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Journalism of Courage
Last night I lit a candle in my window in memory of the children who died in Beslan. It was a rite of mourning that millions of people all over the world were urged to participate in, and participate though I did, I believe the time for candlelight vigils and symbolic gestures is gone. It is time to face the horrible truth, in the week of the third anniversary of 9/11, that Islamic terrorists are winning the global war against terrorism because the countries who are its victims have not had the courage to look evil in the face and call it evil or dared to admit that we are up against malevolent forces the like of which the world has not seen since Nazi Germany.
They cannot be fought unless the world comes together to fight with a common strategy and without double standards. You cannot condemn acts of terrorism in New York and Madrid but justify them in Beslan because you think the Chechens have a political cause. You cannot justify them in New Delhi and Mumbai because you think the Kashmiris have a political cause.
For me if there was anything more sickening than the horror of those tiny hostages in the Beslan school, it was the justification of the horror by liberal commentators across the world, including in our own country. Ah, the poor Chechens! Who can blame them for being angry when Russia treats them so badly, when it rigs elections and refuses to negotiate? I do not support President Putin’s policy in Chechnya but believe he was right to respond by asking why Osama bin Laden was not being invited to the White House for talks. Bin Laden also has a political cause. He believes the West is the enemy of Islam and must be defeated, and that America as the most successful symbol of Western civilisation must be destroyed first. He also holds the Americans directly responsible for what is happening in Palestine, and that is as political a cause as Chechnya or Kashmir.
After Beslan, the least we can do is not desecrate the memory of those children who died such terrible deaths by talking about political causes in the same breath as terrorism. No political cause justifies taking small children hostage and starving and torturing them for two days before shooting them in the back when they tried to flee. No political cause justifies asking a mother to choose between her two tiny children before allowing her to leave with only one. What kind of men and women are capable of such unspeakable horror? What kind of religion permits the killing of small children and, since the religion of the killers in the Beslan school was Islam, why are the mullahs silent? So vocal as they always are when it comes to the West’s so-called atrocities against Muslim countries, why is it we hear no word of condemnation against the monsters who took hundreds of children hostage in Beslan and forced them to survive without a drop of water for two days? Where are Islam’s moderate voices?
Something terrible has happened to Islam in the past 20 years, and nobody needs to admit this more than Muslims themselves. From being a religion that had learned to live in relative peace with the world it has become a religion that seems unable to live in peace with anybody. Not with us infidels and not even with the Christians and Jews they once considered brothers for being ahl-e-kitab, people of the Book. The isolation of Islam, its current pariah status come from the radicalisation that the religion has undergone since Ayotallah Khomeini brought about his Islamic revolution in Iran in the late ’70s.
In India, you see this radicalised new Islam everywhere. I have seen villages in Rajasthan where every woman is veiled, every child in a madarsa and every man bearded and dressed in a way that distinguishes him from his Hindu brethren. Twenty years ago, it would have been hard to tell a Rajasthani Hindu from a Muslim. In Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, I now meet Muslims who try to speak Urdu and wear salwar-kameez in some mistaken belief that Islam comes from northern India, and in Deoband recently, in the famed Dar-ul-uloom, I discovered a world so blinkered and medieval it was hard to believe I was not in Saudi Arabia.
When we speak of Saudi Arabia, we come close to the crux of why the free world appears to be losing the war against terrorism. Saudi Arabia, as everyone knows, is largely responsible for this radicalised new Islam. It is Saudi money that builds mosques and madarsas in Indian villages and it is Saudi money that funds Islamic militancy in the rest of the world. The men who hijacked the planes on 9/11 were nearly all from Saudi Arabia and yet Saudi Arabia remains a valued ally of the United States in the war on terrorism. It is not possible to win a war in which you cannot identify the enemy.
If the Americans are guilty of not doing this because of a vested interest called oil, our own political leaders are guilty of not identifying the enemy because of a vested interest called the Muslim vote bank. Our governments fund madarsas and other Islamic institutions without admitting that even the most moderate teach the difference between believers and infidels. When a child grows up believing in this difference, it does not take long for radical preachers to convince him that in the holy war that good Muslims are now fighting to ‘‘save Islam’’, killing infidel children is alright. If anything proves that we need our own jihad against radical Islam, Beslan does.
Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com.
