Amid the raging war in Gaza, Osama bin Laden has suddenly become a hero of the pro-Palestine lobby in the US, with several young Americans posting videos sympathising with the orchestrator of 9/11. A letter that the Al Qaeda leader had written to the “American people” went viral on TikTok wherein he had criticised the US’ support to Israel and threatened that the “United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds”.
The 2002 letter read thus, “Palestine has been under occupation for decades, and none of your presidents talked about it until after September 11 when Bush realised that your oppression and the tyranny against us were part of the reason for the attack. You have to implement a roadmap that returns the Palestine land [sic] to us, all of it, from the sea to the river; it is an Islamic land not subject to being traded or granted to any party.”
Two disquieting thoughts emerge from Osama’s letter: One, the war in the Middle East will end only when Israel ceases to exist, as the Jewish nation purportedly exists on the “Islamic land”. Two, the Al Qaeda terrorist has, in two decades since unleashing terror through the skies in New York, has become a hero for a section of people living in peace and material comforts of the West.
The concept of the “Islamic land” is quite a fascinating phenomenon. The closest one gets to it in India is the Waqf land. As per a report, 77 per cent of Delhi is on Waqf land. This includes the Delhi High Court, Central Vista, and Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, among others. Waqf’s claim on a land or a property is for all time to come. And its claims can travel across time too: The Manendiyavalli Chandrashekhara Swami temple in Tamil Nadu, for instance, may be 1,500 years old but it is today claimed to be a Waqf property, even when Islam per se came into existence 1,300 years ago!
Just like Waqf, the nature of an “Islamic land” remains unalterable for perpetuity. This is the case even when the said land is currently occupied/controlled by the followers of other religions. The Islamic claim to a land is irrevocable, though the same courtesy is not given to other faiths. For instance, the Muslim world is almost unanimous in saying that Israel has been created on Palestinian territory. But the same logic works for Jews too, who were the original inhabitants of the region. Their claim to Palestine predates the birth of Islam. Similarly, in India, the Hindu claim to Kashmir is much stronger than that of the Islamic, given the fact that it was the seat of Shaiva-Shakti and Buddhist traditions in ancient times. This also is the case with thousands of temples destroyed by Muslim rulers: While these destroyed temples cannot return to their old pristine form, the Islamic claim to mosques remains incessant and operative. Once an Islamic land, always an Islamic land, after all!
Just like “Islamic land”, one hears the term “Muslim area” in India, especially at a time when a Hindu religious procession takes place. One, in fact, regularly witnesses communal violence post such a procession, forcing the bleeding-heart ‘liberals’ to come out in the open with their prescriptions to safeguard India’s ‘secular’ fabric. As an antidote to growing polarisation in the country, they suggest the “law-abiding citizens of India” (meaning Hindus) should avoid going to “Muslim areas” to celebrate their festivals. In other words, these saner minds want Hindus to celebrate their festivals in “Hindu areas”!
Nothing can be more sinister than this ‘liberal’ advice. For, it not only legitimises the ghettoisation of certain areas, but also gives them a bad name for all times to come. However, the moment a Hindu turns back and asks if this means the entry of Muslims in “Hindu areas”, during “Hindu festivals”, would also be restricted, the cat is out of the ‘liberal’ bag. The sane ‘liberal’ voice suddenly becomes shriller, coarser. India’s democracy and secularism become imperilled. The very people who call for a barrier on the entry of Hindus in “Muslim areas” hail the presence of Muslim food vendors in Durga Puja and Navaratri pandals as a symbol of India’s syncretic culture!
Coming back to the idea of “Islamic land”, it has an uncanny similarity with Communist China’s hegemonistic streak. Eminent historian RC Majumdar wrote in an article in 1965: “It is characteristic of China that if a region once acknowledged her nominal suzerainty even for a short period, she would regard it as a part of her empire forever and would automatically revive her claim over it even after a thousand years whenever there was a chance of enforcing it.”
Though Majumdar believed this to be a unique Chinese character, going across centuries, this phenomenon was most pervasively and mischievously used during the communist rule in China. What also brings the Godless communist and God-fearing Islamists together is what Erich Fromm calls “authoritarian ethics”. In Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, Fromm writes, “In authoritarian ethics, an authority states what is good for man and lays down laws and norms of conduct.”
Both Islamists and communists, in their own distinct ways, do the same. And this explains why they invariably find themselves, often in unison, against the “humanistic ethics” of the democratic West and civilisational India. In humanistic ethics, as per Fromm, “man himself is both the norm giver and the subject of the norms, their formal source or regulative agency and their subject matter”. So, unlike authoritarian ethics, this one doesn’t deny “man’s capacity to know what is good or bad”. He is not in “awe of the authority”.
Maybe it is this imperialist, authoritarian commonality between Islamist and communist worldviews that explains why they invariably partner with each other against common enemies, but when any of the two come to power, the first thing they do is to put the other to the sword. Remember Iran post-Islamic Revolution in 1979!
This Leftist-Islamist camaraderie is currently being witnessed in the West amid the Gaza warfare. The cases of anti-Semitism are fast rising, and Jewish students are being harassed on American campuses. Ironically, even the terms that were used by terrorists have liberal takers. For instance, in the recent rallies in the West, from Beirut and Tunis to London and Rome, the calls for a ceasefire interspersed with the slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Now this is the slogan Osama used in his 2002 letter. It seems Osama has found a new voice—and respectability—in the liberal West.
It is these Leftist-Islamist Trojan Horses in the West that make the war against terrorism a never-ending battle with a clear and categorical edge for the jihadi elements. As Umberto Eco writes in Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, in this era, the “enemy not only lives in your own country but also has the right to national health insurance”. This makes the case for a war “based so much on the principles of maximum happiness and minimum sacrifice”; Eco calls it “neo-war” as he elaborates how during World War II, “even the highly liberal Americans, albeit most humanely, put all their Italian and Japanese residents into concentration camps, even those born in the United States”.
What further makes the war difficult is the fact the Islamist/jihadi elements know fully well not just the liberal nature of modern warfare, but also democratic system of governance. Just as one Brussels-based Islamic scholar told author Pallavi Aiyar, as she mentions in the book Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis, how “Europeans have become victims of their own laws”. The Islamic scholar was talking about Europe’s dangerously changing demographic profile. Similarly, knowing fully well how the rest of the world has slowly moved to the neo-war phase, the Islamists, still employing the old state of all-out warfare, often put women and children in front of their adversaries. They hide behind them with bombs, bullets and stones. In all this, they find an able ally in the Left-‘liberal’ media and intelligentsia, strategically stationed to shoot the first civilian casualty of the lopsided warfare. The die is cast even before the first bullet is fired.
The fight is not against “Israeli atrocities” or “highhandedness” but against the very existence of Israel. The real battle is against the humanistic, democratic world order by those pursuing authoritarian ethics of both Godless and God-fearing ideologies. Today it’s Israel. Tomorrow, the battle lines will be drawn against the US and India. Sadly, a section of the media and the intelligentsia in the West and India would continue to talk in the enemy’s language. Till then the Islamist Osama bin Laden would continue to resurrect himself as a hero in the democratic West.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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