaken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in theirhouses no sign of gold or silver…or of any superfluity was to be seen…. Blows, confinementin the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.” When one of his own advisers protested against this policy, Alauddin answered: “Oh,Doctor, thou art a learned man, but thou hast no experience; I am an unlettered man, but Ihave a great deal. Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never become submissive andobedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have therefore given orders that just sufficientshall be left to them from year to year of corn, milk and curds, but that they shall not beallowed to accumulate and property.”

This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, itsuccumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficialdelusions, and concluded that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worthdefending in so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.

The Muslim Issue, hvor ovenstående billede er hentet, har mere om den muslimske invasion af Indien.

Barak Obama udtalte som bekendt på FNs talerstol at fremtiden ikke må tilhøre de, der fornærmer islams stifter. Den stil har han holdt ved. Hot Air skriver at Obama mener det er en borgerpligt at tale imod blasfemikere

Noah already blogged the lowlight of this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast speech but don’t overlook this passage. The Washington Times didn’t.

There’s wisdom in our founders writing in those documents that help found this nation the notion of freedom of religion, because they understood the need for humility.  They also understood the need to uphold freedom of speech, that there was a connection between freedom of speech and freedom of religion.  For to infringe on one right under the pretext of protecting another is a betrayal of both.

But part of humility is also recognizing in modern, complicated, diverse societies, the functioning of these rights, the concern for the protection of these rights calls for each of us to exercise civility and restraint and judgment.  And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — (applause) — and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks.  Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t question those who would insult others in the name of free speech.  Because we know that our nations are stronger when people of all faiths feel that they are welcome, that they, too, are full and equal members of our countries.

Watch him deliver that at 12:25 below. He floated the same idea of a trade-off on blasphemy in his now famous speech to the UN a few years ago when he told the General Assembly “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Legal sanctions against blasphemers are a bridge too far, he conceded, but moral sanctions are not just warranted but obligatory. We’ll punish the blasphemer, just not with the power of the state. Re-read the boldfaced part above. Does this guy, who swore an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, actually believe that our duty to defend a blasphemer’s right to free speech is no greater than our duty to condemn him for affronting religion?

13. januar skrev Jihad Watch at Det Hvide Hus vil hindre at medierne bringer historier, der gør terrorister sure

More self-censorship and voluntary acceptance of Sharia blasphemy laws. The President of the United States is now (again) signaling that terrorism works: he is saying he will act to curtail Americans’ freedom of expression because Muslims are committing mass murder in response of the freedom of expression. He could have said that he would defend those who say things that jihadis dislike from violent attacks, but no. He was as consistent as ever. And the freedom of speech will suffer for it. How long before he shuts down Jihad Watch, to appease our jihadi brethren?

“White House: Obama Will Fight Media To Stop Anti-Jihad Articles,” by Neil Munro, Daily Caller, January 13, 2015:

President Barack Obama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defenses forces, the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12.

“The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform” whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.

The unprecedented reversal of Americans’ civil-military relations, and of the president’s duty to protect the First Amendment, was pushed by Earnest as he tried to excuse the administration’s opposition in 2012 to the publication of anti-jihadi cartoons by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The White House voiced its objections in 2012 after the magazine’s office were burned by jihadis, followings its publication of anti-jihadi cartoons.

Earnest’s defense of tho 2012 objections came just five days after the magazine’s office was attacked by additional jihadis. Eight journalists, two policeman and a visitor were murdered by two French-born Muslims who objected to the magazine’s criticism of Islam’s final prophet.

Og den altid fremragende Danield Greenfield skriver på Frontpage Magazine

When it comes to Islam, Obama is like the weather in Seattle. There are no surprises. If there’s a national prayer breakfast, then he’s going to slam Christianity and defend Islam.

But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon.  From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.  We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism  — terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.

We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion…

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India — an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity — but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.

They’re not perpetrated in the name of religion, generic, but in the name of Islam.

Obama has to throw in slavery and attack Hindus in India, but he still can’t come up with anything happening today on the scale of Islamic genocidal violence and conflicts with non-Muslims.

There simply isn’t anything like it.

Og nu, hvor denne posterings tema er gledet fra Obamas angreb på ytringsfriheden over i relativering vil jeg lige medtage den også altid fremragende Thomas Sowell på Townhall om hvad Obama så gik og talte med inderne om på hans og Michelles tur til Indien

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.

Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against untouchables in India in the 21st century.

Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.

Med venner som disse….

I disse jubilæumsdage for fatwaen mod Salman Rushdie kunne man på BBC læse at forlaget Pengiun India har trukket en bog om hinduer tilbage fordi hinduer har let til krænkelse - og vold.

“Now here’s this book. And there will be more. After half a century of studying and engaging with Hinduism, I’m not about to be silenced by a few (bad) eggs,” academic Wendy Doniger wrote in her latest book On Hinduism, published last year.

Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago and has written nearly half a dozen books on Hinduism, including a translation of the Kama Sutra, was writing about how her 2009 book The Hindus: An Alternative History quickly became a lightning rod for Hindu anger.

Doniger wrote that bloggers had accused her of attacking Hinduism and sexualising Hindus, flooded Amazon with their “lurid opinions of the book” and sent her obscene and threatening emails. There was even a protest outside the US embassy in Delhi calling for the book, which was climbing the best-seller non-fiction list, to be banned. The book had also prompted a legal challenge from Hindu groups and attracted at least two separate criminal complaints.

But Tuesday’s news of her publisher Penguin India deciding to recall and destroy all remaining copies of The Hindus is being seen as the unkindest cut of all.

The publisher appears to have come to an out-of-court agreement with a little-known Hindu campaign group called Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Save Education Movement), which had filed cases against the book.

The man behind the campaign is Shiksha Bachao Andolan leader Dinanath Batra, a former teacher and school principal. After retirement, he told a newspaper, he began to devote his time to a “mission to see distortions removed from books taught to schoolchildren“.

Since then, he says, he has filed some 10 lawsuits involving “objectionable passages” from various textbooks. He filed another demanding an essay on Ramayana by the late poet and scholar AK Ramanujan be dropped from the history syllabus of Delhi University. That was followed by a legal notice to a newspaper for publishing a story on Hindu terrorism. Then he trained his guns on the Doniger book.

(…)

Academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes that the country’s reputation as a bastion of liberal values is “dimming by the day”.

He makes the point that the courts have also failed liberal India “because of a law that signals that it is open to banning books”, a point Doniger also makes in her statement. Mr Mehta despairs that liberal India has also been “silenced” by “professional offence mongers”. He blames the educators for the “extraordinary failure of the project of liberal education”.

Mr Mehta writes: “Wendy Donniger could not have damaged Hindus. But if liberal India dies, Hinduism will die as well. It’s a frightening message for one of the world’s largest religions.”

En The New York Review Of Books artikel fra 2005 fortæller om hinduistisk sensibilitet.

On January 5, 2004, an incident at one of India’s leading centers of historical research, the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute in the town of Pune, southeast of Bombay, demonstrated how serious things had become. Just after 10 AM, as the staff were opening up the library, a cavalcade of more than twenty jeeps drew up. Armed with crowbars, around two hundred Hindu militants poured into the institute, cutting the telephone lines. Then they began to tear the place apart.

The militants overturned the library shelves, and for the next few hours they kicked around the books and danced on them, damaging an estimated 18,000 volumes before the police arrived. More seriously still, they severely damaged a first-century manuscript of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata, as well as a set of palm leaf inscriptions, some important relics from the prehistoric site of Mohenjodaro, and a very early copy of the Rig Veda—the world’s oldest sacred text—once used by the great German scholar Max Mueller.

The cause of this violence was a brief mention of the institute in the acknowledgments of a short scholarly book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India by James W. Laine, a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota. The book, which had been praised by scholars when it appeared in the spring of 2003, was a study of Shivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680), the Hindu guerrilla leader from western India who successfully challenged the Mughal Empire and eventually had himself crowned as Chatrapati (“Lord of the Umbrella”) of an independent Maratha state. Shivaji is now regarded as a near-divine figure by many Hindu nationalists. He is also the particular folk hero of Maharashtra, the region around Pune and Bombay, whose airport, station, and museum have all been renamed in his honor.

In his book, Laine wrote that Shivaji’s parents “lived apart for most if not all of Shivaji’s life,” adding that “Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father.” This was interpreted as a suggestion by Laine that Shivaji was illegitimate; after a horrified review was published in a Marathi weekly magazine, a series of protests began. In October an elderly Sanskrit scholar whom Laine had thanked in his acknowledgments was beaten up and had his face smeared with tar. To forestall further violence, in November the book was withdrawn from the Indian market by Oxford University Press, and an apology for causing offense was issued by the author.

The Indian newsmagazine Outlook ran its story of the attack on the institute across two pages under the banner headline “A Taste of Bamiyan,” and most of the leading Indian papers carried editorials attacking what one referred to as the “Talibanization” of India. “We cannot have the mob write our history for us,” said Indian Express.

Unluckily for Professor Laine, the attack took place in the months leading up to India’s general election and the book soon became an election issue. The militants who carried out the attack held public meetings announcing that they wanted every Indian named in the book’s acknowledgments to be arrested, questioned, and tried. Opening his campaign in Maharashtra, the then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, issued a “warning to all foreign authors that they must not play with our national pride. We are prepared to take action against the foreign author [Laine] in case the state government fails to do so.”

Uffe Ellemann Jensen har mange gange udtrykt at man har ytringsfrihed, men ikke ytringspligt. Det er myntet på de, der er uenige med ham og ikke ham selv. Men jo, man har faktisk en ytringspligt, hvis ikke man vil have pøblen til at skrive historien!