By Jamie Glazov
Source: FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Moorthy Muthuswamy, an expert on terrorism in India. He grew up in India, where he had firsthand experience with political Islam and jihad. He moved to America in 1984 to pursue graduate studies. In 1992, he received a doctorate in nuclear physics from Stony Brook University, New York. Since 1999 he has extensively published ideas on neutralizing political Islam’s terror war as it is imposed on unbelievers. He is the author of the upcoming book, Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War.
FP: Moorthy Muthuswamy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Muthuswamy: Thank you for this timely interview, Jamie
FP: There were some Islamic terror attacks against India in late July. What do you make of them?
Muthuswamy: The late July 2008 blasts are ominous signs of a political Islamic movement in India coming of age. This movement is a consequence of a thirty year old process of jihadization of Indian Muslims or simply, jihad build up in India.
The Islamic conquest of nations and people in Arabia and Africa is now part of history. We are now witnessing the Islamic conquest of South Asia. With Pakistan and Bangladesh firmly Islamized, now the attention is shifting to India, the last big land of South Asia yet to be conquered.
Who would have thought that this barbaric conquest phenomenon will rear its ugly head again in our life time?
FP: Can you give some background to the readers?
Muthuswamy: Sure.
Studies of Islamic conquest of non-Muslims and their land have identified a process called jihad build-up in non-Muslim nations. This build-up also creates what is called a political Islamic movement.
In this process the Muslim minority is systematically and politically indoctrinated by mosques aided by funding from Muslim majority nations, on the grounds of “religious freedom”. This indoctrination is geared towards driving Muslims away from the mainstream, to become hostile to their own nation, and to identify with pan-Islamic aspirations, including a unified Caliphate under Sharia. The Caliphate is envisioned to wage wars until the whole world is converted to Islam.
The contiguous land mass of the Caliphate requires destroying India and converting it into an Islamic state – the primary goal of the political Islamic movement in India. Spearheading this effort in India is the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), identified by Indian intelligence as the terror outfit behind the serial blasts of late July, 2008.
Here is what one may call as a well-articulated manifesto of the Call to Arms (armed jihad): click here. This manifesto was sent minutes before one of the serial blasts and it warned of impending blasts to note that Hindu blood is, “the cheapest of all mankind” and contained Koranic justifications for killing unbelievers. Of course, the manifesto also called on the Hindu majority in India to embrace Islam in order to avoid further attacks – a chillingly similar threat Bin Laden and his deputies’ issue to America every now and then.
FP: What is the ideological inspiration and cover for SIMI?
Muthuswamy: It is mostly derived from Deoband Islamic seminary and the tens of thousands of clerics it has graduated over the years. Deoband is an Indianized version of Wahhabism established in the 19th century (most terrorist outfits in Pakistan, Taliban or even many in ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, are considered its followers). A declaration issued at the end of February 2008 “anti-terror” conference organized at Deoband showed Islamic deceit or Taqqiya at its very best – “Their [western] aggression, barbarism and state-sponsored terrorism – not only in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Bosnia and various South American countries – have surpassed all records known to human history.”
The declaration said nothing about Pakistani and Saudi sponsorship of terror in India or Indian Muslims’ role as foot-soldiers of this jihad. Among the main thrust of this conference was to give a clean chit to SIMI and to absolve it of any terrorism related activities carried out in India.
Ironically, the Indian government too has unwittingly acted to nurture the intellectual base of jihad and sponsorship of SIMI, through an increasing number of government-funded universities with “Muslim character” – Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia Millia Islamia University, to name a new.
FP: Can you talk about the serial blasts themselves?
Muthuswamy: The back-to-back serial bomb blasts that killed many and injured scores of innocent civilians in the Indian cities of Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and detection and diffusion of scores of other bombs in Surat in July 2008 may have signaled the next stage of jihad build-up in India – from siege to attack mode. Bangalore was probably chosen due to its prominence as the emerging technology capital of India; the city of Surat in Gujarat is the diamond business center of India and Ahmedabad is the capital of the Indian state of Gujarat – the engine driving India’s economic growth and whose population is most resistant to jihad.
From the strategic point of view of destroying Indian economy and degrading the will of the unbelievers to resist, and to destabilize India, no other targets could be better chosen.
These blasts show exceptional levels of organizational ability, inspiration, logistical support in both men and material, and importantly, wide following of extremism among Indian Muslim population. I believe that Indian jihadists and their sponsors in many Muslim nations have concluded that due to the extensive network of terror cells established in Muslim communities all over India they can now indefinitely bleed India until it is destroyed. I also think that the Indian jihadists have shown only a small measure of what they are capable of.
Unlike most western nations where state monitoring of mosques and other jihad sponsoring entities is good (especially since 9/11 attacks), in the case of India, a retired top intelligence official has noted very limited penetration of terrorist entities by the state. Due to this reality, Indian intelligence has no clue about the full dimension of terrorist threat India faces.
Unsurprisingly, military pressure on India is now mounting on its western front, with frequent reports of gun fire exchange with Pakistan and breaking of the four year old ceasefire. As the Indian army is increasingly diverted to quell Muslim-Hindu fight within India, Pakistan is expected to infiltrate more of its irregular jihadists and troops disguised as “freedom fighters” in order to help “oppressed” Indian Muslims to take the war inside India.
The excitement of a resurgent India is fast getting replaced with India as a theater of jihad.
FP: American intelligence officials have gathered intelligence suggesting that Pakistan helped plan the deadly bombing of India’s embassy in Afghanistan. What do you make of this?
Muthuswamy: Indeed, there is every bit of motivation for Pakistanis to plan and execute the Embassy bombing. Pakistanis see India as their primary enemy and clearly, they couldn’t digest increasing Indian influence in what they see as a Pakistani sphere of influence.
This bombing puts a damper on developmental efforts in Afghanistan. When you add this to the Pakistani support and sponsorship of the Afghan Taliban, the American effort to stabilize and to moderate Afghanistan is running into some serious difficulties.
In addition, aided by Saudi Arabia, even under Musharraf, Pakistan has continued to destabilize India.
It seems, American effort to engage Pakistan has yielded very little on the larger strategic front, while tactically it may have been successful in capturing some Al-Qaeda operatives.
Jamie, as you may recall, in an earlier interview conducted last year, I had mentioned that, “[t]he de facto power in these nations [Pakistan and Saudi Arabia] are political Islamic movements, this makes these leaders ineffective in stopping these nations from being fountainheads of terror.”
Pakistani military and ISI are the sword-arm of political Islam in Pakistan. First and foremost, they will never stop armed jihad – and no other internal force can change that.
Even Musharraf showed his true colors by coming to the aid of the ISI, by calling it: “the first defense line of Pakistan.”
Pakistan has now become one of America’s biggest foreign policy and strategic challenges. The bottom line is that America has little leverage against Pakistan (or Saudi Arabia for that matter).
A desperate India and frustrated America will be increasingly pulled toward each other to counter Pakistan-Saudi axis in the region.
FP: What are the powers behind the jihad build-up against India?
Muthuswamy: The primary powers behind the jihad build-up in India, and the resulting terror and mayhem created there are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
We may be able to associate these nations and their leaders with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Geneva Convention. This is an interesting angle because it may provide the western powers much-needed leverage against these terror-sponsoring entities and also legal justification to jihad victim states to decisively strike back.
Let me present some material that might implicate Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Centuries ago “offensive” or “expansionist” armed jihad was used to conquer land and people for Islam. It is interesting to note the view of a Sharia judge of Pakistan who had sat in its Supreme Court for twenty years: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged… because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.”
Now, with international criminal system in place, and also because many Muslim nations no longer have the military might to impose an expansionist jihad on unbeliever nations, the concept of “defensive” armed jihad has been invoked to justify arming and funding Muslim insurgencies in many non-Muslim majority nations in order to create separate homelands for Muslims.
As part of the grand vision of the so-called defensive jihad, state-sponsored Saudi charities have worked to deliberately drive a wedge between Muslim minorities and the non-Muslim majority in many nations; new mosques were established and material hateful of unbelievers was distributed and preached. These measures, funds for mobilizing the faithful and the indoctrinating the necessity of waging armed jihad have given Muslim populations a sense of empowerment, ideology, logistics, and motivation needed to mobilize and to finally wage armed jihad.
In Muslim majority nations such as Pakistan, the above process has created a steady stream of recruits for global jihad.
In other words, as we will see, worldwide Islamic terror is part and parcel of a grand vision of Saudi Arabia.
Having financed and provided logistics for the charities, the Saudi government itself provided material for indoctrination and to prepare Muslim minorities to wage armed jihad on their non-Muslim compatriots. Here is a sample of the official Saudi school material for consumption both internal and abroad:
In these verses is a call for jihad, which is the pinnacle of Islam. In (jihad) is life for the body; thus it is one of the most important causes of outward life. Only through force and victory over the enemies is there security and repose. Within martyrdom in the path of God (exalted and glorified is He) is a type of noble life-force that is not diminished by fear or poverty (Tafsir, Arabic/Sharia, 68).
Before adverse publicity compelled the Saudis to remove the following statement, the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi embassy in Washington carried the following statement defining the motif for jihad:
The Muslims are required to raise the banner of jihad in order to make the Word of Allah supreme in this world, to remove all forms of injustice and oppression, and to defend the Muslims. If Muslims do not take up the sword, the evil tyrants of this earth will be able to continue oppressing the weak and [the] helpless…
There is every reason to believe that the Saudis have distributed these kinds of materials around the world, including in India.
FP: Can you discuss the specific case of the Kashmir jihad?
Muthuswamy: “Self-determination” of “oppressed” or “alienated” Muslims in Kashmir is among the most popular cause (of “defensive” jihad) in the Muslim world. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have pursued this jihad aggressively, while exposing their hand (and thereby implicating them) because they seem to think that they are dealing from a position of “moral high ground” and because India is seen as a weak state.
By the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, admitting its role: “Jihad, insurgency or whatever you want to call it in Kashmir… Yes, Pakistan may have helped the jihad at some time, but it was not started by us”.
First, I want to show that the Kashmir jihad is an offensive one aimed at extending Islam’s boundaries at the expense of non-Muslims by imposing a no-holds-barred warfare on the state controlling Kashmir, India. It is ironic that Pakistan would want to grab more territory from India, especially when it owes a significant portion of its territory to India for its recent acts of non-Muslim ethnic cleansing.
Funding for building mosques and indoctrinating Muslim populations in Kashmir has been funneled through state-sponsored Saudi charities. While supporting Muslim self-determination in Indian part of Kashmir (so that the Muslims would vote to join Pakistan and take the land to Islamic Pakistan), nothing is said about non-Muslim ethnic cleansing (to India) from Pakistani part of Kashmir or from Pakistan itself (to India).
Just as India had to absorb non-Muslims driven out of Pakistani part of Kashmir and from the rest of Pakistan, Pakistan could simply absorb the Muslim population in the Indian part of Kashmir (minus the land), if they feel so alienated. And, that could be considered an equitable arrangement. But clearly that is not the case here; the principle that has been invoked is: What is mine is exclusively mine and what is yours is also mine!
In other words, Kashmir jihad is a bogus “defensive” jihad.
FP: Can you provide more details on the jihad buildup in India aided by Saudi Arabia (and assisted by Pakistan)?
Muthuswamy: I provide them below. I believe the Indian govt. has shared much more comprehensive data implicating both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with their American and other western counterparts.
- Funds for Muslim insurgencies, including Kashmir Muslim insurgency and Al-Qaeda were funneled through Saudi state-sponsored charity organizations such as Muslim World League (MWL) and World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY). A MWL communiqué in 2000 called for, “all assistance to the people of Kashmir, and support its steadfast struggle.” Since a major part of this “struggle” is armed insurgency, this call for material support and support of the “struggle” can be taken to mean supplying of funds, arms, and ammunition for an armed jihad. According to Indian government, “90 percent of the funding [for Kashmir militants] is from other countries and Islamic organizations like the WAMY”.
- A cursory review of over thirty years of MWL’s mouthpiece, The Muslim World League Journal, indicates that it has consistently ignored expulsion of over 300,000 non-Muslim Kashmiris and Kashmir Muslim complicity toward this cleansing act. Also ignored are Kashmiri Muslims’ religious apartheid practices toward non-Muslim Kashmiris and others in the rest of the state.
- The key first step toward building up jihad is the construction of new mosques. Starting 1980, scores of new mosques were constructed. Since 1990s at least 3,000 new mosques were constructed in Kashmir, many with Saudi assistance.
- SIMI’s, “spectacular growth after 1982 lay in the support it gained from Islamists in West Asia, notably the Kuwait-based World Association of Muslim Youth and the Saudi Arabia-funded International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations.”
- With authorities in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya and Sudan assisting, about $700 million was raised to further growth of Islam. As part of this plan new mosques and madrassas were to be constructed outside of Kashmir.
- Indian security agencies have detailed how Saudi Arabia acts as the meeting point of Indian and Pakistani-backed terrorists who plot their strikes in the Indian Kashmir and elsewhere. Indian security officials have been unhappy with the Saudi efforts in monitoring sizable funds that are transferred to India, a big portion of which is suspected to be routed to fundamentalist institutions.
- In January 2006, India approached the Saudis to sign an extradition treaty covering terrorism. But Saudis demanded that India agree to incorporate “freedom struggles” as a justification of acts of violence.
- Additionally, state-sponsored Saudi charities have funded India specific terrorist outfits in Pakistan, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), who are working to create additional homelands for Muslims in India through terror. An ex-activist of SIMI claimed, “Funds are available for the asking for LeT not only from Pakistan, but also from Wahhabi fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and the UAE”.
Battling Saudi-sponsored Islamic terrorism has been an escalating burden on an impoverished India. Nearly about 6,000 children die every day in India due to malnourishment driven by poverty.
Serial blasts by suspected Islamists, in major Indian economic and technological hubs such as Bangalore and Ahmedabad are poised to drive capital and investment out of India, drive millions more into poverty and make it easier for jihadists to destroy India from within.
Also notable is terrorist attacks directed at Hindu temples – exposing the intent to annihilate the idolaters’ way of life, as suggested in Koranic injunctions.
All of the available evidence appears to show a desire, intent, and execution on the part of Saudi Arabia (and Pakistan) to impose an offensive jihad on India – not just restricted to Kashmir – using bogus excuses that are either exaggerated or invented. Even the so-called alienation of Kashmiri/Indian Muslims is to a great part built up by Saudi charities in order to use Indian Muslims as foot-soldiers to purposefully extend Islamic sphere of influence at the expense of non-Muslims. This is sanctioned by the pseudo-Constitution of Saudi Arabia, the Koran and the Sunnah, which have widely quoted verses (by Muslim clerics) that justify violent conquest of unbelievers.
This deliberate, long-term, and large-scale execution of terror plans has already devastated significant portions of India, with about one hundred thousand people killed, and about half a million displaced. Besides, this highly impoverished nation had to divert its scare resources to fight this terror imposed on its people, and this has in turn led to exacerbating malnutrition of its children, their deaths as a result and grinding poverty of millions of its citizens.
Among the cross hairs of the terrorists’ hit list, according the Indian Home Ministry: India’s nuclear installations, power plants, and oil refineries. The current escalation of serial blasts and what is yet to come at this rate is poised to devastate and kill tens, if not hundreds of millions of Indians and take away the future of many more in the coming decades.
It appears that one can associate the pattern of terrorism waged on India, spearheaded by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as per the Geneva Convention. This act of genocide is of a slow form, likely taking several decades to conduct (less likely to be noticed, as a result), unlike the classic one in Darfur region of Africa which is measured in years.
By emphasizing just the “self-determination” of the Muslims in Kashmir while ignoring the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in Muslim majority regions nearby, leaders such as the reigning King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s leadership may have set forth policy measures leading to terror, genocide and crimes against humanity conducted on the people of India, using the Saudi and Pakistani resources respectively.
FP: What can India do?
Muthuswamy: In the near-term there is little the ruling regime in India can do, as the nation awaits blasts of increasing devastation and frequency.
Internally, the tipping point may have been crossed; India no longer defendable. Jihadists know what they are doing, as a Pakistan-based jihad commander proclaimed a few years ago.
Even in the long-term, poor governing and a dysfunctional democracy significantly undermine India’s prospects. Besides, the institutional know-how on dealing with the Islamic threat remains primitive, as the recent Frontpage Symposium can attest to.
Putting it differently, India is a sitting duck – and these serial blasts mark the beginning of extreme destabilizing of India: Spreading of Kashmir jihad into the rest of India.
In this war of minds, first and foremost, India has to articulate the rationale for its existence within human rights framework. Here is one.
Non-Muslims from every Muslim majority region of South Asia – without exception – be it Pakistan, Bangladesh or from India’s own Kashmir valley have been massively driven out to Hindu-majority India. This occurred when Muslim populations in these areas obtained political power. In addition, in 1971, the Pakistani army selectively sought out and killed perhaps a million or more Hindus and drove many more to India. But it was never held accountable. Indeed, due to this mostly one-sided religious cleansing India ended up accommodating about 85% of the original population in about 75% of the original land called British India.
The fact that non-Muslim populations in these Muslim majority regions shared ethnicity, language, food habits, and culture didn’t at all help or save them. This data shows unequivocally that South Asian Muslims do not believe in coexistence and that the Islam practiced in the region is a repressive political ideology of conquest that pretends itself as a religion.
This documented genocidal conquest of non-Muslims in South Asia compellingly defines the first human rights priority for India: Ensuring India’s long-term existence as a free and safe land of opportunity for non-Muslim South Asians.
Armed by this rationale and with the right leadership India can take to the much-needed offense by first mobilizing the non-Muslim majority and to weaken jihadist hold on a mobilized Indian Muslim population.
However, the major responsibility of stopping jihad in India falls in the hands of mainly those who nurtured it all these years: political and religious leadership of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Besides, in the eyes of Indian jihadists, these external entities carry more weight than the internal ones.
It is only natural that the Indians make the following demands on the Saudi/Pakistani political and religious leaderships:
- They apologize for their one-sided past support of “self-determination” of Muslims in Kashmir while ignoring the plight of non-Muslims driven away from nearby Muslim majority regions.
- These leaders will appeal to the Indian Muslims, Pakistanis and the Saudis – and take steps to stop the jihad directed at India and its citizens.
- Saudi Arabia will agree to generously fund to rehabilitate Indian Muslims away from extremism, to compensate non-Muslim Indians affected by Islamic radicals that are in anyway indoctrinated by Saudi-originated funds and to compensate the Indian state for the damages suffered and expenses occurred due to Saudi jihad.
- Saudi Arabia will not stop oil exports to India, as this could be interpreted as waging additional jihad on humanity in India.
- Pakistan will take the “alienated” Kashmiri Muslims from India and settle them in the portion of Kashmir it holds and in the rest of Pakistan.
Of course, one should be under no illusion that any of these demands are going to be made by the Indians any time soon or even if they are made, the Saudis and Pakistanis are willingly going to embrace them!
Yet, if India wants to exist and do so securely, it has little choice.
These are first of the steps India has to undertake in order to persuade western powers to bring up genocide and other charges against the Saudi and Pakistani political and religious leaderships, and before embarking on a military offensive.
The 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice even extends such authority to the preemptive use of strategic nuclear weapons in certain existential circumstances.
Should the terrorist attacks continue to devastate India and if Pakistan and Saudi Arabia do not act to discourage jihad, India’s existence is threatened and as a nuclear-armed state, it should use every means to devastate Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, paving the way for unraveling of political Islamic movements in India and beyond.
The conundrum of Pakistan is understandable; any limited offensive military measure directed at punishing it will most likely destabilize it and persuade Pakistani military leadership to retaliate with nuclear strikes. However, under the current western policy of “engaging” Pakistan, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have only grown stronger due to internal support.
India could be the missing link in neutralizing the threat Pakistan poses in Afghanistan and through its procession of “Islamic” nuclear bombs.
If Indians feel that they have to hit back at Pakistan due to extensive internal terror attacks attributable as genocide or crimes against humanity, an option worth backing by the western powers is a full-scale Indian offensive that may involve massive pre-emptive strategic nuclear strikes to first soften up Pakistan, followed by over running Pakistan’s territory with Indian troops and liberate its population to Hindu way of life (which culturally Pakistanis belong to), by comprehensively neutralizing its Islamic roots. The West can follow it up by aiding nation-building to be utilized wisely for the first time in Pakistan (until now, the well-meaning western aid has gone into jihad-building there, much to the discomfort of the givers). Such a Pakistan will not only have a negative memory of its Islamic past, but importantly, will be a much less likely terror sponsor.
FP: What can the western powers do?
Muthuswamy: Let me set this section up by first explaining how policy decisions regarding Islamic terrorism are taken in India at the present time.
India’s top two leaders’ (the unelected Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his boss, Sonia Gandhi, the president of Congress Party) interaction with the public or journalists on foreign policy and security matters come down to reading statements prepared by aides, with virtually no cross-examination. Singh’s long career in the government had been that of an economic technocrat and Gandhi’s prior experience consisted of home-making.
Due to these leaders’ inexperience on strategic issues, including matters related to Islam or Muslims, Muslim leaders who serve as aides or those who serve in the Cabinet have take the lead in formulating policies. This has been a recipe for disaster as the Muslim leadership in India reflects the Bin Laden loving, fundamentalist-oriented Muslim community.
Not surprisingly, every long-term decision taken by these two leaders have gone on to advance the cause of jihad. Even in cases of obvious Islamist violence, Muslim leaders close to these top Indian leaders have used their influence and access to stymie the investigation and let the terrorists run free. In addition, the Muslim leaders have helped to misguide the focus of government effort away from the roots of terror within their community.
That the Muslim leaders with jihadist outlook are pulling strings behind the top two Indian leaders can explain the bizarre Muslim exclusive promises made by these Indian leaders. Prime Minister Singh stated in Dec. 2006: “They [Muslims] must have the first claim on resources.” Sonia Gandhi went a step further. She wrote a letter as part of a 2007 election campaign in India’s most populous state, specifically pleading to over 15,000 Muslim leaders, including clerics, “I can build a society of your dreams“.
The shocking reality of India is that the ruling Manmohan Singh regime is an unwitting proxy of jihadists on policy matters pertaining to Islam and Muslims.
The ruling regime’s success in bringing India along to sign the proposed nuclear deal with America shouldn’t misconstrued as an ability to tackle Islamic terrorism. Reason: This proposed deal is not an Islam related issue and hence Muslim “advisors” didn’t play a determining role. In any case, in my view, the nuclear deal with India is highly irrelevant for the reason that India will neither be able to securely build nor maintain the nuclear reactors it proposes to construct in another ten years time, should internal destabilizing continue at this rate.
Give these realities it is hard to believe that India is any longer capable of surviving the Islamic onslaught all by itself.
It all comes down to western leaders deciding whether they would like to see India rapidly destabilized by an Islamic war of thousand cuts, with millions of people dying of hunger and malnutrition, and importantly, hostile jihad-sponsoring Muslim states born inside of what is left of India within the next few decades.
When large-scale terrorism that can categorized as crimes-against-humanity is taking place in a nation at the behest of external Islamic powers and where the regime in power is not only ineffective in stopping terror but even seems to act as a proxy for the Islamists, there is every reason for the world powers to step in and help the beleaguered people staring the face of a mutual existential threat.
Such a help can come in the form of backing the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its strong leader, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. Indian intelligence has identified BJP as the only main stream party free of terrorist infiltration. Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party with its traditional reliance on Muslims has become susceptible to jihadist infiltration and influence.
As part of discrediting the jihadist moral “high ground”, the United States must question the credibility of the Kashmir jihad.
The western powers should persuade and back India to build up the case of crimes against humanity implicating both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia through the International Criminal Court. Not just in the case of India, this angle needs to be pursued to include other jihad victim states and also potentially more sponsors, including the Islamic Republic of Iran (due to its sponsorship of terror directed at Israel).
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other attacks directed at the United States by Al-Qaeda should have given more than ample warning to the Saudi ruling class (and Pakistan) that continued funding – directly or through government-linked charities – of either the Taliban or Al-Qaeda is to harm American interests – and that corrective measures must be put in place to roll back extremism. We now know that the Saudis and Pakistanis hardly undertook any measures to stop the funding of terrorist groups, let alone undertake any corrective measure, until a least 2001 – and that make these nations significantly responsible for 9/11 attacks on America. Still, the 9/11 Commission has blundered into letting the Saudis (and to a lesser extent Pakistanis) off the hook.
The need to move beyond proxies, from Al-Qaeda, Taliban or Hezbollah to their major sponsors – namely, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran – can’t be overstated.
Associating Saudi Arabia with genocide and other crimes against humanity gives us an unprecedented ability to regulate its funding for “religious causes” in the West, to even retroactively shutdown any “religious” institution built with its funding, to discredit its standing (Saudi Arabia is synonymous with Islam and vice versa) in the community of societies and nations – and to even seize its oil-based assets (used to sponsor genocide) as a last resort.
Specifically, western powers, going beyond their support for India, should call on the Saudi leadership to allocate, say, 30-40% of its oil-based revenues for rehabilitating Muslims it has indoctrinated all these decades and to compensate non-Muslim victims and their states.
The victim list includes the United States.
Should the Saudis balk at this humanitarian proposal, the western powers should work to add top Saudi political and religious leaderships to the elite list now occupied by the fellow Muslim, Sudan’s leader, Omar al-Bashir – now charged by the International Criminal Court. Similar approach may be pursued in the case of Pakistan in order to make it disengage from terror sponsorship directed at Afghanistan and India.
Due to deeply entrenched and popular nature of political Islamic movements based in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan that are answerable to none, it is unlikely that even the above approach will yield any meaningful results. Still, this intermediate step may be necessary before justifying far more lethal means.
FP: Moorthy Muthuswamy, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Muthuswamy: Thank you Jamie.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine’s managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Francois Gautier is a man on a mission. His Indian connection dates back to the 70s, when he came to Auroville as a young student. A writer and journalist based in India, he strongly believes that modern day leaders should learn from icons like Chhatrapati Shivaji, who was a great administrator and warrior. “Just as the French keep Napoloean’s memory alive and celebrate his life and achievements constantly, Shivaji can be a wonderful role model for present day politicians. He respected all faiths and was a just ruler.The chief of his navy and more than 25 per cent of his armed forces were Muslims. But not all know of his greatness. In fact some think of movie stars when I refer to Shivaji,” he said speaking at a miniature painting exhibition titled ‘A hero for Modern India: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’.
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