Well said, Mr. Roy

 

Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy is bang on in his remark that those who attended the last rites of Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon were potential terrorists. The reaction of the liberal-secular gang was on expected lines. It is, however, heartening to note that Roy is sticking to his guns, despite the gangsters’ sinister efforts to keep the truth under wraps.

Responding to the twaddle of intellectuals, Roy said, “I stand by what I have said on Twitter. All those who went to attend Yakub Memon’s funeral, other than his family members, close relatives and friends, are definitely prima facie suspects. There must be some potential threat element in these people. They ought to be kept under surveillance.”

He is absolutely right. Thousands of people attended Memon’s funeral procession, giving the lie to the oft-repeated claim of liberals that terror is the handiwork of a ‘handful of Muslims,’ that Muslims do not support jihadists, and so on. While it is true that a very large number of Muslims in India, and elsewhere, are peace-loving people, it would be ingenuous to believe that ‘only a tiny minority’ support terrorists: a crowd of thousands of people participating in the funeral procession of a mass murderer is not exactly a handful of people.

That the local police in Mumbai had to restrain the media from reporting the procession and last rites suggests widespread sympathy for Memon among Muslims. The ‘secular’ politicians and politically correct media steer clear of these truths, so the subject is not even touched. But there is a greater desire for the truth in Western nations and considerably greater courage to say it. So, the London-based Telegraph reported on February 19, 2006, that “a fifth [of Muslims] have sympathy with the ‘feelings and motives’ of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July 7, killing 52 people, although 99 per cent thought the bombers were wrong to carry out the atrocity.”

The Mumbai scene doesn’t seem to be much different: even if most Muslims believe that the 1993 blasts were wrong, there is considerable sympathy among the community for Memon; you have to be hopelessly credulous or fanatically secular to ignore this reality.

The Telegraph finding was corroborated by CBS News whose report on August 14, 2006, said that “almost one in four British Muslims believe that last year’s 7/7 attacks on London were justified because of British support for the US-led war on terror.”

Muslim support to terror is not confined to Britain. According to a 2010 report by Pew Research Centre, “In Egypt, about one-in-five Muslims offer positive opinions of bin Laden (19%) and his organization (20%)… Among Muslims in Indonesia, about a quarter have a favorable view of al Qaeda (23%) and express at least some confidence in bin Laden (25%).”

In Jordan Muslims were more favorably inclined towards al Qaeda, with over a third offering positive views about it. In Pakistan, 18 people expressed at least some confidence in Osama bin Laden. “About half of Muslims in Nigeria express favorable views of the extremist group (49%) and say they have at least some confidence in its leader (48%),” the Pew report said.

There is a mountain of evidence to suggest that many Muslims are sympathetic towards jihadists. “In truth, even a tiny minority of ‘1%’ of Muslims worldwide translates to 15 million believers—which is hardly an insignificant number,” says www.thereligionofpeace.com.

The problem, especially in India, is that intellectuals have blindfolded themselves to the unsavory truths about jihad. As in H.G. Wells’ story, ‘The Country of the Blind,’ the blind dismiss the person who could see, the blindfolded are trying to haul Tathagata Roy over the coals for committing the sin of seeing the reality as it is and then committing the greater sin of talking about that reality. So, the great journalist Shekhar Gupta, who could see a military coup in Delhi but refuses to look at the visuals showing thousands of people mourning Yakub Memon’s death, has sought presidential reprimand for Roy.

If secularists and liberals had their way, everybody not conforming to their dogmas would be reprimanded, rebuked, censured, censored, and banished.