Genocide by Anglo-American champions of Human Rights

Continued from last week...

By Latheef Farook

Organised violence against Muslims has been a common feature especially in North India ever since the country was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan. In the state of Gujarat where Hindus and Muslims coexisted in harmony for centuries, fifty-eight Hindus belonging to the Hindu extremist Vishva Hindu Parishad, VHP, were killed on 27 February 2002, when the Sabarmati Express train they were travelling in was burnt at the town of Godhra.

Muslims had nothing to do with this incident as revealed by a subsequent government investigation. Yet accusing Muslims of burning the carriage there was organised violence, killings and the destruction of property.

Later it was revealed that the Chief Minister Narendra Modi was behind these attacks which killed around 7,000 Muslims under a well thought out plan to oust Muslims out of mainstream areas in Ahmedabad and other places.

The mobs used knives, axes, swords, iron and wooden rods, acids, gas cylinders and all sorts of inflammable materials and every possible other weapon to kill Muslims in the cities and villages. In some cases, they got the entire Muslim population in certain areas electrocuted.

In many urban centres, explosives were used to blow up houses, shops, dargahs and mosques. Structures that could not be razed by the mobs were mowed down by trucks. Overnight, once prosperous Gujarati Muslims were reduced to nothing. They languished in refugee camps while their properties were looted.

Describing these attacks as India’s shame thousands of peace-loving Hindus vehemently condemned the bloodshed while a well-known Kathakali dancer even refused to accept an award presented by Modi’s government.

Kashmir

People in the Muslim state of Kashmir were known throughout history for their peaceful nature. In 1846 the British colonial rulers sold Kashmir for 750,000 Sterling Pounds to Hindu war lord Raja Gulab Singh who despised and brutally oppressed his Muslim subjects.

They were kept so economically downtrodden that even around 1940s their per capital income was eleven rupees of which they paid a tax of 21 percent besides paying levies on everything from salt to saffron.

Their condition didn’t improve even after independence. Political manoeuvrings of the Central Government in Delhi, rigging of elections in 1987 and 1996, years of political turmoil, economic problems, poverty and many other factors led to the 1989 mass uprisings.

Instead of attending to their grievances, the Indian forces used violence and atrocities to crush their freedom struggle and silence them. Since then thousands of civilians were killed and thousands of houses were demolished with the occupants rendered homeless.

After a visit to Kashmir in 1991, the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi said in New Delhi that “the brutalities of the Indian army and the Central Reserve Police meant that India may have lost Kashmir”.

Raping Kashmiri women became a daily occurrence to break the spirit and soul of this great people. The exact number of rapes will never be known as Kashmiri women who prefer death to dishonour, refuse to speak about their shameful ordeal and prefer to suffer the indignity in silence. There are more than 10,000 women, in their 20s and 30s, whose husbands were taken into custody without any trace for years.

They remain married widows as they cannot re-marry since they do not know the fate of their husbands. Today Kashmiris who demands their political rights are branded as Jihadi Terrorists.

Occupied Palestine

The continuous sufferings of Palestinians by the Zionist Jewish occupiers remain an on-going tragedy. Before 1948 there was no country called Israel. The British mandatory authority after World War I together with International Jewry brought in thousands of Jews from all over the world and settled them in lands belonging to Palestinians who were driven out at gun point by Jewish gangsters.

These gangsters such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon, godfathers of terrorism, were later elected as prime ministers of Israel. Despite all his crime records Menachem Begin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

The West created the state of Israel for Jews on Palestinian lands while Palestinians continue to suffer in refugee camps for more than 75 years as stateless people and to this day Palestinians struggling for their political rights are branded as terrorists by the West.

In the midst came the 9/11 events in New York. Almost every independent study undertaken by numerous professionals, institutions and organisations came to the conclusion that the Twin Tower buildings were not brought down by the aircrafts but by missiles placed within the buildings.

Some of these studies exonerated Muslims of being responsible stating that hey suspect the demolition as an inside job, well timed and set up before the aircraft crashed into the twin towers.

An advertisement carried in The Sydney Morning Herald by Jimmy Walter, offered one million US dollars to anyone who proves that explosives were not used in the demolition of the World Trade Centre, and challenged the US government to “Re-open the investigation and address the unanswered questions of 9/11”.

Usually it takes months and even years to find out who the perpetrators were as it involves lot of investigations. But within 24 hours President Bush accused Al Qaeda of masterminding the attacks, invaded Afghanistan within 27 days, toppled the Taliban regime, installed a puppet regime under Ahmed Karzai and started setting up military bases all over the country.

Washington let loose its destructive military might on the poorest of the poor Afghans, pitiable people forced to forage for a single meal and who didn’t know where their next meal would be coming from.

The US blitz turned what was already a battered land into a region of nearly complete devastation. Carpet-bombings, missile attacks, and cluster bombs simply slaughtered thousands of innocent Afghans while many thousands, including children who make up half of the population, died from starvation or exposure. According to reports more than 60,000 Afghans were killed during the early days.

The Taliban would have been the darlings of Washington if only they had agreed to be party to the proposals of the US oil cartels to exploit the resources of Central Asia. Their failure to do so put them on a crash course with Washington.

The Taliban did make some positive contributions to Afghanistan as it brought law and order and stability to that lawless country, wiped out some rapacious war lords and gangsters, ended civil wars, stamped out corruption, paved the way for trade and commerce to flourish by making roads safer for people to travel from one corner to another without the fear of being waylaid or attacked, destroyed poppy cultivations and eliminated drug barons to cite a few. They also took some positive steps to wipe out some age-old unislamic Afghan traditions such as forced marriages.

Invasion of Iraq

Then the Bush-Blair team turned their attention on Iraq. Iraq, the birthplace of Prophet Ibrahim, is an ancient country where a rich Mesopotamian civilisation flourished. Iraq’s capital Baghdad was once the seat of learning which attracted people from all over the world. It was also the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Golden period of Islam when Baghdad ruled the Muslim world.

Bush and Blair invaded Iraq and turned this oil rich and almost developed country into a killing field to loot Iraq’s oil wealth and ensure Israel’s supremacy in the Middle East.

Four years later today, the US and British troops have killed nearly 1.2 million Iraqi men, women, children and the aged, more than two and half million Iraqis are in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, four million Iraqis are refugees in their own country while more than half the population suffer from starvation. Iraqi society and infrastructure had been destroyed, drinking water polluted, power supply disrupted while schools, hospitals and other places are all in shambles.

The Americans even burnt birth, marriage, death, land, company, industrial and vehicle registration offices and all other such places to create chaos. Israel’s secret service Mossad came up with a list of names and addresses of professionals such as university lecturers, professors, scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other intellectuals, and went from house to house, killing them in their sleep.

In many cases they used sharp weapons to cut the throats of husbands in the presence of wives who were killed later. American forces looted the museums and robbed very valuable historic artefacts. They armed shiites and Sunnis to provoke civil war.

Then there emerged shocking pictures of American troops’ gang-raping Iraqi women. These hapless women were forcibly dragged out of their homes, screaming in terror, stripped naked and gang-raped by the very people who had ostensibly been there to protect them.

Nonetheless, such criminal depravity had been committed by so-called civilised uniformed personnel representing the most powerful military nation on earth.Among the victims were ordinary housewives, mothers and daughters - all brought up in a decently conservative society and whose religious traditions have always valued feminine purity as a prerequisite for a happily wedded life? Did the perpetrators of these appalling crimes ever stop to wonder that their victims were the same kind of women as their mothers and sisters at home?

Hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women were arbitrarily arrested and subjected to savage forms of torture which brought swift condemnation from all over the world.

In Falluja, a city of 300,000 people, President Bush dropped internationally banned and improved versions of napalm bombs which burnt and melted fasting Muslims to death. The American media was quite conspicuous in its silence on the Fallujah massacre which is one of the most horrendous acts of genocide in modern history.

Today the entire Iraqi population remains traumatised and these are the obscene images of crimes that cry out to the Heavens for vengeance.

Angered right-minded Jewish, Christian and other intellectuals all over the world openly called for impeaching Bush for misleading the American people and launching what they described as the most barbaric war in modern history.

Nobel laureate and British Jewish playwright Harold Pinter called it an act of banditry. They demanded that once removed from office, Bush and Blair should be put on trial along with the rest of their cohorts in The Hague and be categorised in the same class and company as Slobodan Milosevic.

President Bush dispatched harmless young American soldiers, with their full lives ahead of them, to kill Iraqis and in the process, more than 3,500 of them were killed and around 30,000 young American men, some married with families, returned home maimed, burnt, mentally crippled and destined to suffer for the rest of their lives.

Besides the pain of being physically disabled, the conscience of these young men, burning inside their minds, were also haunted by the ghosts of the innocent Iraqis they killed, tortured, maimed and raped.

Haunted by the blood they spilled and all that they did and saw in the battlefield - burnt out corpses of innocent Iraqis and their loved once, screams of the suffering, cries of limbless children, weeping widows and fatherless daughters, they scream in sleepless nights in different corners of America.

While they will have to live with this agony for the rest of their lives, what about the pathetic plight of the mothers, wives and children and other loved ones who need to put up with the agony of these young American men for the rest of their lives?

While wives of marines lined up at churches for grocery handouts of feed their children, New York-based tycoon David Brooks, who made a fortune from this war, spent ten million dollars to celebrate his daughter’s bat mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony making the girl’s twelfth birthday at the Manhattan Rockefeller Centre in November 2005.

Meanwhile billions of dollars worth of contracts for the so-called rebuilding of Iraq was given to companies close to the war mongers including Vice President Dick Cheney, called “Vice President for torture”, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others. Frightened and helpless Muslims have been watching the unfolding crimes fearing they would be the next target. Today Al Qaeda threat has lost its credibility. For example, the Bush administration accused Al Qaeda of bombing Benazir Bhutto’s arrival procession in Karachi while Benazir accused the Pakistani Internal Affairs Ministry and even named the people involved.

It appears Muslims have no one to turn to. Western media which is an integral part of the Western war machine is hostile to Muslims. The United Nations has been used by the United States to implement its evil designs on Muslim countries.

Regimes in the Muslim countries are willing collaborators and no one even bothers to condemn these crimes.

Only outspoken former Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohamed, South Africa’s living legend Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, besides numerous American, British and even Jewish writers had the courage to condemn these crimes.

The situation is so frightening for Muslims that Wolfram Richter, the Economic Professor of the University of Dortmund, expressed his fears that ‘the next holocaust would be against Muslims”.