Image courtesy: History.com

It is exactly eighty years since that infamous night of November 9-10, 1938. The world will never ever forget that night known as the ‘Reichspogromnacht’ or by a seemingly more pleasant sounding ‘Kristallnacht’ (crystal night), which ironically refers to the litter of broken glass strewn on the streets after the pogrom. The Nazis and their henchmen were on the onslaught as they attacked Jews and destroyed their property in a night of bloody violence and terror, across Germany and Austria. Thousands were affected, several killed; according to some estimates more than one thousand Synagogues and an additional 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. At least thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The violence on the Jews continued unabated the next day, and the following weeks and for several years after that. It was a pogrom, the start of a genocide. The sheer hate, brutality and inhumanity that unfolded over the period has been recorded for posterity.
 
Etched in the hearts and minds of all men and women at the end of the Second World War, were those immortal words, “Never Again”. It seemed that the world had learnt a lesson particularly with the promulgation of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ in 1948. Ground realities point to something very different: human nature seems to continue to be feeble and fickle. Eighty years down the road, it seems that we have neither the courage nor the capacity to learn from history; that we will continue dishing out flimsy justifications and incredible reasons to legitimatize hate, violence, divisiveness and war.
 
When will we ever learn that anti-Semitism has no place in this world? The lone gunman that killed eleven members of the ‘Tree of Life’ Synagogue in the United States recently is but an example of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in several parts of the western world today. This needs to be addressed and countered as soon as possible.
 
When will the Israelis ever learn that Palestinians have a right to their homeland?  Despite the decisions of the United Nations and the outcry by most thinking nations of the world, the Palestinians continue to be at the receiving end of inhuman treatment and hostility from the Israeli regime.
 
When will the Saudis ever learn that they have no right to continue to destabilize the Middle East? Their intervention in Yemen has resulted in widespread bombing of civilian areas, the deaths of several thousands and a terrible famine all over. The world is aware of the prime movers behind the ISIS- but sadly, everyone else is called out except the Saudis.
 
When will the US administration ever learn that democracy is about equals? That the core values and vision of any great country are justice, liberty equality and fraternity. That the dignity of the human person is sacrosanct. That agendas and speeches of hate and divisiveness are bound to have negative effects everywhere.
 
When will the Indian rulers ever learn that India is about diversity and harmony? That the essence of a great country is the constant pursuit of truth and non-violence. That the denigration of the minorities; the instutionalisation of violence, the partisanship in ‘name-changing’, crony capitalism are guaranteed signposts for the destruction of the country
 
When will the right wing ever learn that inclusiveness is at the heart of people’s development? Be it in the Philippines and Austria, in Brazil and Congo, in Myanmar and in Italy – the ‘official’ xenophobia is bound to have repercussions. A great nation is about building bridges to reach out to one another and not about constructing walls to keep out others.
 
When will the military industrial complex ever learn that they are responsible for so much suffering all over? The guns lobby, the other producers of weapons, the nuclear club are all having a heyday profiteering from fomenting violence in so many different parts of the world. They have no qualms of conscience when innocent, ordinary citizens have to flee their homes because of violence.
 
The tragedy is that there are these and too many other ominous signs all over the world today. The ‘Kristallnacht’ of 1938 was not a spontaneous event. There were conditions created: hate speeches given, lies and myths propagated a fear about the ‘other’ slowly but surely entrenched in the majority community. Finally, the demon unleashed itself to an unimaginable level. An objective analysis of the politics of today provides one with the grim reality of very similar indicators.
 
Sometime in the early sixties Bob Dylan gave us that haunting song, which several folksingers and anti-war protesters like Joan Baez made famous
Yes, ‘n’ how many times a man must look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
 
Yes, the answer is blowing in the wind – but do we have the courage to learn from history and help make our world a better place for all?

 
 Fr. Cedric Prakash SJ is a human rights activist)
 

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Istanbul c.1875, in an early photo by the Swedish photographer Guillaume Berggren

Port cities like Constantinople, Smyrna and Malacca were microcosms of the world market in the sense that people from all or most parts of the world were drawn there, so that many different languages could be heard. When the state was committed to maintaining this cosmopolitan character, rulers consciously sought to encourage a culture of religious tolerance. One can hardly say this about the present government of India, despite all of Modi’s international pretensions!

Religious tolerance was the main feature of Calicut / Kozhikode that impressed the shipwrecked Breton navigator François Pyrard, who wrote (in the early 17th century), ‘it has merchants from all parts of the world, and of all nations and religions, by reason of the liberty and security accorded to them there: for the king permits the exercise of every kind of religion…(he) holds that to be a cardinal maxim of government’. ‘Everyone lives there in great peace and concord, notwithstanding the great diversity of races and religions…and of strangers and sojourners’. Calicut was ruled by the Nair Samoothiris. On the other coast of India, Masulipatnam in the 17th century was another case of a cosmopolitan port with a mixed population where the rulers (in this case the Qutub Shahis, who were Shias) ensured what Arasaratnam describes as ‘communal harmony’ at a time when most east-coast ports were plagued by ‘civil strife’, mainly caste rivalries among Hindus.
 
Against Kirti Chaudhuri’s strange view that ‘it was unusual for a Hindu merchant to conduct business with a Muslim’, Irfan Habib was able to show that ‘the brokers of Muslim merchants (in Surat) were invariably Hindus’, that is, Banias.
 
This image of an early capitalism characterized by cosmopolitan cultures of trade partly survives in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, only there it is transposed to industrial capital with its restless search for markets and sources of raw materials. What doesn’t characterize capital in the pages of the Manifesto is the fierce nationalist rivalries that would start tearing the world apart from the early part of the twentieth century. Nationalism, prepared by the struggles between mercantilist powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only finally blossomed in the age of industrial capital. And we are still living with its hideous legacies.
 
Take the latest example of this: the NRC is overloaded with meanings. At one, totally prosaic, level it is an elaborate attempt to manipulate the voter lists, so terrified is the BJP of losing the next election. At another, more purely ideological, level it is an exercise in communalism, a drive to purge some mythical ‘nation’ of so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants (read: unwanted Muslims) in a way that mimics Trump and goes way beyond him. And it tries to do all this by deliberately stirring up sub-nationalisms throughout the country, destroying the very idea of ‘India’ itself.
 
(From the author’s FB Profile)

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Image: BFI
 
According to an Indian Express report, Akhtar has criticised MNS and questioned the government’s role as the mediator, and said, “The only word, I think, that comes to mind is unfortunate, because it has set a terrible precedent.”
 
Following MNS’ threat of vandalising theatres screening Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, which has a Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in it, CM Fadnavis had called for a meeting of the party president Raj Thackeray and the producers, in which it was agreed that the filmmakers will not cast Pakistani artistes in future and will pay Rs 5 crore as ‘prayashchit’ (penance) to the Army welfare fund.
 
Referring to the series of incidents since MNS’ threats, Akhtar told Express, “It’s not even the government telling you what you should be doing and not doing. So who are you listening to? You are listening to the people who are threatening you with violence. Now, when you have the threat of violence, it’s not only about you. You have kids at home, you have a family.”
 
Speaking to The Indian Express during the promotion of his next film, Akhtar questioned the selective targeting of the film industry. “By all means pass a law. If you pass a law, you are representing the voice of the people. We’ve elected you to do it, so by all means pass a law. But don’t hold that standard only for the film industry. Why only the film industry? Because we are easy targets. Why don’t you stop business between India and Pakistan, this two billion dollars of business that happens every single year. Stop it, go the whole hog. This is like window dressing,” he said.
 
Supporting Johar’s statement in which he had explained how the circumstances were different when he had signed Khan, Akhtar said, ““People were encouraging exchange, our Prime Minister travelled there. It was an air, an environment of optimism, an environment of wanting bridges to be made. That’s the environment you started functioning in. Now, if that’s changed, you cannot hold this person by his throat and say that what you have done is wrong, and force you to say things and force you to pay money.”

To read the full report, click here,

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Dismissing this murderous act as the work of “a lone madman” ignores a more detailed study of the killer’s motivation.

A few years ago, the respected Cambridge scholar TJ Winter, also known by his Muslim name of Abdal Hakim Murad, gave a fascinating lecture to humanities staff and students at the University of Leicester. The title was ‘Islam and the threat of the West’, turning on its head the more usual – then and now – ‘Islam and the threat to the West’.

It was a novel approach which, in a nutshell, illustrated that historically, aggression has been directed more from Europe to the Muslim world than the other way round. His evidence for such a view was impeccably sourced.

I thought about Abdal Hakim’s talk this morning as I read the reports coming in of the dreadful bombing and shooting in Norway wherein, of course, there was speculation that these two events were “Islamic terror-related”. No doubt we will learn more over the coming days but the early signs are in fact that the perpetrator was a “blonde, blue-eyed Norwegian” with “political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views”. Not surprisingly, the man’s intentions were neither linked to these “traits” nor to his postings on “websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies”. Any influence “remains to be seen”; echoes of Oklahoma 1995.

Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a “madman”. He may well be but this is one way that the motivations for heinous crimes can be airbrushed out of the story before they have the chance to take hold in the popular imagination.

Closing the book

In 1969, for example, Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian Christian who set fire to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, was dismissed as a “madman” and sent for psychiatric treatment; end of story. The right-wing fundamentalists plotting to destroy the mosque, and the nearby Dome of the Rock, lived to fight another day. I suspect that that is what will happen with the Norwegian bomber/ shooter; his right-wing links and Christian fundamentalist contacts will be dismissed as irrelevant. This, we will be told, was the work of a “deranged” person “acting independently”. Ergo the only organised “terror threats” to civilisation are still “Islamic-related” and the focus of anti-terror legislation and efforts must remain in the Muslim world and on Muslim communities in Europe and the USA.

If we allow this to happen, we will be doing the world a great disservice, not least because the new right is on the rise across the West – and Oklahoma was proof that its followers are capable of immense destruction.

Neo-Nazi immigrants from eastern Europe have even been active in Israel where the government, while deploring such far-right activity in its midst, is actually edging ever more to the far right on a daily basis. Ministers advocate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to purify Israel as a “Jewish state”; precious human rights for which the world has struggled are overridden in the name of “state security”; criminals in uniform are allowed to get away, quite literally, with murder.

All of this takes place with the collusion of western governments which are themselves showing right-wing tendencies towards doublespeak on matters of respect and tolerance for minorities. If you are even remotely “different” in Europe today, especially if you are a Muslim, you are eyed with suspicion and must go out of your way to “prove” your loyalty to a state which, if the truth was made known, would get rid of you if only it had the guts to pass the necessary legislation to do so. In some cases, such legislation is virtually in place in the guise of “anti-terror” measures.

All of this is backed by a vociferous and influential right-wing media which supports Israel, right or wrong – and a pro-Israel lobby which acts as if it is untouchable. Given the political context across the West, it probably is.

Attacks against the left

It is significant that the target of the Norwegian “madman” appears to have been the left-leaning Labour Party, both in Oslo and on the island where the shootings took place. Across Europe, the left has been forming alliances with Muslim groups to fight fascism and racism of all kinds and it cannot be a coincidence that The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe, a collection of essays from across the continent, published in 1997, concluded almost without exception that “the challenge” facing Europe was the presence of large Muslim communities in “our” midst. Anyone who claims therefore that the perpetrator’s “right-wing traits” and “anti-Muslim views” or even links with “Christian fundamentalist” websites are irrelevant is trying to draw a veil over the unacceptable truths of such “traits” and expecting us to believe that right-wing ideology is incapable of prompting someone towards such criminality.

Of course, that idea is nonsensical. Right-wing ideology was behind the Holocaust; it has been behind most anti-Semitism and other racism around the world; the notion of Europe’s and Europeans’ racial superiority – giving cultural credibility to the far right – gave rise to the slave trade and the scramble for Africa leading to untold atrocities against “the Other”; ditto in the Middle and Far East. Ironically, it is also far-right Zionism – far from the socialist myths of Zionist pioneers in the 1930s and before – which has been behind the ethnic cleansing of Palestine throughout the 20th century, right up to today, as a specific policy to be pursued – by military means if necessary.

This is well documented and yet ignored by our political masters. In the context of the latest apparently far-right atrocities in Norway, it is equally ironic that the word in English for a traitor who collaborates with an enemy power stems from Major Vidkun Quisling who ruled Norway on behalf of Nazi Germany during the second world war.

We dismiss this “madman” as a one-off “not linked to any international terrorist organisations” at our peril. If nothing else, history has shown us that such ideologies are transnational across and beyond the West, with catastrophic effects on the rest of the world. We have been warned.

(Education and media consultant Ibrahim Hewitt is the chair of trustees of the Palestinian Relief and Development Fund and is senior editor of the Middle East Monitor. He is also a trustee of Creative Arts Schools Trust. This article was posted on the Al Jazeera website on July 23, 2011.)

Courtesy: Al Jazeera; http://english.aljazeera.net

Archived from Communalism Combat, July-August 2011  Year 18    No.159, Fascist Terror

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