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Fight Back Against Hate
Extremism, religious supremacism, militancy and terrorism are social problems seen in all societies and religious communities. In the Parliament of World’s Religions held in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2015; Dr. Shaik Ubaid held a session where representatives of various religions shared the ways their communities were combating the extremists within them. The falling birth rates in the West coupled with rising corruption, failing economy, exploitation by multinationals, occupation and tyranny in the developing world, led to massive immigration into Europe, North America, Australia & New Zealand. The economic downturn in these rich countries has provided the opportunities to demagogues to whip up racial and religious hatred. In the developing world too places such as Iraq, Syria, Burma, India, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Israel have seen the rise of militant ultra-nationalism and or religious supremacism. The worsening climate change will displace hundreds of million of million people. The rising tyranny in the Arab states and Israel will increase militancy. The rise of genocidal religious ultra-nationalism in nuclear India will destabilize the whole region. We in the US will have to proactively act to stop these religious supremacists from infiltrating the country and its power centers.
Main Threats
The RSS is a fascist paramilitary founded in India in 1925 with the goal of establishing a Hindu nation. Its members are uniformed and armed. It has approximately six million members.
It has produced many subsidiary organizations which work to infiltrate society at every level: religion, politics, courts, police, universities, and so on. The RSS and its subsidiaries are collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, meaning “Family of Organizations.”
The RSS’s organizational founders interacted with European fascism, even traveling to Fascist Italy to meet Benito Mussolini. Praising his institutions, they declared that the RSS was of a similar type. At the outset of World War II, they praised Nazi racial policies as a “good lesson” to “learn and profit” from. They named non-Hindus in India, particularly Christians and Muslims, as “foreign races” and “internal threats” who should be stripped of citizenship rights and even eradicated. This supremacist ideology is called Hindutva and was coined by Damodar Savarkar
Since its earliest days, the RSS has repeatedly provoked anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence throughout India. Its followers are implicated in terrorist bombings, assassinations, and multiple outright pogroms which have left, at minimum, tens of thousands dead. This includes the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 when now Prime Minister Narenda Modi was the Chief Minister of the state. Women are targeted for mass rapes before being butchered in these pogroms.
Modi himself is a lifelong RSS member as have been, at times, up to 75 percent of the ministers in his cabinet.
Major RSS subsidiaries included the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, a religious wing) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, a political wing). The BJP, in power with Modi as the head of state, closely coordinates its political agenda with the goals of the RSS. It has altered educational policy, crafted legislation criminalizing religious freedom, targeted dissidents, and generally stripped away fundamental civil and human rights.
The BJP has an international wing called the Overseas Friends of the BJP. The RSS has an international wing called the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS). The VHP has international wings generally named after the country in which they operate such as VHP A or World Hindu Congress -A.
All three of these major Sangh Parivar organizations operate extensively within the United States. Executives in the BJP, RSS, and VHP regularly travel to the US to both speak at major events hosted by their American counterparts as well as tour American Sangh Parivar organizations. American Sangh Parivar groups, which work closely with their Indian counterparts, are deeply involved in attempting to influence US foreign policy towards India, elect associates to political office, and even change educational curriculum.
The goal of the Sangh Parivar in India is to infiltrate and control society and their presence in America raises similar concerns.
They also have advocacy organizations such as Hindu American Foundation which defend them in media and political arenas
The Overseas Friends of BJP has recently registered itself as a foreign agent in the US to legalize its attempts to influence US policies
They have 2 members already in the House of Representatives – one from Hawaii and the second from the Chicago area who attend HSS sponsored events and are heavily funded by the Hindutva network in the US
CIA calls VHP and Bajrang Dal as religious militants and RSS as a nationalist organization
Hindutva infiltration is very heavy in the educated upper caste Hindus in India. Tens of thousand of RSS sympathizers come to the US every year on student and H1b visas.
Moderate Hindus https://www.hindusforhumanrights.org have started to organize themselves to resist Hindutva supremacist infiltration in and take over of Hindu temples and professional associations of Undian Americans such as physicians, engineers, etc.As the Security agencies are not monitoring Hindutva groups as much as they should and because of their extensive infiltration in the US, Hindutva RSS is now the main foreign religious extremist threat in the US.
Read:
Hindutva Driving Fascism in India, Islamophobia in the US
Watch:
Foreign THreats
Ma Ba Tha:
Ma Ba Tha is a Buddhist ultra nationalist and religious supremacist movement of Burma (Myanmar) led by the Buddhist monks. It is implicated in the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims. This is the longest running genocide which was initially started by ultra nationalist military government in the 1950s as ethnic cleansing. The ultranationalist government started ethnic cleansing of the dark skin Bengali speaking Rohingya Muslims who were indigenous to the Arakan/Rakhine region. The ethnic cleansing went on in spurts killing hundred of thousands of Muslims and displacing hundred of thousands more. After decades of propaganda and hate, the religious supremacists joined hands with the ultra-nationalists creating the Ma Ba Tha movement which is behind the current wave of the genocide which started around 2012 and is ongoing. Many supporters of this movement have migrated from Burma to the United States which was evident by the public support shown to it in many cities in the US and Canada.
Ma Ba Tha is also involved in the ethnic cleansing the Christians in Burma.
When Suu Kyi, the current president of Burma, toured the USA, they were met by protests rallies organized by the Burma Task Force against the Rohingya genocide. These protests were met by small counter protests led by the Buddhist monks in support of the genocide, proving the existence of Buddhists with a pro-genocide agenda within the US.
Bodu Bala Sena:
Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) or Buddhist Power Force is a Sri Lankan Buddhist supremacist organization involved in the persecution of Muslims and Christians of Sri Lanka. They wish to make Sri Lanka a Buddhist state where a Hindu minority may live as second-class citizens, but no Muslims or Christians would be allowed.
They have extensive relations with the Hindu supremacist RSS and Buddhist supremist Ma Ba Tha. Supporter of this movement are found among the Sri Lankan diaspora in Canada, Western Europe, New Zealand, and the US.
Once again, the US law enforcement and intelligent agencies DO NOT keep a close eye on this Buddhist terrorist group and must be asked to investigate them.
Kach and Kahani Chai are Jewish supremacist organizations and are considered terrorist by the FBI. Their members are the followers of US born rabbi, Meir Kahane. Their network of supporters are spread all over the US and Canada. These groups are active especially among the militant American settlers in the West Bank of occupied Palestine. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn born physician, carried out “the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre” which was a mass murder of Palestinians during the predawn prayers in the Ibrahimi mosque in Al-Khaleel /Hebron. He served as a physician in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). These groups want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians Muslims and Christians from Palestine and Israel. Yigal Amir who assassinated Israeli Prime minister for signing a peace deal with the Arabs after claiming that “Din Rodef” (Jewish religious law of informer punishable by capital punishment) was a supporter of West Bank settler movement.
Muslim Militant Groups:
Muslim militant organizations are well known because the terrorist acts committed by them, are extensively covered by the media. The Islamic State in Iraq (ISIS) aka Islamic State in Levant (ISIL) seems to have arisen from nowhere and had a meteoric rise and collapse. A vacuum was created in Iraq after the American occupation when Saddam Hussein’s army, which was dominated by the Sunni tribes, was disbanded by the US viceroy. The Shia government started taking revenge on the Sunnis for the atrocities committed during Saddam’s brutal reign. A group of trained army officers who were now jobless and some Al-Qaeda elements. Thus, ISIS was born. This was effectively documented by Frontline in their PBS documentary: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-isis-came-to-be-four-docs-to-watch/. The new Iraqi army and Kurdish militias did not have the will to fight against the dedicated soldiers of this group. ISIS soon overtook northern Iraq and declared a caliphate. ISIS, who started to broadcast their stance of standing up for the oppressed Muslims, invited angry young Muslims from all over the world to come and live in its caliphate. It soon started its reign of terror with beheadings and slavery.
In the neighboring state of Syria, Bashar Al Assad who was facing a democratic uprising saw an opportunity. His government was reeling from massive defections from his army after he ordered a crackdown on peaceful protestors and unleashed massive ethnic cleansing with the help of Alawite militia and Hezbollah fighters from the neighboring country, Lebanon. Assad knew that if he let ISIS come in, then he would no longer be seen as the primary adversary by the Western media. Thus, he could deflect the world anger from his use of chemical weapons for ethnic cleansing, mass-scale ethnic cleansing, massacres, mass rapes and violence, towards the brutality by ISIS.
He let the leaders of Al-Qaeda out of his prisons and allowed ISIS fighters to pour into Syria. Soon large swaths of Syria were controlled by ISIS and Al-Qaeda after they defeated the Syrian democratic opposition. ISIS then fought Al-Qaeda fronts and emerged victorious. This gave Iran the opportunity to intervene on a massive scale. Iran created militias out of the poor Shias of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and its own population to send them into Syria.
ISIS adopted the policy of brutality and terrorism as its version of shock and awe, playing right into the hands of Assad, Iran, and as well as other countries who wished to intervene in the resource rich region. Europe, USA, Russia, Iran, and Assad all used ISIS to justify their agendas.
The biggest threat to the West came from the disaffected Muslim youth of Western Europe who went to Syria in large numbers as they saw no future for themselves in Western Europe.
Even though ISIS had been defeated militarily, it still poses a potent threat to the West.
American intelligence and law enforcement agencies watch ISIS carefully.
Al-Qaeda:
Al-Qaeda was the first international Muslim militant organization which used terror in targeting the West. It emerged from the ruins of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the civil war ensuing the defeat of the Soviet Union; and from the brutal repression of the masses within the Arab countries. Osama Bin Laden, a charismatic figure and war-hero of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, led this movement and spent a considerable fortune of his own in building it up. He declared war on the West for its support of the corrupt and brutal Arab dictators and monarchs and for the support of Israeli occupation of Muslim lands.
The dramatic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon gave America the pretense it needed to invade Afghanistan to destroy Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, which was on the defensive after the terrorist attack of September 11th, won some of its lost moral ground after America invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The rise of ISIS, though took away much of the thunder from Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda still remains a potent threat to the USA.
American intelligence and law enforcement agencies keep a close eye on Al-Qaeda.
Some of the Sikh groups fighting for a seperate Sikh nation such as Babar Khalsa had resorted to terrorism and were responsible for bombing of Air India flight 182 and Narita International airport bombing in the 1980s. They claimed to be fighting the persecution of Sikhs by Hindus in India. Their activities peaked after the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in India. By 2020 these groups had lost much of their support which was not huge to begin with.
The links between American slavery and trans-Atlantic slave trade to Christian supremacist thinking is well known as it the connection of the same supremacist thinking to colonialism. What is not so well known is that there is a resurgance of white supremacist terrorism in Europe and these European groups are increasingly forming alliances with the heavily armed white supremacist militias in the US. The leaders of the Christian white supremacist groups especially those leading political parties in Europe are allowed easy access to the US where they come to raise funds and strengthen the trans-Atlantic ties. This fact is making the white supremacist threat worse by the month. These facts are documented by centers doing research on Christian white extremists such as the Anti Defamation League and Souther Poverty Law Center
https://www.csis.org/analysis/rise-far-right-extremism-united-states
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/christian-identity
https://www.counterextremism.com/european-white-supremacy-groups
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2014/white-identity-worldwide
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/anti-muslim
https://www.islamophobiaeurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EIR_2017.pdf
