Britain's Sikhs Reeling from Wisconsin Attack (& Personal Update from Me)

Lately, as you have all probably noticed, I have not been posting regularly. This is because I am working on a new project with some fellow South Asians. We are a varied bunch --Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and freethinkers-- but we all share some common values and goals. I will still make a few posts here and there, maybe respond to some Muslim apologetics, but not very often at all. This is a big project that will take up a lot of my spare time, but I thought I'd make this final post before I say goodbye.

When I first heard of the Wisconsin terrorist attack, I thought (like millions of others, I'm sure) this is either the work of a white, far-right, convert to Islam nut-job or a white, far-right, Neo-Nazi nut-job. Both have a lot in common, but it is mainstream Sunni Muslims (especially the converts) who far outperform their Neo-Nazi counterparts in violence (Sunni Muslim terrorists committed 8,886 [more than 70% of the total] terrorist murders in the world last year. Neo-Nazi/Fascist/White Supremacist groups committed 77 murders). Attacks on South Asian minorities living in the West by  far-right Muslims is also not uncommon (e.g. there are many examples in the UK, Australia's oldest Hindu temple [situated in a "Muslim area"] was also sprayed with bullets, an armed group of Muslims in Denmark attacked a Hare Krishna temple, and there was also a massive terror plot targeting 4,500 Hindus and Sikhs in Toronto), so there is little wonder that I assumed the former and was surprised that it turned out to be the latter. Nevertheless, acts of terrorism  committed by anyone, for any purpose, is as worthy of condemnation as the next. As always, regardless of their beliefs, my thoughts go out to the victims and their loved-ones.

From Reuters:

Devastated by the massacre of their brethren across the Atlantic, Britain's vast Sikh community blamed ignorance and racism for a rise in attacks on members of their religion since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

Sikhs say they have been singled out increasingly for harassment around the world since September 11, with attackers believing incorrectly that they are Muslim extremists because of their turbans and beards.

In the paranoid environment just after the 2005 London suicide bombings, many Sikhs were spotted wearing badges and stickers saying 'Don't freak, I'm a Sikh'.

Sunday's attack - in which a gunman killed six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin - has only confirmed their worst fears.

"It's just devastating," Ranjit Kaur, a Sikh mother of four, said as she reclined on the floor of one of Europe's biggest Sikh temples, known as Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha, located in the ethnically mixed suburb of Southall in west London.

"Since 9/11 there is just no awareness as to who we are. Somehow people categorize us as Muslims, or radical Muslims. (My neighbors) here are a bit confused. A lot of them would come up and ask: 'Are you Muslim?'"

The confusion itself does not bother Kaur and other community members in Southall, where many spoke warmly about their Muslim neighbors and emphasized that a similar attack against a mosque would have been equally devastating.

But the Wisconsin massacre still sent a chill through the community where exactly a year ago a wave of violent riots in London prompted Sikh men to grab their ceremonial swords to protect their property and temples.

In Southall, one of Britain's most densely populated Sikh areas, Sikhs have lived peacefully for generations alongside other South Asian diasporas, Muslim and Hindu.

Sikh cafes and sari parlors stand next to Muslim butchers and kebab shops.

The Sikh temple's white and gold domes glitter in the sun above the bustling street, with white-bearded Sikh men in black turbans, women in pink and orange saris and Muslim men in flowing white robes rushing about on daily errands.

VULNERABLE

Indarjit Singh, a lawmaker in Britain's House of Lords who was the first Sikh to wear a turban in the upper house, said it was ignorance about their religion that worried him most.

"What concerns Sikhs is that, because (Osama) bin Laden wore a turban where most Muslims don't, people assume that Sikhs and Muslims are all the same," said Singh.

He said the Sikh community - which numbers about 330,000 people in Britain - has felt much more vulnerable since September 11, adding that he and many others had been taunted by people, while temples have been defaced and people threatened.

Some Sikhs in Southall said they tried not to venture out outside their community because the reaction of other Londoners was more unpredictable.

"In Southall, yes, it's all good, but in other places it's different," said Sukhraj Singh, a lanky teenager of 15, his head wrapped tightly in a black turban.

"Some friends of mine had a bad experience. In central London, if you walk with the turban, you might get discriminated, like, people would say something rude, young kids. But here it's all fine, people get along."

His mother, Binder Singh, standing next to him, looked worried as she listened to her son and shook her head. Asked about her view, she just said: "If it happened in America, it could happen in London.

But many community members emphasized that the long-standing presence of Sikhs in Britain meant the average British person knew more about them.

Sikh bikers in turbans are exempted from wearing crash helmets in Britain. Sikhs, whose religion was founded by Guru Nanak Dev in Punjab in the 15th century, also fought alongside British troops in the Burma campaign of World War Two.

Those warm memories are still intact, and many Sikhs said a Wisconsin-style attack could not happen in Britain.

"Britain and Sikhs have a long history stretching back over 200 years, so there is a far better understanding of Sikhs in the UK, but when you go across to Europe confusion persists, while in the US it is the worst," said Gurmel Singh, Secretary General of Sikh Council UK.

In Southall, the idea of unity among religions and ethnic groups runs deep among community members.

A giant colorful mural depicting communal scenes from mosques, Sikh temples, churches and libraries dominates one of the central streets, and members of various religious groups could be seen shopping in local stored together.

"There is freedom here. Sikhs, Muslims, Hindu, we are all fine," said Adnan Sayed, who runs a Muslim halal meat shop. "After the night service at the mosque, people go home and there is never a problem. In this area there will never be a problem like that."

The Massacre of 1.5 Million Armenian Christians by Muslim Turks that Inspired Hitler's Holocaust

You can read more about the genocide here, and view more shocking images here.

From the Mail Online:

When the Turkish gendarmes came for Mugrditch Nazarian, they did not give him time to dress, but took him from his home in the dead of night in his pyjamas.

The year was 1915, and his wife, Varter, knew that she was unlikely to see her husband alive again. Armenian men like him were being rounded up and taken away. In the words of their persecutors, they were being "deported" - but not to an earthly place.

Varter never found out what fate her husband suffered. Some said he was shot, others that he was among the men held in jail, who suffered torture so unbearable that they poured the kerosene from prison lamps over their heads and turned themselves into human pyres as a release from the agony.

Heavily pregnant, Varter was ordered to join a death convoy marching women and children to desert concentration camps.

Genocide:The Ottoman Turks murdered more than
1.5million Armenians between 1915 and 1917

She survived the journey alone - her six children died along the way. The two youngest were thrown to their deaths down a mountainside by Turkish guards; the other four starved to death at the bottom of a well where they had hidden to escape.

Varter herself was abducted by a man who promised to save her - but raped her instead. Eventually, she was released to mourn her lost family, the victims of Europe's forgotten holocaust.

The killing of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th century, and has been called the first modern genocide.

In all, 25 concentration camps were set up in a systematic slaughter aimed at eradicating the Armenian people - classed as "vermin" by the Turks.

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted: "This crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race."

Chillingly, Adolf Hitler used the episode to justify the Nazi murder of six million Jews, saying in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Yet, carried out under the cover of war, the Armenian genocide remains shrouded in mystery - not least because modern-day Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of its killing fields.

Now, new photographs of the horror have come to light. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was working in the region financing a railway network when the killing began.

Unearthed by award-winning war correspondent Robert Fisk, they were taken by employees of the bank to document the terror unfolding before them.

They show young men, crammed into cattle trucks, waiting to travel to their deaths. The Turks crowded 90 starving and terrified Armenians into each wagon, the same number the Nazis averaged in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.

Behind each grainy image lies a human tragedy. Destitute women and children stare past the camera, witness to untold savagery.

Almost all young women were raped according to Fisk, while older women were beaten to death - they did not merit the expense of a bullet. Babies were left by the side of the road to die.

Often, attractive young Armenian girls were sent to Turkish harems, where some lived in enforced prostitution until the mid-1920s.

Many other archive photographs testify to the sheer brutality suffered by the Armenians: children whose knee tendons were severed, a young woman who starved to death beside her two small children, and a Turkish official taunting starving Armenian children with a loaf of bread.

Eyewitness accounts are even more graphic. Foreign diplomats posted in the Ottoman Empire at the time told of the atrocities, but were powerless to act.

One described the concentration camps, saying: "As on the gates of Dante's Hell, the following should be written at the entrance of these accursed encampments: 'You who enter, leave all hopes.'"

So how exactly did the events of 1915-17 unfold? Just as Hitler wanted a Nazi-dominated world that would be Judenrein - cleansed of its Jews - so in 1914 the Ottoman Empire wanted to construct a Muslim empire that would stretch from Istanbul to Manchuria.

Armenia, an ancient Christian civilisation spreading out from the eastern end of the Black Sea, stood in its way.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were two million Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Already, 200,000 had been killed in a series of pogroms - most of them brutally between 1894 and 1896.

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I against the Allies and launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus. It blamed defeat on the Armenians, claiming they had colluded with the Russians.

A prominent Turkish writer at the time described the war as "the awaited day" when the Turks would exact "revenge, the horrors of which have not yet been recorded in history".

Through the final months of 1914, the Ottoman government put together a number of "Special Organisation" units, armed gangs consisting of thousands of convicts specifically released from prison for the purpose.

These killing squads of murderers and thieves were to perpetrate the greatest crimes in the genocide. They were the first state bureaucracy to implement mass killings for the purpose of race extermination. One army commander described them at the time as the "butchers of the human species".

On the night of April 24, 1915 - the anniversary of which is marked by Armenians around the world - the Ottoman government moved decisively, arresting 250 Armenian intellectuals. This was followed by the arrest of a further 2,000.

Turkey refuses to acknowledge the killing fields

Some died from torture in custody, while many were executed in public places. The resistance poet, Daniel Varoujan, was found disembowelled, with his eyes gouged out.

One university professor was made to watch his colleagues have their fingernails and toenails pulled out, before being blinded. He eventually lost his mind, and was let loose naked into the streets.

There were reports of crucifixions, at which the Turks would torment their victims: "Now let your Christ come and help you!"

Johannes Lepsius, a German pastor who tried to protect the Armenians, said: "The armed gangs saw their main task as raiding and looting Armenian villages. If the men escaped their grasp, they would rape the women."

So began a carefully orchestrated campaign to eradicate the Armenians. Throughout this period, Ottoman leaders deceived the world, orchestrating the slaughter using code words in official telegrams.

At later war crimes trials, several military officers testified that the word "deportation" was used to mean "massacre" or "annihilation".

Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern provinces was deported and murdered en masse.

The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, said: "Squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and marched to a secluded spot.

"Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes."

In urban areas, a town crier was used to deliver the deportation order, and the entire male population would be taken outside the city limits and killed - "slaughtered like sheep".

Women and children would then be executed, deported to concentration camps or simply turned out into the deserts and left to starve to death.

An American diplomat described the deportations or death marches: "A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison with it."

An eyewitness who came upon a convoy of deportees reported that the women implored him: "Save us! We will become Muslims! We will become Germans! We will become anything you want, just save us! They are going to cut our throats!"

Walking skeletons begged for food, and women threw their babies into lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks.

There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. It is reported that civilians burned bodies to find the gold coins the Armenians swallowed for safekeeping.

Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling. The majority were located near the modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor - described as "the epicentre of death". Up to 70,000 Armenians were herded into each camp, where dysentery and typhus were rife.

There, they were left to starve or die of thirst in the burning sun, with no shelter. In some cases, the living were forced to eat the dead. Few survived.

In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs 'eliminated' some 25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.

In September 1915, the American consul in Kharput, Leslie A. Davis, reported discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near beautiful Lake Goeljuk, calling it the "slaughterhouse province".

Tales of atrocity abound. Historians report that the killing squads dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers.

One young boy remembered his grandfather, the village priest, kneeling down to pray for mercy before the Turks. Soldiers beheaded him, and played football with the old man's decapitated head before his devastated family.

At the horrific Ras-ul-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day, completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of the camp, bragged about raping children.

An American, Mrs Anna Harlowe Birge, who was travelling from Smyrna to Constantinople, wrote in November 1915: "At every station where we stopped, we came side by side with one of these trains. It was made up of cattle trucks, and the faces of little children were looking out from behind the tiny barred windows of each truck."

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem. From a wealthy banking family, she was just one of thousands of Armenian girls to suffer a similar fate. Many were eventually killed and discarded.

In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 girls crucified, vultures eating their corpses. "Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands," Mardiganian wrote. "Only their hair blown by the wind covered their bodies."

In another town, she reports that the killing squads played "the game of swords" with young Armenian girls, planting their weapons in the ground and throwing their victims onto the protruding blade in sport.

Elsewhere, bodies tied to each other drifted down the Euphrates. And in the Black Sea region, the Armenians were herded onto boats and then thrown overboard.

In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers, stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires.

Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty desert cisterns and village wells. Travellers reported that the stench of death pervaded the landscape.

One Turkish gendarme told a Norwegian nurse serving in Erzincan that he had accompanied a convoy of 3,000 people. Some were summarily executed in groups along the way; those too sick or exhausted to march were killed where they fell. He concluded: "They're all gone, finished."

By 1917, the Armenian 'problem', as it was described by Ottoman leaders, had been thoroughly "resolved". Muslim families were brought in to occupy empty villages.

Even after the war, the Ottoman ministers were not repentant. In 1920, they praised those responsible for the genocide, saying: "These things were done to secure the future of our homeland, which we know is greater and holier than even our own lives."

The British government pushed for those responsible for the killing to be punished, and in 1919 a war crimes tribunal was set up.

The use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of Armenians has been hotly contested by Turkey. Ahead of the nation's accession to the EU, it is even more politically inflammatory.

The official Turkish position remains that 600,000 or so Armenians died as a result of war. They deny any state intention to wipe out Armenians and the killings remain taboo in the country, where it is illegal to use the term genocide to describe the events of those bloody years.

Internationally, 21 countries have recognised the killings as genocide under the UN 1948 definition. Armenian campaigners believe Turkey should be denied EU membership until it admits responsibility for the massacres.

Just as in the Nazi Holocaust, there were many tales of individual acts of great courage by Armenians and Turks alike.

Haji Halil, a Muslim Turk, kept eight members of his mother's Armenian family safely hidden in his home, risking death.

In some areas, groups of Kurds followed the deportation convoys and saved as many people as they could. Many mothers gave their children to Turkish and Kurdish families to save them from death.

The Governor-General of Aleppo stood up to Ottoman officials and tried to prevent deportations from his region, but failed.

He later recalled: "I was like a man standing by a river without any means of rescue. But instead of water, the river flowed with blood and thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong young people all on their way to destruction.

"Those I could seize with my hands I saved. The others, I assume, floated downstream, never to return."

Germany: Islam vs. Nazism, Muslims win Game of Intolerance (3 Attempted Murders to 0)

A group of protesting Muslims more intolerant than a group of protesting Nazis? There is little surprise here.

From Stripes:

A 25-year-old Islamist was remanded in custody in Germany on Monday, accused of the attempted murder of three policemen as they were separating neo-Nazis from Islamic fundamentalist protesters.

Two officers were stabbed in the thigh on Saturday and a third officer dodged an attack by the knife-wielding man during a melee outside a mosque in the western city of Bonn.

Pro NRW (North Rhine Westphalia), a far-right party with neo-Nazi canvassers, had organized a protest event drawing nearly 30 rightists to the mosque, holding up cartoons ridiculing Islam and its founder Mohammed to publicize the group's anti-immigrant views.

A larger group of 500 to 600 Salafists, who seek to impose what they say are the original doctrines of Islam, held a counter-demonstration, trying to break a police cordon.

The police made 109 arrests, and 29 officers were hurt in the Saturday clashes.

Hannelore Kraft, premier of North Rhine Westphalia state, told the mass circulation newspaper Bild, "We will not put up with attacks on our legal system, and our police and will come down hard on both Pro NRW and the Salafists."

Prosecutors said the 25-year-old, who was born in Germany but has Turkish nationality, admitted to attacking the police but denied an intent to murder. He said he knifed the officers because they were protecting people insulting Muslims.

Prosecutor Robin Fassbender said the stabbings could have been fatal.

"If a major blood vessel had been punctured, the victim could have bled to death within minutes," he said.

The Central Council of Muslims in Germany condemned both sides.

"We expressly dissociate ourselves from violent Muslims who urge lynch justice and attack the police," general secretary Nurhan Soykan said in Cologne. She termed Pro NRW a hate group.

Kraft's government has tried to prevent further anti-mosque demonstrations by Pro NRW.

But a court cited free-speech grounds to quash a police ban on a similar demonstration by 15 Pro NRW activists Monday. Police said 400 mainly leftist counter-demonstrators yelled abuse at them in the city of Bielefeld without violence.

Scripture Quote of the Week: The Curse of Ham ("The Father of the Black Africans")

This is from Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, i.e. The History of al-Tabari. This texts is highly important to orthodox Islam and Muslims due to it forming in part the Sunnah of Muhammad. Just take a look at the praise heaped upon it by A.I. Makki of the Muslim Writers Society.

Of course, the modern-day Muslim apologetic denial of this comes in the form of blaming "early Jewish converts to Islam". That's right; just like the Nazis, when all else fails, blame it on those nasty Jooooos.

From Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 11, p. 11:

Shem, the son of Noah was the father of the Arabs, the Persians, and the Greeks; Ham was the father of the Black Africans; and Japheth was the father of the Turks and of Gog and Magog who were cousins of the Turks. Noah prayed that the prophets and apostles would be descended from Shem and kings would be from Japheth. He [Noah] prayed that the African’s color would change so that their descendants would be slaves to the Arabs and Turks.

My Prophet, My Führer

Educational and humorous at the same time. This is a Downfall parody video which has "Hitler" playing the role of Muhammad. All references can be found here.

Now it's five Muslim on Muslim attacks in nine days

This is an update to the earlier post: First Belgium, then France, and now Australia: Third act of Muslim on Muslim terror in just over a week


Well, I expected this, but preferred not to jump to any conclusions until the facts were in. The recent killings in France were not committed by a Neo-Nazi, but a Muslim terrorist. Considering the similarities between Nazism and Islam, you can be forgiven for thinking it was an adherent of the former who was behind the atrocities.

That takes the number of Muslim on Muslim attacks in secular and liberal "Western" nations to 5 in only 9 days, from the 11th to the 19th of March.

Hitler admired Islam [Hitler: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, pg. 115], and actual Muslim Nazis are a little-known historical fact. The Handzar Muslim Division was an SS branch of soldiers who were Bosnian Muslims, and who were responsible for many war crimes, especially against Serbs.

After WWII many Nazis fled the West to safer and more welcoming pastures in the Muslim world. Some even converted to Islam. Even today, many Neo-Nazis embrace Islam and retain their affections for Nazism and, naturally, their hatred of Jews.

From the BBC:

11 March: Off-duty sergeant shot dead in Toulouse while waiting for a man about a motorbike sale

 15 March: Two paratroopers shot dead and a third injured while waiting at a cash machine in Montauban

19 March: Three children and a teacher shot dead, and a youth injured, at a Toulouse Jewish school

From Forbes:

The Washington Post and France24 have reported that French police have raided a Toulouse home to arrest the suspect in the shooting deaths of three children and an adult at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France. The suspect, an Algerian-born French citizen, reportedly told the police that he committed the killings “to avenge Palestinian children” – ironic at a moment when Palestinians have been shooting rockets into Israel.

According to the Washington Post report,

"Gueant described the suspect as a French citizen, 24, who has spent time with Islamic groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. News reports said he was of Algerian origin and had invoked the al-Qaeda terrorism network in his contacts with police in shouted conversations through the locked door of an apartment."

The rise of Islamic extremism has been a concern in Europe for some years, but so far, France has been spared the horrors of Islamic terrorism. Now it joins Holland, Spain, and England in confronting the dangers posed by radical Islam as it spreads through our communities in the West.

UPDATE

France24 reports that the suspect targeted French Muslim members of the military in his first shootings as “Arab soldiers are prized targets for groups like Al-Qaeda, which regards Muslims who fight for Western armies as traitors.” Having filmed the attacks as he committed them, the suspect has told French officials that he plans to place the films online. With the Internet now the most powerful recruiting tool of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, such films have become standard in the efforts to spread their influence and teachings, and are frequently watched by radicalizing Muslim youth in Europe and elsewhere in the West.