There goes their secularism

The true colours of champions of human rights and secularism

Speak up for Christianity, Cameron tells Archbishop

David Cameron last night called on the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a return to the ‘moral code’ of the Bible.

Mr Cameron declared Britain ‘a Christian country’ and said politicians and churchmen should not be afraid to say so.

Anti-India intellectual prostitute gets fired

This woman has degenerated and has been openly sleeping with the enemy. Nothing hurts more than when a woman turns traitor to our own race and faith due to greed, money, intellectual corruption or lust for someone of a hostile faith.

CIIS Fires Two Professors after Student Complaints

The California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, sustaining a unanimous 3-0 vote by its own Faculty Hearing Board, has fired social and cultural anthropology department professors Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro.

The two professors, who are married, had been suspended from their teaching posts in July after some current and former students registered complaints against them.

CIIS had said in a statement after the suspensions were announced that it was taking action against the two teachers because it received complaints about “lack of timely and thorough faculty evaluations or written work of students; lack of orderly administration or comprehensive examinations; grading activities outside of institute policies; differential treatment of students without apparent or recorded basis; and failure to respond to student complaints.”

The three faculty board members issued their report, which is now public and was made available to India-West by CIIS, in mid-November.

This is how they spread love

The BBC reports:

Institutional Dutch Catholic abuse ‘affected thousands’
Allegations of abuse in Dutch Catholic institutions multiplied after ex-pupils at a school came forward 
Tens of thousands of children have suffered sexual abuse in Dutch Catholic institutions since 1945, a report says.

 

So Gita is an extremist text, while Bible and Koran preach love!

Here is an example of the bigoted cuckooland in which monotheists live. A big Christian group is behind this move:

Bhagavad Gita faces ban in Russia

Bhagavad Gita, one of the holiest Hindu scriptures, is facing a legal ban and the prospect of being branded as “an extremist” literature across Russia.  A  court in Siberia’s Tomsk city is set to deliver its final verdict on Monday in a case filed by state prosecutors.

The case, which has been going on in Tomsk court since June, seeks ban on a Russian translation of “Bhagavad Gita As It Is” written by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

It also wants the Hindu religious text banned in Russia and declared as a literature spreading “social discord”, its distribution on Russian soil rendered illegal.

In view of the case, Indians settled in Moscow, numbering about 15,000, and followers of the ISKCON religious movement here have appealed to Manmohan Singh and his government to intervene diplomatically to resolve the issue in favour of the scripture, an important part of Indian epic Mahabharata written by sage Ved Vyas.

The ISKCON followers in Russia have also written a letter to the  Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi, calling for immediate intervention, lest the religious freedom of Hindus living here be compromised.

“The case is coming up for a final verdict on Monday in Tomsk court. We want all efforts from the Indian government to protect the religious rights of Hindus in Russia,” Sadhu Priya Das of ISKCON and a devotee of a 40-year-old Krishna temple in central Moscow, told IANS.

The court, which took up the case filed by the state prosecutors, had referred the book to the Tomsk State University for “an expert” examination Oct 25.

But Hindu groups in Russia, particularly followers of ISKCON, say the university was not qualified as it lacked Indologists who study the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent.

The Hindus pleaded with the court that the case was inspired by religious bias and intolerance from a “majority religious group in Russia”, and have sought that their rights to practice their religious beliefs be upheld.

The prosecutor’s case also seeks to ban the preachings of Prabhupada and ISKCON’s religious beliefs, claiming these were “extremist” in nature and preached “hatred” of other religious beliefs.

“They have not just tried to get the Bhagavad Gita banned, but also brand our religious beliefs and preachings as extremist,” Das said.

The ISKCON devotees have taken up the matter with the Indian embassy in Moscow too for an early diplomatic intervention before things get worse and the court passes an adverse verdict banning the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna consciousness teachings.

In the Nov 1 letter addressed to Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Pulok Chatterji, ISKCON’s New Delhi branch Governing Body Commissioner Gopal Krishna Goswami, said the prosecutor’s affidavit claims Lord Krishna “is evil and not conforming to Christian religious view”.

Goswami also urged Manmohan Singh to accord priority to the matter during his Moscow stay and take it up with the Russian authorities.

Indian diplomatic corps officials at the embassy here, who were unwilling to be named, told IANS that they have been following up the case since the time it was brought to their notice earlier this year.

They had also taken up the matter at the appropriate levels in the Russian government to get the case either withdrawn or get the defence to fight the case to obtain a favourable verdict.

Officials at the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, who were part of the Indian delegation accompanying Manmohan Singh, confirmed to IANS the case and the letter they received from ISKCON in this regard.

“This matter is receiving the highest attention and the Indian embassy officials in Moscow have been instructed to follow up the case with the Russian authorities,” they said.

So according to these Christian bigots, Gita should be banned because Lord Krishna “is evil and not conforming to Christian religious view.” Urr.. by that logic, Bible should be banned in India because it doesn’t confirm to the Hindu religious view. These Christians are cowards too — notice how they steer clear of mentioning the Koran anywhere, and only choose soft targets. The day Hindus pick up the stick, they will start getting respect from the monothiests.

Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History

“The Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History” — the celebrated book written by Veer Savarkar. Click here to read. No Hindu should miss it.

Media brothel NDTV accused of laundering Rs 2,000 crores

Rs. 2000 Crore Bribe Allegations Application Filed Against NDTV

An application filed in the CBI court alleges involvement of NDTV and P Chidambaram in bribe and money laundering of Rs. 2,000 crores in 2G scam. They also state misuse and abuse of power. The application was filed in Patiala House Courts by an IT Commissioner, SK Srivastava. It states that a dummy company of NDTV at Holland is being used for alleged money laundering via Mauritius back to India.

NDTV has reacted to these charges as baseless and has filed a defamation suit against the person who filed the application. “NDTV has just filed a defamation suit against a man making wild allegations about NDTV – and about “prostitution in the IT dept,” tweeted Vikrama Chandra, CEO of NDTV.

Aatish Taseer says it straight

I just read Aatish Taseer’s “fictional self-interview.” The guy is brilliant. Here, he lays the full force of his sarcastic wit on that holy cow Arundhati Roy and that over-rated William Darymple who is feted by clueless Indians suffering from an inferiority complex in front of white skin.

About Arundhati Roy, Taseer says:

Ida: Sorry! So, we’ve talked about Noon, we’ve talked about Pakistan and your father, what about India? You’ve said some pretty harsh things about a certain writer cum activists on the Left–no names!–who, we in the States, kind of like. She seems, in an environment of rapacious capitalism, to be a friend of the poor and marginalised. What possible objection could you have to her?

Aatish: None except that I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty. They are beautiful to her–the poor–beautiful, benign and faceless. And that is exactly how she wants them to stay. Let me say also that it is not the poor who animate her politics. Oh, no! The people who get her into the streets are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions; when India wins the cricket and she sees them celebrating, her skin crawls; she wants, more than anything, to do these people down. And it is her overwhelming hatred of them that allows her to be a friend of movements that are seemingly far apart. The jihadists, the Maoists, the Kashmir movement, the anti-development people…they’re all her friends. Anyone who can prove a credible threat to the future of India is a friend of that woman. I would go so far as to say she has a prurient fascination with the enemies of India. And where do they love her? In Pakistan, and in the faculty rooms of Europe and America. No surprise there.

Also, this business of pretending she’s a lone voice in the wilderness. What rubbish! At least have the good grace to admit that not one thing she says is provocative or new; it is perfectly banal. And we know how well the universities Europe and America reward this bogus cant!

About that fat-ass Darymple:

Ida: The ‘idiot’ to whom you refer…what is your beef with him?

Aatish: I disapprove of him. That’s all.

Ida: Disapprove of him? That’s a bit imperious…

Aatish: I saw him at one of his book launches, a grotesque figure, a man become obese on the affections of Indians! He lay on a stage, this great whale of a man, dressed in a mirrorwork kaftan, if you please, his dirty feet hanging off. And all about him, like little pixies, Baul singers skittered around…

Ida: Baul singers?

Aatish: They’re Bengali bards of a kind. And to complete this awful scene was an audience of embassy trash. They sat among bolsters and fountains, sipping white wine. You’ve never seen anything more hideous in your life. But we mustn’t blame him alone; the fault is as much India’s; it is India who makes giants of these mediocrities, fattening them up till they’re as corrupt as Kurtz.

Ida: That’s a bit harsh…

Aatish: In this respect, one cannot be harsh enough. In a more confident country—like Russia, say, in the 19th century; or, even China today—a man like that would have been booted out. He would have been a figure of fun and contempt. He would not have been able to position himself as a gatekeeper to intellectual life. But in India, he can; we love a man like that!

Killings in Kashmir: The Real Figures

Propaganda is an essential component of any war. It is particularly a favorite tactic of Muslims and Christians against non-believers. This hateful propaganda, called “atrocity literature” by Rajiv Malhotra in his book “Breaking India”, is used to “prove” that either the non-believers have to be converted to the True Religion because they are primitive barbarians or that they need to be eliminated because they are savages and a threat to the believers. It is therefore nice to see this news piece posted by a poster in the comments section of this blog. I am reproducing it here for wider publicity.

State data refutes claim of 1 lakh killed in Kashmir Randeep Singh Nandal, TNN Jun 20, 2011, 12.59am IST SRINAGAR: They are figures that have been quoted so often that they are widely believed to be true: almost 100,000 dead Kashmiri civilians and 10,000 people who have disappeared in the last two decades. From public meetings in small villages to TV studios, from online pages to newspaper reports, these figure are cited and printed, used to stir emotions and silence voices in Kashmiri society, even presented to visiting ambassadors and printed in petitions to the UN. Except, nobody bothers to explain just how these figures were arrived at. TOI accessed Jammu & Kashmir government documents to arrive at the truth behind the urban legend. Collected between January 1990 and April 2011, the records are comprehensive and give year-wise breakup of all violent incidents in the state, the nature of the acts of violence, the number of people killed, and also the circumstances that led to the deaths. Here’s what the data says. In the last 21 years, 43,460 people have been killed in the Kashmir insurgency. Of these, 21,323 are militants, 13,226 civilians killed by militants, 3,642 civilians killed by security forces, and 5,369 policemen killed by militants. The 21,323 militants were killed in operations by security forces and include both Kashmiri and foreign militants. And of the 5,369 members of the security forces, around 1,500 are Kashmiri policemen. The government has collated the figures of civilians killed by security forces since 1990: it lists 3,642 people. The numbers vary from a high of 539 civilians killed in 1990, the year in which 51 people were massacred by the CRPF in just one incident when it fired at a crowd of protesters on a bridge at Gaw Kadal in downtown Srinagar, to 120 protesters killed across the state in firing by the police and paramilitary forces in the summer of 2010. The records also show another slaughter that has gone on ceaselessly since 1990, a slaughter that nobody comments on, nobody laments: of Kashmiris killed by militants since 1990. Of the 13,226 civilians killed by militants, 11,461 were shot and 1,765 died in grenade blasts and explosions.

Rape of the ancient Greeks

A powerful book about how Christians wiped out the culture of ancient Greece.  Exactly the same method they are applying in India too. Church is the biggest mafia on earth — perhaps the only spiritual body in the entire universe to have its own intelligence agency! Agora is a movie that shows Christians torturing ancient Greeks in Alexandria. Watch it if you can.

The book is available from Flipkart and Amazon. It shows the fight Hindus have ahead of them to save themselves from this global machinery of death and destruction.

The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes,

Mediterranean Quarterly, 19:1 (Winter 2008): 97-106.

Book Review

Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes, (Harwich Port, Cape Cod: Clock & Rose Press, 2006), Hardcover, 245 pp. ISBN: 978-1-59386-039-4

Reviewed by Christos C. Evangeliou.

This book was a pleasant surprise for me. Its title, The Passion of the Greeks, reminded me of a statement I had made in the Hellenic Philosophy, published ten years ago.[1]I had stated then that: “By the Hellenic definition of philosophia, understood as a free inquiry and unfettered speculation about both nature and culture, “European philosophy” becomes simply a case of homonymia. For this kind of “philosophy” has been deprived, for historical reasons, of that essential freedom of spirit, which is absolutely necessary for an authentic and genuine philosophy to be born and flourish…. [It] had the misfortune to serve, alternatively or simultaneously, three very non-Hellenic musters: dogmatic theology, scientific technology, and political ideology. Hence, what I have termed “the passion of philosophy,” which the forthcoming volume will attempt to bring to light, by critically analyzing the phenomenon of the historical transformation of Ancient Hellenic philosophy in Christianized Europe and the West.”

So, while I was still trying to figure out the details of “the passion of philosophy,” that is, what happened to Hellenic philosophy in Christian Europe, Vallianatos’ book came to address such larger questions as: “What happened to the Greeks? When did the Greek Gods become “myths” and their people, the most highly evolved in the Mediterranean “pagans”? Why are their statues mutilated and their temples smashed? Why was so much of their knowledge destroyed? This book tells the secret story of the Greek genocide at the hands of the Christians between the fourth to the sixth centuries CE… At a time of religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, this book highlights the intolerant nature of monotheism, the hidden history that plunged the West into the Dark Ages. This book is pleading for another Renaissance, another love affair with the Greeks, so as to reinvigorate our civilization with Greek values.”

Written with great passion, by a passionate Greek scholar, this impassioned book recounts with graphic details the historical “passion” of the pagan Greeks at the crucial time, when they encountered the fanatic hordes of missionary monks and Christianizing Roman Emperors. They tried to convert the remaining Greeks too to the new, fanatical, and fashionable faith at the time, willy-nilly. This book is unlike other books, which present the Christianizing of Greece and of the Mediterranean region as some kind of felicitous meeting and mating of the philosophic spirit of Hellenism and the prophetic spirit of the new and ecumenical religion of love and peace. For it chronicles, with boldness and candor, the other and more hideous side of this tragic story. The meeting of Christianity and Hellenism was not peaceful and pious, in the eyes of the author, but bloody and brutal, and has been kept secret and hidden for a long time.

This challenging and truthful tale, therefore, will probably offend the sensibilities of Christians and Greeks, who have been taught the other aspect of the story for so long that they have come to believe it with fanatic faith. They even feel proud of what they refer to, with equal passion, as the great and glorious synthesis of the Greco-Christian heritage, historically facing the menace of Islam. For, as Prof. Thanasis Maskaleris has put it: “[The] book dramatically portrays the immense conflict between Christianity and Hellenism from its beginnings to the present, and is structured with a backbone of extensive documentation. It also estimates our great loss for essentially abandoning the political and humanistic principles the Greeks shaped for a civilized sustenance of our world. One wishes that more books were written in the same vein, for the wisdom of the Greeks can provide the guidance we desperately need…”

More praise for this good book comes from distinguished Professors, like Apostolos Athanassakis and Phillip Mitsis. They have stated respectively that: “The Passion of the Greeks is a book which proposes to sail into the highly controversial early centuries when the Christian faith made every possible effort to prevail over the deeply-embedded Hellenic religion…. However, violence, political conspiracy, and downright destruction of the great religious centers of antiquity were much more the order of the day….” And, “His plea for reason, moderation, liberty, and a general world view that he finds best defended in the traditions of Hellenic philosophical thought is especially timely in a world increasingly disturbed by religious fanaticism and sectarian violence. Rather than giving into despair, however, Vallianatos tries to chart an optimistic map of human and political possibilities and calls for a general renewal of individual and societal reason based on modern pagan principles.”

The book deserves all this praise and more because it is written not only with great pathos, but also with clarity of thought and lucidity of style. What he said about Zosimos, one of his favorite Greek historians, applies to Vallianatos work as well: “He wrote in the great Greek historical tradition—of honesty, conciseness, insight, originality and moving narrative.” (p. 87) The book combines historical erudition with a personal touch, as the author tries to understand what happened to his beloved Hellenes and to him personally. His journey took him from a war ravished Greek island, Kephalonia, to America, where he discovered himself and his Hellenic roots through the study of history, with help from Adamantios Koraes, an enlightened and inspired Greek scholar on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation.

Life in Valsamata, the village where Evaggelos was born and raised, in the post war Greece which was also torn apart by civil war, was tough and determined by the interplay of shadows. On the one hand were the shadows cast by mountain Ainos, with the ruins of the shrines of Zeus, Apollon, Athena, and Pan; and on the other, the shades coming from the monastery of St. Gerasimos, with its Church bells, festivals and icons. He explains in the prologue of the book the conflict within this tradition and in his inner soul:

The ideal of what Greece was in “ancient” times and the ideal of what it should be in my time clash violently with what Greece is, in fact, in the dawn of the twenty-first century. I love passionately all that is still Greek in Greece. I say this with sorrow, for Christianity radically remade Greece to the point that the real Hellas was buried for more than a millennium, indeed it is still buried, in the country, which calls itself Hellas or Greece…. The Christians made the whole country a cemetery, which quite unintentionally preserved the aftermath of their plunder and genocide of the Greeks and Hellenic civilization…. The products of Christian culture—the bible, the liturgy, the miracles of Jesus and the saints, the dogmas of sin, paradise and hell, the icons of the religious hierarchy—come from a world that has nothing to do with the Parthenon and the philosophy and piety of the Greeks, who built this greatest masterpiece of Greek and Western culture in order to honor the Greek virgin goddess Athena. (pp. 4-10)

Between the long prologue (pp. 1-26) and a short epilogue (pp. 201-207), the author has arranged
eleven chapters that make up the bulk of the book and house his passionate narrative of the passion of the Greeks. He chronicles the tragic transformation of the Hellenic and Greco-Roman civilization in the crucial time o f the 4th and 6th centuries. As he sees it, this civilization (rational, beautiful, good and humanistic) was replaced, for the most part violently, by the monstrosity of a theocratic Christian Empire, which was based on a fanatical and intolerant faith, with its foolish hopes and irrational fears of an after life.

Chapter one, “Greek History: From Marathon to Korinthos,” covers the historical period falling between the glorious battle of Marathon, which marked the first Greek victory over the Persians in 490BC, and the infamous battle of Corinth in 146BC, which the Greeks lost to Romans. It made mainland Greece a province of the expanding Roman Empire. Of special interest here is the theory regarding the relation between Hellenic historia (history) and mythologia (mythology), or “early history.” The author explains, “God Prometheus comes to us out of what we call “mythology”. Greek mythology, however, is not a fairy tale or a legend—this is a pernicious lie the Christians invented to denigrate the Greeks. Mythology, for the Greeks, is early history or history lost in time, and it is the fundamental key to understanding the world, how it works, and where we humans fit in.” (p. 29) In support of this theory he refers also to the work of an expert in the field of Classical Greek Studies, Dr. Mary Lefkowitz.[2]

Chapter two, “Power and Importance of Greek Religion,” builds upon and elaborates this theory. It addresses the important questions of how the Greeks and their gods are literally inseparable, and “why religion, in the form of piety for the gods expressed in athletics, the tragic theater, the oracles, and the festivals, helped the Greeks to maintain their Greek identity?” He insists that, “Greek piety, the veneration of the Greeks for their gods, was at the core of how the Greeks understood the universe, nature, the rest of the world, and themselves. In fact the religion of the Greek people was their culture, which was full of gods but did not have a creed, holy book or church…. All agricultural festivals were propitiation to the gods for increasing the fertility of the land, for a good harvest.” (p. 42) He concludes with the insightful observation: “So the Greeks started their grand political experimentation in the gymnasion-palaistra of each polis with a combination of training the beautiful nude body of young people with rigorous physical exercises, and educating their mind with a command of the Greek language, music, philosophy, mathematics and science. The nude athletic games of Olympia…. were a sort of final exams, an offering of piety to the gods, all in one political act and celebration of common Greek culture.”(p. 48)

In chapter three, “Apollonios of Tyana: Hellas is the World,” he discusses the special case of the sage Apollonios of Tyana, his travels all over the world, his many exploits, as well as the rivalry between his Hellenic movement and the early Christian cult. In him, the author sees an archetype with which he can identify. For, like Evaggelos, “He passionately tried to preserve Hellenic culture by choosing its ascetic and scientific version worked out by Pythagoras 700 years before his time… He urged the Greeks and Romans to stand by their traditions, studying nature and medicine, offering piety to their gods….Christianity did to Apollonios what it did to Greek culture—it obliterated his works and influence…. Apollonios, however, made a difference among the Greeks, offering a model of inspiration and resistance to them, which they used to preserve and protect their culture for many hundreds of years.” (pp. 59-60)

Chapter four, “The Treason of Christianity,” is one of the longest and most passionate. It narrates the failure of the Roman State to deal effectively with the serious danger that the rapidly growing, the “insidious and seditious,” Christian sect represented, although the authorities were aware of its devious, anti-social behavior. One Roman Emperor after another underestimated the threat of Christianity, until it was too late to stop it in the 4th century, when they embrace it and used it for their interests. Of course, “What happened to Rome eventually reached Greece: Tremors in Rome became earthquakes in Greece. [But] it took time for the cultist tremor of Christianity to become a political and cultural earthquake.”(p. 62)

Several pages of this chapter are devoted to Celsus or Kelsos’ sustained attack of the new religion, as well as the reactions to it of leading Platonic philosophers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, such as, Ploutarchos, Plotinos, and Porphyrios. According to Kelsos, “Christianity had nothing original or divine in its history and theology. It was a stolen piece of Judaism modified to fit the fiction of Jesus. This was a Jewish sorcerer whom the Jews rejected because he claimed to be their messiah. The Jews, however, expected a messiah-prince to free them of Roman rule, but Jesus had nothing to do with princes or revolution. The Christians, nevertheless, made Jesus, a secretive, untrustworthy sorcerer, into a god. …Christian teachers sought their converts among slaves, women, children and fools. This was no accident but a consistent policy because they feared educated people. They considered science and learning dangerous and evil, and thought of knowledge as a disease of the soul.” (p. 68) All these conclusions the author derives from Origenes’ response to Kelsos’ attack of the Christian Church. In the eyes of Hellenic philosophers and Roman authorities, the Christians appeared as “atheists and impious and criminal.” This is attested by Christian Eusebius, among other authors, in Preparatio Evangelica (1.2. 1-4).

The 3rd and 4th centuries were certainly stressed times intensified by ideological war between the new Christian thinkers, like Eusebius and Augustine, and traditional thinkers, like Plotinus and Porphyry. Porphyry in particular became the champion of Hellenism and Hellenic polytheism, so that he attracted the ire of the theologians. In this, the author sees a parallel to the recently ended Cold War pitting Communists against Capitalists: “This war was as nasty a war—fought between the Greeks and the Christians—as that fought in the twentieth century between the Communist Russians and the Americans. Eusebios and Augustine played the role of the hagiographers of Lenin and Stalin. No crime made any difference as long as the hero was on the side of Christianity…. After all, they spent their entire lives trying to show the Jewish prophecies and the gospels were not fiction but the word of god…. Yet the slander of Porphyrios by Eusebios and Augustine did not diminish his timely and all-important message.” (pp. 79-80) The Emperor Maximinus Daia (308-313) was probably influenced by Porphyry and picked up the message and the struggle against the enemies of the state, but it was too little, too late. Constantine had other plans in mind.

Chapter five is titled, “Decline and Fall of Rome–Through Greek Eyes.” The author wants to look at the decline and fall of Rome through the eyes of two Greek historians, Zosimos and Ammianus, because: “To uncover what the Christians did to the Greeks, we need to turn to the Greeks themselves—that is, we must understand Roman imperial history from the perspective of the Greeks who witnessed the smashing and burning of their culture. That is the only way to get to the truth. The Christians… whether historians, philologists, translators, editors or theologians writing in the last several centuries, including the twentieth century, are unreliable: They no longer see the Greeks as Greeks but see them as idolaters, heathens and pagans…. That is the main reason we must consult the Greeks in order to reveal the truth.” (p. 87)

When we do consult the Greek historian Zosimos, we see that he identified the period 313-363 as the crucial time of Roman decline. Two related factors, Christianity and barbarity, combined to bring down Roman power. For the Barbarians “infiltrated the Roman world, and together with the Christians, barbarized it. Finally, the barbarians and the Christians became indistinguishable, destroying the integrity, and indeed the civilization, that had been Roman Empire.” (p. 88). This certainly happened in the western part of the Empire, but the eastern part seems to have faired a little better, perhaps in the eyes of other observers, but not in the eyes of the author of this book. For him, as for Zosimos, the emperors Constantine and Theodosius I, do not deserve the title “Great,” that Christians historians have bestowed on them, because they share “most of the blame for the catastrophe,” the collapse of the Empire. More to the point:
Zosimos disliked Constantine primarily because, by his support of Christianity, he broke irrevocably with both Greek and Roman past. Zosimos was right…. Constantine inflicted a nearly mortal wound on the civilization of Rome. He was the first Roman emperor who, by his actions, became no longer the chief magistrate of the Roman people, but a despot armed with troops and his own state religion, Christianity. He wrecked the ancient Roman tradition that the emperor, the princeps, was the legal representative of the senate and the Roman people. Instead, Constantine founded a hereditary monarchy and used religion to draw moral and political support. This, in my opinion, is the overarching reason why Constantine made Christianity a state religion…. Christianity would forever bless him and justify his rule.” (p. 93)

These insights are right on target. Christianity was ready to forgive Constantine’s many hideous
crimes, and even elevate him to the level of the Apostle, calling him isapostolos. Ammianus was equally “disturbed by the violence of the Christians,” in the rein of Constantius, son of Constantine. (p. 99)

Chapter six is titled, “Julian the Great,” not surprisingly, since Julian was the champion of the “pagan” party and, in this regard, the opposite of Constantine and his pro-Christian policies. His rise to power, his short rule, and his tragic fall (362-363) are described in detail following Ammianus’ account. Julian was determined to restore the worship of the gods and the honored Greco-Roman traditions. Thus, he “declared religious freedom in the empire,” although he made it public that he was not a Christian, “but a faithful follower of the Greek and Roman gods.” He “immersed himself in Greek religion with the passion of a person who waited an entire life for that moment;” he “loved Greek philosophy and the gods, for the two were inseparable.” He made a distinction between Christianity and Judaism and showed more respect for the latter. He also considered rebuilding “the sacred city of Jerusalem.” But he always saw Christianity as “an illegal, treasonous and newfangled cult and ideology that destroyed Greek culture.” (pp. 106-112)

He even prohibited, rightly in the opinion of the author, Christians “from teaching Greek and Roman philosophy, poetry and literature.” These were replete with references to Greek religion and reverence for the gods. How could Christians appreciate their beauty, understand their truth, and interpret it correctly? Gregory of Nazianzus, who had met Julian as a student in Athens, called him “a public and private enemy” and an “apostate,” an epithet that stack with him since. To counterbalance this, Vallianatos calls Julian “ the Great” and a “Philosopher-King.” If it was not obvious that he loves Julian, the author tells us so (p.119). Because of this love, he admits that his portrait of this tragic Emperor is “probably more one-sided than I would like it to be.” However, at this point, he is critical of Dr. Polymnia Athanassiadi who, following the line of St. Gregory, sees in Julian a fanatic man and “the very incarnation of evil.”[3]

Clearly the author identifies with Julian and his project: “He, no more than I, had no choice in growing up Christian. We dumped Christianity because it had been imposed on us by the force of the church and the government in his case, and by the force of unexamined tradition in my case. In addition, and this is the real reason of abandoning Christianity, that religion had nothing to do with our Greek culture. In fact, it turned out to be a fatal enemy to that culture. The apostates were the likes of Gregory Nazianzus who willfully ditched their fabulous and philosophical Greek tradition for an alien and treasonous doctrine.” (p. 119) With the assassination of young Julian (in 363, at the age of 32), and the intensified barbarian attacks on Rome, the Empire seemed as if abandoned by the gods, and doomed to follow “its Christian path of violent decline and fall.” This decline is covered in chapters seven and eight

Of special interest is chapter eight, “Universal Captivity of Greece,” because it provides what the author calls “chronology of murder and genocide,” a long list of dates in which policies directed against the pagan Greeks were adopted by Christian Roman Emperors. Worship of the Hellenic gods and sacrificing to them were forbidden on the penalty of death. The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Olympic Agones were ended. Teachers were forbidden to engage in Greek studies. An edict of Zeno, published in 484, reads thus: “Bishops and government agents should find and punish teachers of Hellenic studies. They should not be allowed to teach, lest they corrupt their students. But, above all, Bishops and government officials should put Greek teachers out of business, bringing the “impieties” of Hellenism to an end. No one shall leave a gift or bequeath anything to Greeks or to schools and other institutions supporting the “impiety” of Hellenism. All previous legislation against the “error” of the Greeks is reaffirmed.” (p. 139)

Dr. Vallianatos comments on the imperial order that brought an end to the Olympics, as follows:

Here was a millennial tradition of athletic competition for arete (courage, virtue, equality before the law, goodness, manliness, nobility and excellence) started by Herakles, son of Zeus and the Greeks’ greatest hero, and Theodosios, thinking like a barbarian, brought it to an end.

The Olympic agon (contest) was much more than a struggle between outstanding men for physical excellence. It was, above all, a Panhellenic honoring of the gods. It was an extraordinary effort to rein in the Hellenes’ passions for war and bring them together from all over the world for the celebration of their common culture. The overwhelming idea behind the Olympic contest was political. The Olympic contest was an effort to build a Panhellenic polis and commonwealth, a united Hellas under democratic governance. The Olympic agon was also building better and nobler human beings. And, yet, the Hellenes’ greatest athletic contest and celebration of national identity were buried…. by a barbarian king who knew no better than listening to the fanaticism of his Christian advisors. (p. 136)

The destructive work of Theodosius against the Greeks and their culture continued by his successors and, with real zest, by Justinian, who closed down the schools of philosophy in Athens in 529, and “brought barbarism to Greece.” According to John of Ephesus, “in 546 Justinian’s agents discovered several illustrious and noble men, grammarians, sophists, and doctors, who were worshiping the Greek gods. The government of Justinian tortured, beat, flogged and imprisoned these men who then rushed to denounce each other. Some of them admitted their “false beliefs” and became Christians. One of these rich and powerful men, Phokas, committed suicide in prison rather than face Justinian who ordered that he “be buried like a donkey.” (p. 148) Together with the pagan Greeks, the Jews were targeted too. For instance, St. John Chysostom considered them, long before Hitler, as a “disease that had to be eradicated.” (p. 154)

Chapter nine is titled, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The question has been borrowed from Tertullian, a Christian fundamentalist and bigot, who represented an extreme version of Christianity. He expressed deep suspicion and hatred of Hellenic philosophy, which he considered the seedbed of heresy. For him, and many other Christians like him, the truth had been revealed and was to be found in the Holy Scriptures, whose origin was in Jerusalem, and not to be sought by philosophers and their theories, whose origin was in Athens, Greece. At any rate, the fact is that, although the Christianized Roman Empire retained in its eastern parts at least the Greek language and some morsels of classical literature, this was just the cell of the Hellenic culture, without the soul or vital spirit. The spirit was lost and would not be revived in the West for more than a millennium, until the coming of Renaissance in the 14-15th centuries.

But, before the Italian Renaissance, another renaissance had taken place in the Islamic world in the 9th and 10th centuries, especially in Baghdad under the Abbassid dynasty. This was primarily due to the fact that many books of Greek philosophy and science were translated into Arabic in a systematic way. The two captures of Constantinople (by the Crusaders in 1204, and the Turks in 1453) brought to the West valuable Greek manuscripts and competent Greek scholars, who gave an impetus to the Renaissance. But the light of Renaissance was soon to be dimmed by the fury of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic reaction. Thus, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) brought effectively the Renaissance movement to a premature end. The author correctly observes that, “As a result, the religious wars in the sixteenth century, among many other catastrophes, nearly sealed the fate of Hellenic logos (reason) in European culture…. Calvinism brought an end of pleasure, the agonizing fear of sin, and hatred for nature and the earth to the Evangelical Christians. Calvin said Christians longed for death, not life. Calvin was right about that.” (p. 169)

However, the movements of Renaissance and Reformation left Greece and its Orthodox Church unmoved, as they were covered protectively with the darkness of Turkocracy (1453-1821). To this theme the next chapter (chapter ten) is devoted and is titled, with caustic irony, “The Greek Palimpsest.” The comments, in this chapter particularly, about the Greek Church will make religiously minded people in Greece upset, and not eager to extend their Christian love to the author of this book. Consider for example:

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Christianity is still a force to contend with in Greece. The church is an occupying and colonial and colonizing force. The church in Greece is the highest of all conceivable corruption. It stole the identity of the Greeks and continues to muddle their minds with anti-Hellenic thoughts. The church is also the wealthiest institution of the country. It has made religion into an extraordinary profitable business…. What Christians did to the Hellenes and their culture…. is a closed and secret page of Greek history in Greece…. Most Greeks don’t know that their church collaborated with the Turks to keep them slaves for 400 years. Adamantios Koraes was straightforward. Writing anonymously in 1806, he said the priests and monks and bishops were primarily responsible for the Turkish occupation of Greece…. The country is a Palimpsest. Barbarians are writing over the scraped history and culture of Hellas…. Greek children and students sing the praises of Christian saints, some of them with abominable records of anti-Hellenism, but barely know the poetry, or even the names of, Homeros, Hesiodos, Aischylos, Sophocles…. (pp. 171-172)

In spite of this bleak picture of the status of Greek culture in Greece, in Europe, and the world, he is optimistic that a possible renaissance by the resurrection of Hellenic gods, especially agrarian Dionysus, to replace Christian Jesus, is not out of the question completely. To this possibility the last chapter of the book is devoted, “Dionysos for a Permanent Hellenic Renaissance.” Following on the steps of Nietzsche, he sees the difference between a Greek god and other gods: “A god to a Greek is not what Christians (and other monotheists) understand their god to be. The Greek god was sometimes an immortal being of pure goodness, intelligence, beauty, and power; but, more often, the Greek god was a mixture of human and divine elements, a human-like god or god-like human with immortality, goodness, power, beauty, and intelligence to spare—the very ideal of Greek philosophy and culture, kalon k’ agathon, the beautiful and the good.” (p. 187)

He also meditates on the relation between Greeks and Christians, and finds the combination of “Christian Greek” a kind of oxymoron. This will not please many Greeks and Greek-Americans who are proud of their Greek Orthodox Christianity. He always seems to return to the basic “anti-Hellenic impulse of Christianity” which, for him, constitutes the “Greek tragedy in Christian Greece.” This would make one wonder what a Jew would say about Christianity, which, in his eyes, took the concept of the one Jewish God, and turned it into a Trinity, using the tricks of Greek sophistry and some ideas of Hellenic philosophy. We know that Mohammed found this radical transformation of the “one true God” abominable and blasphemous. Hence the unbridgeable gap that separates these two sister religions and “faiths of Abraham.”

The author hopes earnestly that Hellenic logos and a revived Dionysus can help humanity to find its way back to reverence for nature and its gods. But, as the 9/11 and the war on terror indicate, Islam and Christianity are ready for another round in the cosmic arena for world dominion. It would be great if only fundamentalist Muslims and Christians could be persuaded to supplement the reading of the Holy Bible or the Holy Koran, with the reading of other good books like the book of Dr. Vallianatos! Then, there would be more hope for his dream to come true, a renaissance of Hellenic learning and culture. But that will take a true miracle. On the other hand, just as the Hellenes were turned into Christians, the Christian Greeks at least could be made to return to their Hellenic cultural roots with some good luck and in better times ahead.

Dr. Christos C. Evangeliou

Professor of Hellenic Philosophy and Poet

Towson University, USA

Here is a reader’s review of the book from Amazon.

Vallianatos’ book addresses a crime of the past that still affects us today, and whose rectification could facilitate a more humanistic future. He reveals the censored history of the conflict between Christianity and ancient Greek culture (“Jerusalem versus Athens”) in late antiquity.Though the “conversion” of the Greeks is traditionally presented as peaceful and pious, in fact, it was a bloody and brutal conquest, where Christian monks (and even Goths) were funded by Christian Roman emperors in an attempt at forced assimilation of the Greeks into a Judaeacized Latin Empire. Per Vallianatos, the Greeks resisted Christianity for centuries. In the war against the Greeks, the Christians branded the Greeks as “pagans” and, in the guise of “fighting paganism,” defaced or destroyed their temples, academies, sculptures and art, in sum, their culture. Vallianatos makes a convincing case that the “conversion” of the Greeks was, in fact, a conquest and despoliation no less than the later Turkish conquest.

Vallianatos contrasts Hellenic values with Christian values, art and government. The Greeks valued democracy, freedom, piety, and the struggle for the good, the brave, and the beautiful. In sum, they had an appreciation of and enthusiasm for life. Zeus is a good god. The Christians valued austerity, harshness, conformity, dogma, despotism, sin and hell, the exploitation of guilt and fear, intolerance, a hatred for Greek literature, philosophy, and art; a cult of death, with life only “after death.” The Jewish/Christian god is a jealous god.

Per Vallianatos, Greece today is still colonized by medieval Christian thinking. Christianity is the state religion in Greece. The clergy is a bureaucratic class, maintained by the taxpayer, who resist the educational and archaeological restoration of ancient Greek culture. He concludes that Christianity must be detached from the government and the educational system, and that much of the Church’s extensive landholdings should be confiscated to help finance an overdue Greek Renaissance, by restoring Hellenism to Greece.

There is much to commend in Vallianatos’ innovative and controversial book. He is definitely a Greek nationalist with an overt ethnocentric bias. Yet, he challenges current leaders to re-learn the wisdom and tolerance of the ancient Greeks to help deliver us from the disastrous choices, based on monotheistic religious ideologies, that have led to the current crisis in the world today. By urging us to return to the rationalism and tolerance of the ancient Greeks in place of the superstition and intolerance of Christianity, I think Vallianatos has made a valuable contribution to the Science-versus-Religion issue so prominent today.

Bob Arango

When China was given a bloody nose

Not many Indians know this, but just five years after the 1962 debacle, the Chinese were given a bloody nose at Nathu La. Read about it all here.

This is a post from another forum:

May 1841 – Just one Indian community – the Dogras under Zorawar Singh – beat the shit out of Chinese

August 1842 – Dogras under Dewan Hari Chand and Wazir Ratnu again beat the Chinese in the Battle of Chusul. Ladakh officially becomes a part of India.

1839-1842 – First Opium War – EIC expeditionary forces comrising 7,069 navy personnel, 5,000 British troops and 7,000 Indian troops take on Chinese forces of 200,000 inflicting 18,000-20,000 casulties for 69 killed 451 wounded. That is the reason Punjab Regiment crest shows a ship and the motto is “sthal wa jal”, emphasizing their fighting prowess as expeditionary forces via sea.

1856-1860 – Second Opium War – again similar number of Indian soldiers participated

Godhra: The True Story

Godhra: The True Story, an article written by French journalist Nicole Elfi about the anti-Hinduism of the secular mafia of India and abroad and how they are hounding Modi. It is a story of the deliberate lies, spins and mischief of mono-theistic or Marxist media men driven by a hatred of pagans / infidels.

 

Analysis of Kargil War

An analysis of the Kargil war by a US military analyst. Put Indian army in a good light.

Maldives going the Saudi Arabia way

Religious Unity Regulation prohibits preaching a religion except Islam

MALE, September 17 (HNS) – President’s Office has gazetted the controversial Religious Unity Regulation, declaring it an offence to preach a religion except Islam in the Maldives.

The 12-clause regulation makes it mandatory for preachers of Islam, both locals and foreigners, to have a first degree in a field of Islamic education from a ministry-approved college, university or centre.

A list of 36 worldwide institutes recognised by the ministry has been published in the gazette. The Maldives National University and local colleges and institutes are not included in the list.

The Islamic ministry is authorised under the regulation to license experienced persons who do not possess the educational qualification required.

The regulation, which instructs scholars to consider the social harmony, states practices that should be avoided in preaching Islam in the Maldives, including the practice of making comments in contradiction with prophetic traditions and majority view of the scholars.

The regulation does not allow preventing healthcare and education in the name of religion. It further instructs preachers to avoid giving sermons that support gender discrimination, racism or any other form of discrimination.

“In explaining an issue that has been disputed by scholars, the different views expressed by scholars should be explained. If the scholar favours a certain point of view, evidence to support his view should be made clear,” the regulation reads.

The regulation also prohibits comments of hatred towards people of other religions, spreading a religion other than Islam and using an object that resembles a sign of a religion other than Islam.

A person who violates the regulation will be sentenced to 2-5 years in prison, banishment or house arrest.

So anyone carrying a religion symbol of any faith except Islam will be arrested. And wherever Muslims are in a minority, these jokers become champions of secularism, like in India. What happens to their secularism when they acquire a majority in any area?

Rajeev Malhotra’s New Book

Reajeev Malhotra’s new book is out due this November. It is called “Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism.“

He has a very good hold over language. His books are very well argued and a pleasure to read.

Cloud computing in the clouds?

This dude Vishwa Bandhu Gupta speaks quite well on a variety of issues facing the nation. But this time, he is looking like an idiot and is clearly technology-challenged. Hear for yourself:

Connecting the dots about Sonia Gandhi

A very powerful writeup by an ex-intelligence officer about the Sonia-Rajiv romance and how all people standing in her way to power conveniently died. He also hints at the power that she represents. This is the stuff movies are made of.

Kashmir: The Endless War

Nice video by NDTV about how the Indian army protects the citizens and takes on terrorists in Kashmir.

The war between militants and the Indian Army is a daily one. Patrolling along the Line of Control, ensures our soldiers are at risk of dying or facing a permanent disability almost every night. Despite this, the Indian army ensures through a number of measures that our soldiers morale remains high, so they can continue to safeguard our borders fearlessly.

Rajiv Malhotra about the literalism inherent in Semitic faiths

Received over email from Rajiv Malhotra:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-stanton/is-history-centrism-an-ab_b_894260.html

A central thesis I have developed over the past 15 years is something I have termed as the “History-Centrism” of the Abrahamic religions. My forthcoming book goes into extensive details.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to have a video-taped discussion with Joshua Stanton, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialog. This organization is affiliated with the prestigious Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, and it is pushing the frontiers of inter-religious dialog.

The original idea was for Joshua to interview me in order to produce a 5-minute video of my views. We started conversing casually and it evolved naturally into much more. After editing, what emerged is a series of 11 video clips each addressing a specific issue from a dharmic perspective.

The overall theme is my explanation of the DIFFERENCES between dharma and the Abrahamic religions. While it is fashionable to focus on how faiths are all the same, I focus on the differences. Being different is not a matter of superiority or inferiority, but about respectfully appreciating what makes another faith what it is on its own terms.

Joshua has taken one of these 11 clips and turned it into an important call for introspection by people of Abrahamic faiths: Whether and why these faiths DEPEND upon an absolute and literal history. Pls watch that video and post comments at the blog site. (DO NOT respond to this email address as I seldom check it.)

Gradually, the rest of the videos will also be turned into discussion points between us. But you can see all 11 videos posted on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL3345DE2C0095456D

Each video clip may be separately accessed as well:

1 – God and Identity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS7CE9mrtI4&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

2 – Brahman and Karma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THua8SMPtK4&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

3 – Why Reincarnation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_9IYK6ZlyY&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

4 – Limits & Possibilities of Self: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXrKKz7Mld8&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

5 – Personal Motivations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNhQIKC2jPM&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

6 – Language and Difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEUeYDEFtsE&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

7- History Centrism As the Problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhp3rFuo5Cw&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

8 – History & Dharmic Traditions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufZ1BZcZzKI&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

9 – Dharma & Modern India: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FndfcBhZklU&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

10 – Dharmic Framework for Dialogue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9s433rQloA&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

11 – Educating the Next Generation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20u8yHim1tM&list=PL3345DE2C0095456D

Regards,

rajiv

Plunder of India

Nice slide show about Congress party’s loot of India.

Plunder of India

Momins lust after infidel women

Momins lusting after infidel girls. Where they are in a  minority they do love jihad or pass comments at them. When in a majority, they drag them to their bedrooms. And yes, they always carry a knife.

Hindu youths stabbed for resisting Muslim rowdies’ eve-teasing of Hindu girls

If you do not struggle, you can’t live – the philosophy casting a hypnotic spell on the whole of Europe and United States is finally getting a stronghold among Hindus too and what is the need of it has been depicted by the incident in Uttar Nibra Panchanantala, P.S. Domjur, Dist: Howrah in Indian state of Bengal. Two Hindu youths, Malo Ram and Babla Bera, were stabbed in broad daylight only on yesterday; they had dared to protest against eve-teasing of Hindu girls by Muslim thugs.

In accordance with locals, eve-teasing by Muslim thugs has been a major problem in the locality but even after lots of complaints, police is yet to get active. Yesterday, during afternoon, four such thugs, regular visitors to Uttar Nibra Panchanantala from Ankurhati in the vicinity, arrived as usual and started teasing Hindu girls and using foul languages to make the job more erotic. To be precise, at this time Hindu girls return to home from tuition classes. Finding no other way to stop them Malo Ram (26) and Babla Bera (27) strongly protested.

Within the next couple of minutes both were stabbed. While Malo Ram received severe injuries on his neck and hands, Babla Bera got injuries on the back. Both were rushed to the Howrah District Hospital. What followed these was nothing but a mass outrage. Angry locals got hold of two of four Muslim guys riding motorcycles and manhandled them. Malo Ram is still in hospital, Babla Bera has been released after treatments.

The two Muslim rowdies – Hasan Gazi (28) and Mukul Ali (27) – were then handed over to the police. They were remanded in police custody after being produced before a court. Local people stated that they had asked the youths some days ago not to visit the area any longer. Compliant with unofficial sources, Muslim youths, after being protested by two Hindu youths, came back with more people.

Injured Muslim youths have been admitted to the Domjur Sub Divisional Hospital for treatment. Police is patrolling the area at the moment.

Didi begins her games

BJP hits out at Mamata’s madrasas move

KOLKATA: The West Bengal unit of the BJP on Saturday criticised Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s decision to recognise 10,000 madrasas despite reports that Central intelligence had found most of the madrasas, operating along the Bangladesh border, to be “anti-Indian” in nature.

Ms. Banerjee had announced on Friday that though the government would recognise these madrasas there would be no financial assistance to them due to the State’s poor finances. Describing it as a “revolutionary decision”, she had said that the madrasas would now be able to avail themselves of various Central schemes, some of which would also benefit them financially.

State BJP president Rahul Sinha in a statement accused Ms. Banerjee of “playing with national integrity” in order to “appease a particular community”. He pointed out that Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram had recently told journalists that activists of the Bangladesh-based terror group Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami (HuJI) have a strong presence along the international border with a number of madrasas being under their direct control. “The Central government report says that most of the madrasas are anti-Indian,” Mr. Sinha said. Asserting that the BJP welcomed the approval of “real Indian madrasas,” he said Ms. Banerjee could have taken the reports by the Intelligence Bureau as well as Central and local intelligence units into consideration before arriving at the decision.

Apaat kaale, Viprit Buddhi (“In times of a crisis, the mind loses its wisdom”). Only this can explain why Hindus, wherever they face a serious threat from Muslims and Xians — Bengal, Kerala, North East — will keep shunning political parties which represent their interests, and keep voting for those parties and politicians who are openly hostile to them and work against their interests.

Bengalis, Keralites, Assamese — all these Hindus fall in this category. Notice how determined they are not to allow BJP to come to power but will keep voting Congress and every other rabid anti-Hindu politiican to power who will then keep taking steps to compromise the future of the Hindus.

What has happened to Vir Sanghvi?

The fat dude finally wrote sense. Must have got drunk. Wonder of wonders, he mentions “our Hinduism” (though he is a Jain) and even recommends a book by Jagmohan on Hinduism!! Will wonders never cease!! I have a feeling he has just finished reading Rajiv Malhotra’s Breaking India.

The space of faith between two peaks

Is this column being authored by an Aryan journalist for the benefit of largely Dravidian readers? Don’t laugh. I know it sounds absurd, offensive even, but the Aryan-Dravidian divide has long been one of the foundations of the ancient history we teach our children. Consequently, it has subconsciously shaped the thinking of much of the middle class and contributed to a mind-set in which north Indians see themselves as descendents of strong European invaders and Dravidians are treated as their traditional enemies.

But the more we learn about ancient history and about the battles between Aryans and Dravidians, the more dubious this divide seems to be.

The Aryan invasion theory, in its simplest form, posits that India was inhabited by Dravidians till about 3,000 or 4,000 years ago (the dates vary) when fair-skinned Aryans from Central Asia invaded the sub-continent. They conquered north India and pushed the Dravidians to the south. They brought Sanskrit with them along with Hinduism and created the India that we know today.

This theory also claims that the Aryans left their original homes in Central Asia in waves. One group went to India. One group went to Iran (the Shah used to call himself Arya Meher or ‘Light of the Aryans’). And others ended up in Europe (remember Hitler and his Aryan theories?). When I was at school, much was made of the links between north Indians and Europeans. Sanskrit and Latin had the same source, we were told. The Gods of ancient Greece, ancient Rome and ancient India were the same — they only had different names. The reason why so many north Indians could be fair was because their genes had preserved the original Aryan characteristics.

One of the problems with India is that society has little sense of history. We treat issues such as our origins as being the stuff of school lessons. We never keep up with advances in research and the only time history becomes the subject of a national discussion is when an issue like the Babri Masjid erupts.

Consequently, most of us have missed the historical and archaeological discoveries that have all but destroyed the theory of the Aryan invasion. Though some historians say that the Aryans came to India as nomads and married into the local population, others are beginning to dispute the thesis of the Aryan invasion in its entirety. What’s more, some genetic studies have found it impossible to distinguish between an Aryan and a Dravidian. Geneticists suggest that most of us are descended from migrants from Africa, who probably got to India around 60,000 years ago. Further, the mitochondrial DNA of Europeans is different from that of Indians, casting doubt on theories that posit a common origin. Nor are there huge genetic variations between Aryans and Dravidians.

Then, there’s the problem of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The first Indus Valley sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were excavated in the early years of the 20th century. Startled to discover that a well-advanced urban civilisation had existed in India around 2,600 BC, the British found this hard to reconcile with the Aryan invasion theory. Were the people of the Indus Valley Dravidians? If so, they were certainly far more advanced than any central Asian people of that era. How could the Aryans have defeated them?

Some British archaeologists suggested that the people of the Indus Valley were Mesopotamians who had come to settle in India. This was easily disproved and the discovery, in recent years, that there are 1,500 Indus Valley sites all the way from Sind to Gujarat suggests that the history of that period needs to be re-written.

What some historians are now suggesting is that the British theory of an Aryan invasion was politically convenient for the Raj. The British liked the idea of fair-skinned Europeans (or quasi-Europeans) conquering India and bringing civilisation to the natives. But the evidence for such a theory is almost entirely non-existent. In fact, the only evidence for some kind of Indo-European link is linguistic: the links between Sanskrit and Latin.

If you abandon the Aryan invasion theory, then you are left with a very different version of ancient Indian history. You would have to say that 4,000 years ago (or 5,000 or 6,000, depending on which dates you accept) India boasted of an advanced city-based civilisation. For reasons we do not fully understand (the drying up of the Saraswati river is one theory) that civilisation faded. But the people of India continued to develop in a variety of other ways (some of them agrarian).

There may have been visitors or migrants from Central Asia but their numbers were not large enough to unbalance the proportions of the local people or to introduce a new culture. In other words, there was no Aryan-Dravidian divide. India continued to be inhabited by indigenous people and like all old civilisations, continued to welcome migrants from other places.

If this was indeed the case, then there are various consequences for society and politics. First of all, we need to accept that Hinduism is not a religion that was transported to India from Central Asia. It is an Indian creation and traces of Hindu influence are visible in the Indus Valley cities.

Secondly, we need to abandon this foolish emotional conflict between the north and the south, between Aryan and Dravidian. We are all the same people. It is true that many parts of the south have a distinctive culture and linguistic heritage of their own which is quite different from, say, the culture and language of Punjab. But the differences between north and south are not that great. There are enormous differences between Bengal and Punjab, for instance. But nobody casts those differences in terms of race or historical conflict. India is a large country and differences are inevitable.

In terms of how we live our everyday lives, these may not be important discoveries. But in terms of regional psychology, their impact is phenomenal. The north must shed its air of pointless victorious superiority. In parts of the south, they must abandon the siege mentality and sense of Dravidian identity that has led them to prolong a needless conflict with the north.

History tells us that we are all Indians and have always been so. We must reject the divisive history concocted by the British and focus on the facts as we know them. India is one of the cradles of civilisation judging by the excavations of Indus Valley cities. We have gone through ups and downs in our history. But we have not learnt civilisation from Central Asians or borrowed our Hinduism from them.

It’s time to take pride in being Indian. And time to reject the bogus divisions that we have been misled by.

(I recommend Jagmohan’s new book, Reformed, Reawakened and Enlightened Hinduism, for a fuller discussion of these issues.)

Jagan Reddy’s New Home

Jagan Reddy has a new home in Hyderabad. He has much poorer intelligence than his father, who had always kept his Christianity carefully hidden from the Hindu masses. So much so, when YSR died, many of his Hindu supporters couldn’t understand why he was being buried — the goofballs had no idea he was a Christian. 

YSR was very careful to have his photos shot with Hindu smybology (tilak on forehead, sacred thread on wrist, etc.), much like what Sonia Gandhi is smartly doing. (How many pictures have you seen of her with a saree pallu on her head, a big tilak on forehead, sacred thread, her coming out of a Hindu temple?)

But Jagan has foolishly come out in the open by placing a huge cross on his home, which is a strategic blunder because even mentally blind Hindus will now come to know he is a Christian. Secret Christians have always furthered the interests of Christianity by remaining undercover. This shows Jagan is immature and has a lot to learn.

Italian by birth, Roman Catholic by baptism

Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism

By John Mclithon

I was surprised when the Congress party gave me a Padma Shri – I am the only foreign journalist to ever get it.  For, in my forty years of political reporting in India, I have always been a vocal critic of the Nehru dynasty. Someone even called me recently: “ a vitriolic British journalist, who in his old age chose to live back in the land he never approved”.

It started with Operation Blue Star. I was one of the few western correspondents who criticized Indira.  As I have said since then numerous times, the attack on the Golden Temple and the atrocities that followed the army operations, produced in all sections of the Sikhs a sense of outrage that is hard today to alleviate. I believed then that the large majority of Hindu India, even if politically hostile to Indira Gandhi, openly identified with – and exulted in – her will to overwhelmingly humble a recalcitrant minority.

As everybody knows, Indira Gandhi helped my fame grow even more, by wanting to imprison me during the Emergency she clamped and finally throwing me out of India for a short while. But the result was that the whole of India tuned in, then and thereafter, to my radio’s broadcasts, ‘The Voice of India’, to hear what they thought was ‘accurate’ coverage of events.

When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, I first believed that he was sincerely trying to change the political system, but he quickly gave-up when the old guard would not budge. I criticized him for his foolish adventure in Sri Lanka, although I felt sorry for him when he was blown to pieces by Dhanu, the Tamil Tiger.  It is in Kashmir, though that I fought most viciously against his Govt and subsequent Congress ones for its human right abuses on the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley. The Congress Governments tried indeed several times to censor me and the army even took prisoner my Kashmiri stringer, whom I had to rescue by the skin of his teeth. I am also proud that I was the first one to point out then, that the Indian Government had at that time no proof of the Pakistani involvement in the freedom movement in Kashmir. Thus I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming that « the Indian Government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism», or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir”… As I was so popular, all the other foreign journalists used the same parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of the plight of the Muslims, never of the 400.000 Hindus, who after all were chased out of their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it).

As for Sonia Gandhi, I did not mind her, when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as she started stamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a series of broadcasts on the Nehru Dynasty: “It’s sad that the Indian National Congress should be completely dependent on one family; the total surrender of a national party to one person is deplorable. You have to ask the question: what claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her candidature for prime-ministership? Running a country is far more complicated than running a company. Apprenticeship is required in any profession — more so in politics”. I heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast.

Then, after President Abdul l Kalam called her to the Raj Bhavan and told her what some of us already knew, namely that for a long time, she had kept both her Italian and Indian passports, which disqualified her to become the Prime Minister of India, she nevertheless became the Supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I exclaimed: “the moribund and leaderless Congress party has lashed onto Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism”. She never forgave me for that. Yet, today I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will be written, the period over which she presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense corruption and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non Indian and a Christian like me. Truth will also come out about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G, which she uses to buy votes, as the Wikileaks have just shown.

Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at the fact that Indians –Hindus, sorry, as most of  this country’s intelligentsia is Hindu – seem to love me so much, considering the fact that in my heydays, I considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one billion worldwide. I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that India needs to be able to say with pride, “Yes, our civilization has a Hindu base to it.” The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it has survived so long, is that it does not stand up and fight. It changes and adapts and modernizes and absorbs–that is the scientific and proper way of going about it. I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion of this millennium, because it can adapt itself to change.

John.maclithon@gmail.com

The author, who covered for several decades South Asia for a leading international radio channel, is the author of “Hinduva, Sex & Adventures” (Roly Books, Delhi)

Christians burning witches

Christians in Africa burning two women alive after declaring them as witches. Praise the lord — civilisation has arrived to the heathens with white man’s religion.

Why Christian priests love children

Shock after Dutch priest endorses pedophilia

AMSTERDAM: The Dutch Catholic Church and the Salesian order say they will investigate revelations one of the order’s priests served on the board of an organization that promotes pedophilia — with the knowledge of the order’s top official in the Netherlands.

The official, delegate Herman Spronck, confirmed in a statement that the priest identified as “Father Van B” served on the board of the “Martijn” organization , which advocates adult-child sex. However, Spronck’s superior in Belgium says he will probe both Spronck and Van B, after Spronck was quoted as saying such relationships aren’t always harmful.

Church spokesman Pieter Kohnen said that even with sex abuse scandals, this case was “unbelievable” .

Err.. were these the asses who claimed that they were bringing civilisation to the heathens of India? The Independent of UK reports:

British aristocracy ‘ate human flesh’

The British aristocracy consumed human flesh, a new book on medicinal cannibalism reveals.

The well-off in Britain and Europe swallowed parts of the human body, including its flesh, blood and bones, as medicine until the end of the 18th century.

Even as they denounced the cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummies, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin. Dr Richard Sugg, a Durham University academic, writes: “James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Users included Francis I, Elizabeth I’s surgeon, John Banister, William III, and Queen Mary.”

I guess when you are trained from childhood to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ, cannibalism would come naturally to Christians.

Chickens of secularists coming home to roost

‘Muslims voting along community lines worrying’

NEW DELHI: With Muslims polarizing in favour of religious outfits in Assam and Kerala elections, a key author of Sachar report has sounded the alarm that mainstream parties have to step in to check the “unfortunate” trend.

The community’s gravitation towards Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) in Assam and Muslim League in Kerala was so complete that the parties notched up their highest tallies, emerging key players in state assemblies. All India United Democratic Front is even eyeing the lead opposition’s slot.

Abusaleh Shariff, who was part of the Sachar panel which ranked Muslims at par with dalits in backwardness, called the electoral development “unfortunate”. He said the community veered towards religious parties owing to lack of representation in mainstream platforms. “This makes them vulnerable to religious rhetoric,” he said.

The Muslims-for-Muslim-parties trend raised eyebrows because it happened in states where demographics make religious politics a sustainable enterprise. Assam has 30% of the community while Kerala has around 25%. That they are concentrated in select districts makes them crucial to winnability and appealing to leaders who want to launch religious platforms.

Shariff said, “We want Muslims to go to normal schools and not madrassas, but now the same is happening in politics. They have to be part of mainstream parties and the latter too have to be more inclusive — give them tickets and pay attention to their welfare agenda to check the unfortunate drift.” He said there could not be room for religion in public place.

While the secular credentials of Congress and Left traditionally polled a chunk of community votes, the 2011 results surprised observers to ask if it was a trend.

West Bengal, however, bucked the wave with Trinamool Congress raking in the community’s backing. The West Bengal result is seen as welcome relief.

The political class, however, feels that too much focus on Kerala and Assam could be misleading because the potential is higher among mainstream parties to have broad-based support.

Bihar, too, has high Muslim population but Nitish Kumar’s success last year in singlehandedly weaning them away from Lalu Prasad is seen as evidence of this belief. “Mamata Banerjee follows the same strategy. It is healthy,” a leader said.

The community’s gravitation towards Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF in Assam and Muslim League in Kerala was so complete that the parties notched up their highest tallies, emerging key players in state assemblies.

Does the above come as a surprise to any Indian realist? It has long been said that Muslims are merely using “secularist” parties like Congress as useful idiots as long as they are in a minority. Once Muslims achieve a critical mass in any area, they will sweep them aside with contempt and rally behind purely Muslim fundamentalist parties. This has already begun to happen in Assam and Kerala.

Once in a majority, Muslims would have use neither for Hindu secularists nor for the constitution. Secularism-loving Muslims is a species that exists only in the fertile imagination of Hindu zombies who follow blindly the two idiots, Gandhi and Nehru. Congress jokers are going to be cured of their secularim fetish pretty soon.

A month’s break

Folks, I am taking a month’s break from running this blog as I am travelling. See you soon.

Racist Thugs of Australia

Aborigine race row deepens as more officers are exonerated

No wonder Australians are called White Pakis.

Kashmir: The Storm Centre of the World

Brilliant book by Balraj Madhok. Read it online:

Kashmir: The Storm Centre of the World

It has eyewitness accounts of the 1947 Kashmir invasion by Pakistan.

Breaking India may undermine war on terror

A commentary by NS Rajaram on Rajiv Malhotra’s new book, Breaking India.

BREAKING INDIA MAY UNDERMINE WAR ON TERRORISM

Authors of the just released book Breaking India allege that Christian organizations are engaged in a divisive program to expand in countries like India, Sri Lanka and other former colonies by creating and exploiting divisions. This shortsighted policy may seriously undermine war against terror.

N.S. Rajaram

The war against terror is not just India’s war or America’s war: it is a war of freedom against the spread of ideology of terror in the name of God. The West, America in particular, became aware of the threat only after 9/11 but India has been waging a war against Jihadi terror for over a thousand years. As a result no people in the world today have more knowledge and experience of fighting terror than the Indians. India and the West should be working together to defeat this menace. With countries in the strategically vital Middle East sliding into turmoil, solidarity with India becomes still more important: this is a fact not seriously disputed by any serious strategic thinker in the world

But curiously, some groups based in America and Europe are actively engaged in weakening Indian society by dividing its people into mutually hostile camps on the basis of tribe, cast and religion. It is part of an ideology and academic exercise promoted by evangelical Christian and so-called ‘human rights’ organizations in an effort to spread their influence and gain converts. Many human rights organizations are little more than secular fronts of various churches that have made inroads into the media and are now trying to gain control of sections of the government. All this is brought out with profuse documentation by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan in their just released book Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (Amaryllis 2011).

Their strategy is based on creating and fanning resentments among so-called ‘minorities’— a continuation of the tactics used by bureaucrats, academics and missionaries during the colonial era. These minorities are often based on willful misrepresentation. To take an example, McDonalds is one of the world’s largest fast food chains. In the past decade or so it has begun setting up franchises in India, Sri Lanka and other countries. In India its presence is miniscule compared to local businesses in the restaurant businesses. But no one for that reason regards India’s McDonalds franchises as ‘small businesses’ that qualify for tax and other benefits. Take another example: GM makes and sells cars in India, but in numbers it is dwarfed by Indian automakers like Maruti, Tata and Mahindra. Yet no one sees GM as a small business.

But this is exactly the claim of Christian organizations like the Catholic, Anglican and evangelical churches. Even though they are multinational organizations that are much larger worldwide than any Hindu sect or organization, they insist on being treated as minorities and given special privileges in education, jobs and other areas. This is a central thesis of the just noted Breaking India by Malhotra and Neelakandan. The authors further point out that in a manner eerily similar to what happened in the century preceding the European colonization of India (and other countries), these Christian organizations and their academic and NGO affiliates are engaged in weakening the country to facilitate foreign domination. It is no accident that Church organizations enjoyed special privileges under British rule, many of which have continued after independence in the guise of ‘minority’ rights. Their activities today give the impression that they would like to see the return of colonial rule in some form.

Dividing people along tribal and ethnic lines has a long and sordid history. In India it took the form of a racial divide of Indians into two groups called Aryans and Dravidians. Science has fully discredited the notion of race while the British themselves have acknowledged their political motive by admitting that the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory “gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.” (BBC, October 6, 2005.)

In a speech at the British House of Commons in 1929, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin echoed the idea by claiming that God had told the British (presumably in English) to uplift the degraded Indian Aryans to their former heights through British rule. This is what came to be known as the White Man’s Burden in the phrase made famous by Rudyard Kipling. Neither Kipling nor Baldwin originated the idea: they borrowed it from the missionaries who claimed, and still claim that by accepting Jesus as savior, we can be saved from our sins since Jesus died for our sins. (This is an obvious incentive to sin as much as possible since we can save ourselves by converting on our deathbeds; if we don’t sin, Jesus will have died in vain.)

But missionaries and academics later went much further. They claimed that their (meaning the British) presence was necessary to correct the oppression of the ‘minority’ Dravidians by the ‘invading’ Aryans. The most influential figure in this development was Robert Caldwell, Bishop of Tirunelveli. The Google Encyclopedia describes him as: “a Colonial Era Evangelist Missionary who used native languages as a tool to proselytize the Colonized in Southern India. To aid his mission, he nativised Christianity by adopting a teleological approach to re-classify Indian languages inspired by scientific (sic: pseudo-scientific) racial theories that was popular amongst the European intellectuals in the 19th century. His works revolve around the missionary work in Tinnevelly (Thirunelveli) district in Tamil Nadu and it laid the theoretical foundation for the political and academic ‘revivalist’ movement that came to dominate Dravidian nationalism in Tamil Nadu and racial polarization in Sri Lanka.”

This polarization led to the church-sponsored LTTE terrorism in Sri Lanka that ended only with its total defeat. In India it led to the Dravidian faultline—as the authors term it—that sustains Dravidian politics especially in Tamil Nadu. The original DMK was the handiwork of Christian missionaries. It was originally called the Justice Party, claiming its goal was to bring justice to the oppressed Dravidians. It is supposed to be scientific and rationalist, but still holds on to the scientifically discredited Aryan-Dravidian theory. This division is the centerpiece of both the Dravidian parties and the LTTE: their whole ideology collapses once they accept that science has demolished their racial basis.

This Dravidian ideology, it is hardly a theory, has spawned its own brand of ‘scholarship’. According to the Aryan Invasion Theory now kept alive by Dravidian politicians (and their academic camp followers like Michael Witzel, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola), the invading Aryans destroyed the Harappan cities (of the Indus Valley) like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But these, Parpola in particular go further: the builders of these great 5000 year old cities were Dravidians who spoke an early form of Tamil. These were driven out of their cities by the invading Aryans and forced to migrate en masse to Tamil Nadu, a thousand miles to the south where they have preserved their Tamil language!

How does Parpola know that these long dead people spoke Tamil? He doesn’t but that is immaterial. He complimented the people of Tamil Nadu for preserving the ancient language of the Harappan people of which there is no trace. This pleased the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi sufficiently to give Parpola a cash award of a million rupees (about $25,000). When this news became public there was a flurry of activity in Western academic circles with several scholars claiming that they too had proof of the ‘Dravidian’ nature of the Harappan civilization. (Asko Parpola is from Finland.) But the activity died out when Mr Karunanidhi announced that the award would be given only once every five years.

A curious thing happened on the way from Bishop Caldwell to Dravidian politics— racism became inseparable from language: Dravidian language became Dravidian race. Even a supposedly great scholar like F. Max Müller became an advocate of it, at least until it became politically uncomfortable for him. This was denounced by real scientists. Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great biologists of the century wrote as far back as 1939:

“In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature…” To political and propagandist Huxley might have added ‘religious and missionary’, for it was the missionary Bishop Caldwell who created this conundrum. Even Max Müller believed in the Biblical superstition of Creation on 26 October 4004 BC! He even expressed admiration for the 17th century forger Father Robert de Nobili who produced a Biblical ‘Yesur Veda’ (Veda of Jesus) instead of the Yajurveda.

Today this brand religious ‘scholarship’ has been taken to abysmal depths by missionaries in India who now claim that the original Dravidians were Christians and the invading Aryans created the Vedas by borrowing ideas from the Bible! The authors of Breaking India cite several such examples by these missionary ‘scholars’. Here is a gem from one Deivanayagam (and his daughter Devakala) who claim that Sanskrit was brought to India (by Aryans naturally) after Jesus and prior to that India was Dravidian Christian, which is the source of the Veda. According to this theory Brahmins (Aryans) stole ideas from Dravidian Christianity and created Hindu scriptures including the Vedas. Sanskrit came into existence only 150 years after Christianity.

This raises a few difficult questions. What were Brahmins and what language did they use before they stole Dravidian Christianity and Tamil to create Hinduism and Sanskrit? What is Dravidian Christianity? According to these scholars, Dravidian Christianity was the Christianity preached by St Thomas when he came to India in 52 AD and was killed by Brahmins for that reason. Never mind that the Christian Bible (New Testament) came into existence only in the 4th century, compiled by St Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. Or that St Thomas never visited India. (He may never have existed, but that is a different story.)

What is extraordinary is that such tripe should receive support and sponsorship from Christian organizations. Not so long ago Christian institutions could produce scholars of the caliber of Father Heras, W.W. Hunter and others who for all their prejudices knew the meaning and worth of scholarship. As I will describe in a future article, this precipitous decline in scholarship is due to the decline of Christianity in the West and the emptying of the seminaries. The vacuum has been filled by aspiring seminarians from Third World countries like India. So, where formerly Biblical scholars came from the divinity schools of Yale, Harvard, Gregorianum (Rome) and others, we now have shallow propagandists coming from troubled seminaries with no academic standards. Like the proverbial neo-convert (and neveu riche) many of them have become loose cannons without any trace of scruples.

This horde is now menacing their homelands with newfound money and influence. This is an important area that needs to be studied. Most Americans are not aware of the fact that Christianity today, the missionary movement in particular is a Third World phenomenon where it is creating social and political havoc. Another fact that Americans (and other westerners) are surprised to learn is that the Christianity being propagated by these is pre-Enlightenment Christianity with its baggage of racism and anti-Semitism: churches in India still preach that Jews killed Jesus and Jews are the enemies of God.

The relationship of the U.S. governments over the years with missionaries is a complex one. Some, mainly Republican administrations have not hesitated to use them as political tools for spying and other covert activities. Democratic administrations on the other hand have supported them in the fond hope they will carry out social works and advance ‘human rights’. (Both show that Christian outfits are willing political stooges.) Human rights bodies today are heavily infiltrated by evangelic interests pushing their own agenda. It is no exaggeration to say that human rights is a neocolonial ideology that has taken the place of the White Man’s Burden— of imposing a set of their own but alien values on the people of the Third World.

But the situation today is far too grave for such games: Indian and U.S. strategic interests now overlap to a degree that was unimaginable even a decade ago. And no area is more important than fighting terrorism. Fighting terrorism presents the greatest challenge for the two countries. But Church organizations, in their tunnel vision, focused on gaining maximum converts are oblivious to the social damage it is causing and the ill will it is generating. This discord can only help the terrorists. Leaders and thinkers in both countries must recognize the dangers of this ‘Breaking India’ activity that can only benefit forces that are bent on destroying freedom and civilization as we understand them.
Needless to say these evangelists and human rights-wallahs will not be in the front lines when terrorist forces strike home.

It is impossible to do justice to the full scope of Breaking India in an article like the present one. I have only touched on a few salient points, occasionally going beyond the book to highlight their historical and other background. The book needs to be studied and discussed in detail at various academic and policy forums. 

Swami Ramdev in show Aap Ki Adalat

Brilliant stuff. The swami has brains as well as brawn. See the entire show.

Swami Ramdev in show Aap Ki Adalat

Another medieval fatwa from Indian clerics



’48-mile cap for women travelling sans escort’

LUCKNOW: Darul Uloom Deoband has issued a travel advisory for women. The latest fatwa by the Islamic seminary rules that a single woman must not venture beyond 48 miles unless escorted by a ‘mehram’ — defined as a close kin with whom marriage or sex would be considered incestuous. Apart from this, a husband also qualifies as ‘mehram’. The fatwa has invited derision from activist Muslim groups.

The edict was in response to a query to Darul-Ifta (Deoband’s fatwa department): “Is a married woman permitted to travel to another country with her female sibling?” The response (511/308/d) posted on the Deoband website on March 2 said: “She cannot travel without a ‘mehram’. It’s mentioned in the Hadees that a woman should not travel for more than 48 miles except in the company of a ‘mehram’ relative.”

Justifying the fatwa, Deoband’s spokesperson Adil Siddiqui told reporters on Tuesday that their intent is to protect women. “The fatwa is relevant considering growing crime against women. Therefore, no Muslim family should have any objections,” he said.

The ruling, made public on International Women’s day, raised the hackles of activists who condemned the attempts to “shackle women by insecure maulanas”. The issue was discussed threadbare at the meeting of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) and each of the 253 participants vowed to ignore it completely.

“To try and impose 1,400 years old restrictions when people travelled in kafila is absurd,” said Naeesh Hasan, the founder president of BMMA. “This in an era when women pilots fly planeloads of people across thousands of miles without their fathers or husbands lurking in the cockpit.”

Bazm-e-Khawateen chief Beghaum Shahnaz Sidratwell (76) wanted to know what happened to women who had no mehram. “I was the lone daughter of a widowed mother and have been moving alone ever since I can remember. The maulanas must think of better ways to make their presence felt,” she said.

Deadly Gift from Uncle Sam

Who is sending this money to India and why? The report below neither mentions which entities are sending this huge amount of money, nor who in India is recieving it. Secular media, eh? This money is simply coming in for destruction of Hindu civilisation by mass conversions, and balkanisation of India. China is smart — it doesn”t allow any foriegn funding at all inside its borders. But our Congress goons seem to be  taking a cut to allow this money to keep pouring in.

US tops Rs 31,000cr-donation list

NEW DELHI: Over Rs 31,000 crore have been received as donations from abroad by various associations and organisations working in the country during 2006-09 with nearly one-third coming from the United States alone, Lok Sabha was informed on Tuesday.

The maximum number of these donations were directed to associations and NGOs based in Delhi followed by Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, which have received Rs 8,095 crore, 5,437.91 crore and 3,545.24 crore, respectively during the three-year period — from 2006 to 2009. The top donor was the United States from where over Rs 9,310 crore were received by NGOs in India during the period, data presented by the home ministry in Lok Sabha revealed.

According to the data, Indian NGOs and associations have received Rs 31,473 crore as donations during the 2006-09 period.

MoS (home affairs) Mullappally Ramachandran said some complaints have been received with regard to irregularities and misutilisation of such funds, and based on them 41 associations have been prohibited from receiving funds from abroad. He said, “About 41 associations are prohibited from receiving foreign contribution, 35 associations are placed in prior permission category and accounts of 11 associations are frozen at present. Further nine cases have been referred to CBI for detailed investigations for FCRA violations.”

He said of these nine cases, four are on trial, one has been convicted. The minister said, “Two are stayed by courts, one has been closed due to insufficient evidence and in one case prosecution sanction has been issued.”

Jihad Has Come to India

Scary stuff — be prepared to hand over your women to Muslim harems if you do not stop voting for Congress and communists.

Jihad Has Come to India
By Richard L. Benkin

Jihad has come to India.  The Obama administration and the State Department will tell you that it is nothing more than isolated acts by individuals.  The government in New Delhi will say you are stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment.  The mainstream media will ask how you can say that when we are hearing nothing about it from them.  But it is real, and it is happening now.  I have seen it first-hand.  The Obama administration’s studied denial will find us caught as flat-footed in India as we were in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.  The difference is that India is an economic and military giant, with nuclear weapons, and could be a cornerstone of any effective fight against radical Islam.

For several years, I have been talking about the progressive radicalization of Bangladesh.  Although it is the only country that ranks among the ten most populous and the ten most densely populated, as well as being the second largest Muslim-majority nation, events there do not capture people’s imagination.  When you talk about India in the same context, however, people take notice.  The thought of an Islamist dominated India scares the heck out of them and should.  While our own strategic thinkers concentrate on internecine struggles in the Middle East, their obliviousness to the significance of an Islamist India has enabled our enemies to further their agenda.

I have spent several years along India’s 2545 mile-long frontier with Bangladesh, and have seen the impact Bangladesh’s radicalization has had on its giant neighbor to the west.  Amitabh Tripathi, who has been fighting against what he calls his country’s “soft policies,” noted that Bangladesh’s Muslims “are not radicalized but their institutions are.”  That radicalization and a level of corruption on both sides of the border that makes my fellow Chicagoans look like amateurs has already produced demographic change in many strategic areas of India.  It also has given Muslim activists carte blanche throughout the entire country.  The process is deliberate, has been going on for decades, and should send us a screaming warning signal, not only because of what it bodes for India, but also because of what sort of future the Obama administration’s soft policies and tolerance for an open border to our south mean for the United States.

Each year in districts like Uttar Dinajpur and North and South 24 Parganas directly across from the Islamic state, my colleagues and I find that more and more villages which once had mixed Hindu-Muslim populations are now all Muslim or Muslim-dominated.  Gone are the roadside temples characteristic of places where Hindus practice their faith openly; gone are the sights of Hindu women dressed in their colorful saris and other vestments.  They have been replaced by mosques and burqas.  Last year, Tripathi and I met with Bimal Praminik, Director of the Kolkata-based Centre for Research in Indo-Bangladesh Relations and arguably the foremost authority on these population changes.  He is convinced that this population shift is a deliberate and an integral element the jihad that threatens all of us:  “Bangladeshi infiltration with Pakistani ideas… trying to ‘Pakistanize’ the entire region,” he said adding that that the dominant culture for South Asian Muslims has become more “Arabic,” than South Asian.

In 1947 when the British left, they partitioned the Indian subcontinent into Hindu and Muslim states.  West Bengal went to Hindu India, and East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became part of Pakistan.  While Hindu and Muslim majorities respectively, remain, exhaustive studies by Pramanik and others hold out little hope that things will continue that way.  During the second half of the 20th century, the Muslim proportion of West Bengal’s population rose by 25 percent and its Hindu population declined by nine, a process that has continued into the 21st.  At the same time, Bangladesh’s Hindu population dropped from almost a third to nine percent.  The process has not been pretty and has involved murder, gang rape, abduction of women and children, forced conversion to Islam, and legalized thievery of ancestral Hindu lands under Bangladesh’s anti-Hindu Vested Property Act.  And now it is happening in India.

Between 1981 and 1991, Muslim population growth in West Bengal actually exceeded its growth in Bangladesh.  The South Asia Research Society concluded that Hindus have been fleeing Islamist persecution in East Bengal since the partition; but that since Bangladesh’s emergence as an independent nation in 1971, “there has been large scale voluntary infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims…to West Bengal and other parts of India” as well.  The actual Muslim population growth exceeded Indian government projections that were based on demographic factors (fertility and mortality), internal migration, and the influx of Hindu refugees; thus, there had to be another element driving the change.  Pramanik identifies it as “illegal immigration from across the border.”  Islamist plans have been so detailed and longstanding that since 1951 the Muslim growth rate exceeded that of Hindus in each individual district of West Bengal.

Statistics might be the “smoking gun,” but jihad’s impact is far more powerful in the testimony of individual non-Muslim residents who are its victims.  One elderly woman in the Howrah district told us how Muslims are taking over her property piece by piece.  She even showed us a wall with a star and crescent on it that local Muslims built to identify it as dar al Islam.  In another village, residents showed us the remains of a Hindu temple that Muslims recently destroyed after urinating on its holy objects.  Most poignant was the testimony of a crestfallen mother whose 22-year-old daughter was abducted weeks ago by local Muslims.  Abduction of Hindu women and girls in the name of Islam has been common in Bangladesh for years and is a key element in jihad:  eliminating females of childbearing years from the gene pool and forcing them to “produce” Muslim offspring instead.  It is now happening in India, according to victimized parents who told me about it in India’s North and Northeast.

Residents of Deganga, only 40 kilometers from the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, lived through an anti-Hindu pogrom last September.  The pogrom started — as these things are wont to do these days — with a fabricated land dispute in which Muslims claimed a wooded area off the region’s main road that Hindus own and on which sits a Hindu shrine that is considered very sacred.  As the 2010 Islamic observance of Iftar came to an end, a large group of Muslims attempted to seize the land until local Hindus stopped them.  It was then that they started attacking Hindu households and shops indiscriminately, forcing many to flee the area with little more than the clothes on their backs.

I returned to Deganga last month to find that while many homes and shops have been rebuilt, a sense of security by Hindus in their ancestral land has not.  Most of the residents spoke about leaving the area; others talked about being fearful of attack, their children unable to attend school, and Hindu women being harassed whenever they go to the market or other places in the area.  Many of them showed us charred pieces of their former residences; in other cases we were able to see signs of it bleeding through a new coat of paint.  Hindu women and girls showed us where they hid during the attack to avoid being raped or abducted and made concubines; a fate that likely has befallen the missing 22-year old daughter of the mother above.

In every single one of these cases, local authorities have refused to take action.  In fact, during the Deganga pogrom, they arrested the community’s wealthiest Hindu on the false charge of firing on the jihadis.  In the past, this official inaction has been purchased; but it is also a product of the alliance between Islamists and Communists in India.  That alliance was announced publicly at a meeting in the south Indian state of Kerala; and it has been policy for West Bengal’s three-decade old communist government.  Wherever we spoke with these villagers, Muslim neighbors would gather menacingly in an attempt to intimidate our informants.  In some cases, they attacked after we left — again with no action by the authorities.

In Meerut northeast of New Delhi and far from Deganga, the population of this once Hindu-dominated town is now split down the middle between Hindus and Muslims; and the Hindus are living in fear.  Just five days ago before my arrival, a Hindu was burned to death and shortly before that a community leader was targeted and killed.  These actions are becoming more common in this substantial-sized town with no police re-action; and according to residents and activists, it is only a matter of time before things explode.

Our State Department will tell you that there is no jihad in India.  They will hew the official line that the liberal Awami League government in Bangladesh has put an end to anti-Hindu actions there.  A similarly weak government in New Delhi will parrot the same platitudes.   Yet, their false palliatives bring no comfort to the scores of victims who have told us their stories; or the many others now unable to do so.

They cannot explain away major terrorist attacks in India’s largest cities like Mumbai, Pune, in New Delhi, and elsewhere.  They cannot explain how insurgents can regularly kidnap minor officials and receive their ransom (usually release of prisoners, cash, and government forbearance from counter terrorist action) every time they do.  If the Obama administration and its left-wing counterparts in India do not replace their studied ignorance with effective action, we will be as “surprised” over what becomes of India as we were with Iran, Egypt, and a host of other nations.

Imagine what an Islamist India would mean for us.

Crooked party of India gets sued in US for Sikh pogrom

The party of anti-Hindu traitors and white-skin worshippers gets a taste of its own medicine. These charlatan have been campaigning against Narendra Modi in foreign countries and lobbied with the American government to deny him a visa.

Congress party summoned by US Court for 1984 anti-Sikh riots

A US court has issued summons to India’s Congress party in connection with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, acting on a Sikh rights group’s petition charging it with “conspiring, aiding and abetting” organised attacks on the community.

A federal district court in New York issued summons to India’s ruling party in a class action lawsuit filed by Sikh organisation ‘Sikhs for Justice’ which has offices in New York and India.

The Sikh group has charged the Congress with “conspiring, aiding, abetting and carrying out organised attacks on Sikh population of India in November 1984″.

A statement issued by ‘Sikhs for Justice’ said that the killings could not be described as riots and they were not confined to Delhi alone but were led by Congress leaders in 18 states and 100 cities.

“The gravity, scale and specially the organised nature of these attacks was concealed by the Indian governments’ portraying them as ‘November 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots of Delhi,’” Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, legal advisor to Sikhs for Justice said.

According to the government of India’s record, a total of 3,296 Sikhs were killed while a total of 35,535 claims for deaths and injuries were received throughout India, the group said.

The proceedings are still at the pre-trial stage here in New York.

The Sunshine of Secularism

Chapter one from Sita Ram Goel’s perseptive book on the Niyogi Committee Report.

THE SUNSHINE OF ‘SECULARISM’

Hindus from early seventeenth century Pandits of Tamil Nadu to Arun Shourie in the closing years of the twentieth, have spent no end of ink and breath to demolish the dogma of Christianity and denounce missionary methods.  But it has hardly made any difference to the arrogance of Christian theologians and aggressiveness of Christian missionaries.  That is because the dogma was never meant for discussion. 

It is an axiom of logic that that which has not been proved cannot and need not be disproved.  Who has ever proved that the nondescript Jew who is supposed to have been crucified by a Roman governor of Judaea in 33 AD atoned for the sins of all humans for all time to come?  Who has ever proved that those who accept that man as the only saviour will ascend to a heaven of everlasting bliss, and those who do not will bum forever in the blazing fire of hell?  Nor can the proclamation or the promise or the threat be disproved. 

High-sounding theological blah blah notwithstanding, the fact remains that the dogma is no more than a subterfuge for forging and wielding an organizational weapon for mounting unprovoked aggression against other people.  It is high time for Hindus to dismiss the dogma of Christianity with the contempt it deserves, and pay attention to the Christian missionary apparatus planted in their midst.

The sole aim of this apparatus is to ruin Hindu society and culture, and take over the Hindu homeland.  It goes on devising strategies for every situation, favourable and unfavourable.  It trains and employs a large number of intellectual criminals ready to prostitute their talents in the service of their paymasters, and adept at dressing up dark designs in high-sounding language.  The fact that every design is advertised as a theology in the Indian context and every criminal euphemized as an Indian theologian, should not hoodwink Hindus about the real intentions of this gangster game.

Hindus are committing a grave mistake in regarding the encounter between Hinduism and Christianity as a dialogue between two religions.  Christianity has never been a religion; its long history tells us that it has always been a predatory imperialism par excellence.  The encounter, therefore, should be viewed as a battle between two totally opposed and mutually exclusive ways of thought and behaviour.  In the language of the Gita (Chapter 16), it is war between daivI (divine) and AsurI (demonic) sampads (propensities).  In the mundane context of history, it can also be described as war between the Vedic and the Biblical traditions.

This is not the place to go into the premises from which the two traditions proceed. I have presented them in some detail elsewhere.1 Here I will indicate briefly the behaviour patterns they promote.

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Sagarika Ghose finds Indian (Hindu) males “ugliest” in the world

Sagarika Ghose – Case Study on Biased and Racist Journalism

I mean, who in the hell does this fat cow think she is — Madhu Bala or Parveen Babi?

Sonia Gandhi’s NAC full of Maoist supporters

Like all good Christians, Sonia Gandhi too supports the Maoists because they are killing Hindu saints and want to take over India. Maoists are a creation of the church — you just have to read the Niyogi Committee report to know this. It clearly warned back in 1950s that if the missionaries are not thrown out of the tribal areas, sooner or later they will arm them and start an anti-India insurgency.

Anti-Hindu Congress begins dirty tricks against Swami Ramdev

Sadhus demand probe into Baba Ramdev’s assets

Baba Ramdev ‘s campaign against black money appears to have earned him many enemies among the political class as well as seers.

The Akhil Bhartiya Akhada Parishad, one of the leading groups of sadhus, is planning to write to the Prime Minister and the President seeking a CBI inquiry into the assets and wealth of the yoga guru.

The national spokesperson of the Akhada Parishad, Baba Hat Yogi, said: ” A decade ago, Ramdev used to move on a bicycle. He even had to struggle to find money to fix his punctured cycle. Now he flies on a chopper. We demand an inquiry into the income and assets of the Ramdev ashram.” Hat Yogi wasn’t alone; a demand for a probe into the baba’s assets also came from Trivender Panwar, president of the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal that recently withdrew support from the Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank government in Uttarakhand.

” Baba Ramdev is shouting against black money to protect his own ill-gotten wealth. He is even planning to enter politics to protect his black money,” Panwar alleged. ” He had claimed last year that one Uttarakhand minister had asked for Rs 2-crore bribe from him for some favour. If he is so committed to weeding out corruption from India, he should disclose the name of the accused minister.”

The outbursts against Ramdev come just days after a Congress MP in Arunachal Pradesh allegedly abused him when he talked about corruption at a spiritual camp at Pasighat in the East Siang district.

Many claimed that the popularity and political clout of Ramdev had made a lot of people jealous and they were now making allegations against him. But they, too, agreed that the baba should disclose his assets.

The yoga guru, however, remained unfazed. Hitting out at his critics, he told the Aaj Tak news channel: “We are ready for any inquiry. The central government has conducted such investigations twice and they are welcome to do so again. Is it a sin to speak about corruption in India?

Five crore people have donated for the development of our ashram. We will hold rallies on February 27 and March 23 in New Delhi against the failure of the Congress government to bring back to India the black money stashed away in foreign banks.” His detractors dismissed his aggressive stance as mere posturing and alleged that his ashram was involved in many dubious activities. Baba Hat Yogi said: ” In 2006, Mahant Shanker Dev of the Divya Yoga Mandir disappeared under mysterious circumstances. An independent inquiry should be conducted on the missing Mahant.” The phenomenal rise in the wealth of the trust run by the yoga guru in the last few years has raised many eyebrows.

According to a rough estimate, the Patanjali Yogpeeth Trust has property worth more than Rs 1,000 crore in Hardwar alone.

These include a 300-bed multi specialty hospital, a yoga research centre, a university, an ayurvedic pharmacy, a food park and a cosmetics manufacturing unit.

Swami Ramdev is even reported to have acquired a Scottish isle for about £ 2 million a few years ago to set up a wellness retreat. According to unconfirmed reports, Patanjali Yogpeeth has also acquired major stakes in the Aastha TV channel.

The channel used to telecast Ramdev’s daily yoga classes which helped him become an international figure.

Swami Ramdev’s critics demanded to know where the funds to acquire these assets came from.

Patanjali Yogpeeth’s general secretary Acharya Balkrishna insisted that the ashram’s records were clean. ” We maintain total transparency and keep an updated balance sheet. We have property mainly in Hardwar and land in some parts of India which are yet to be developed,” he said.

” The ashram is making progress because of the support and donations from our followers. Those criticising us should ask the government to demand inquiry into the trust and organisation operated by the Gandhi family,” he added.