Former US President Obama on visit to India said that India must protect and cherish its Muslim population:
As a debate rages over growing intolerance in the country, former US President Barack Obama on Friday disclosed that he had privately told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India must not split on sectarian lines and that it must cherish the fact that Muslims here identify themselves as Indians.
“Particularly in a country like India where you have such an enormous Muslim population that is successful, integrated and thinks of itself as Indian and that is unfortunately always not the case in some other countries where a religious minority nevertheless feels a part of. I think that is something that should be cherished, nurtured and cultivated.
“And I think that all farsighted Indian leadership recognises that but it is important to continue and reinforce that,” he said speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit.
Obama, who was making his first visit to India after demitting office earlier this year, was reminded of his speech at Siri Fort auditorium on January 27, 2015 — the last day of his last visit to India as US President — in which he sounded caution “against any efforts to divide ourselves along sectarian lines” and pointedly asked if the message was directed at the Modi-led BJP government.
He said the message was meant for “all of us” and “the same thing” was told “in private to Prime Minister Modi”.
“If you see a politician doing things that are questionable one of things as citizens you can ask yourself is am I encouraging or supporting or giving licence to the values? If communities across India are saying we are not going to fall prey to division then that will strengthen the hands of those politicians who feel the same way.”
Asked how Modi responded to his message on religious tolerance particularly in the wake of Western media highlighting incidents of lynching in the name of cow protection and love jihad cases, Obama dodged a direct reply saying his goal was not to disclose his private conversations with other leaders.
But, he said, Modi’s impulses recognize the need for unity in India “to advance to the great nation status that India possesses and will continue and amplify in the years to come”.
He said he had shared the concern in public in the United States of America, in Europe “because people feel worried and insecure about all the changes some of which are economic but some of which are cultural and social”.
“There are demographic changes taking place. Migration. People start looking different. There is a collision of cultures. People see much more vividly the differences between people.”
In an interactive session punctuated with humour and loud applause from the audience that included Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, Obama said all humans inherently try to make distinctions to make themselves feel more important than others.
And these distinctions, he said, “are sometimes based on races, on religion, on class and always based on gender”.
He said a counter narrative had always been taking place at all times in the world but has become louder now.
“It) sometimes happens in Europe, in America and sometimes you see it in India where those old tribal impulses re-assert themselves.”
He said some elected leaders try to push back against those impulses and some try to exploit them.
Obama also spoke of how he admired Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh alike for their “political courage”.
Asked about his relationship with Prime Minister Modi, Obama paused a bit and said: “I like him and I think he is that he has a vision for the country that he is implementing and is in many ways modernising the bureaucracy.”
He heaped praise on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has come under attack from the ruling BJP, saying he was a great support in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
“But I really was also great friends with Singh, and when you look at the work and the steps that Singh took to open up and modernise the economy and launch what I think was really the foundations for the modern Indian economy. That is also important.
“Here is the bottom line. Because India is a democracy, it has politics. And that is a healthy thing. As a non-Indian and as US President my job was to work with whichever party was in power. Keep in mind that Singh was primary interlocutor with me when we were saving the country from a global financial meltdown.
“But) Prime Minister Modi was the primary partner in unlocking the Paris Accord. Neither of those things was easy and both required some political courage back here in India.”
Obama jokingly said he had avoided journalist Karan Thapar’s attempt to get him into any diplomatic trouble.
“What I want to be very clear about is, that what I found with both leaders was that strong US-India relations were important; India’s movement towards a more modern economy that would give opportunity and lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty was important; that electrifying the countryside was important; rebuilding infrastructure was important. And each leader obviously had a certain view about how that was going to be accomplished. And I found both of them to be engaged, honest, direct with me.
“So you would not get me to play those games when it comes to my good friends in India,” he added with a smile, to loud laughter from the audience. (source)
I have repeatedly said before the saying “A broken clock is right twice a day,” meaning that even in the midst of things that are incorrect, there is always at least a portion of truth which must be acknowledged. Obama was certainly not a good president and there are MANY issues with him. However, if Obama says something that is objectively true, his past or present sins do not invalidate the truth of his statement because to make such a statement assumes that the validity of a fact depends on the moral righteousness of the person saying it. Likewise, Muslims in large numbers have a well-established reputation for causing much trouble, and it is for this reason that many people do not like their presence. Both of these facts are established and supported by solid evidence. However, they are not metrics by which to prove or disprove other facts- the well-earned public dislike that Obama has does not perpetually invalidate all future statement he makes, and likewise the actions of many Muslims does not mean that many Muslims are incapable of making true statements or having real grievances in society.
One of the major forces driving the rise of National Socialism today is the fact that, as we have pointed out repeatedly, much of what the National Socialists say is actually true. This the the deadly poison of National Socialism, for by making itself a movement that (often- certainly not always) proclaims difficult but undeniable truths, those who hear that National Socialists speak will assume and trust the National Socialists have the answer and are looking out for their interests.
This error is made likewise in reverse with people who are not liked. People many times will assume a statement is false because it is made by a person they do not like, because the equate the validity of the statement with their views on the person making the statement. This is also wrong, because even a person who is evil, distasteful, or disliked can make correct statements, and the feelings or opinions that a person has about someone do not unto themselves prove or invalidate a statement.
Obama is correct on the idea that India must protect its minority populations from abuse or destruction at the hands of the larger majority, especially for unjust reasons. India right now is going through a nationalist revival. As we have pointed out, Hindu nationalists, known as “saffron terrorists” by the color of their robes, are engaged in systematic attacks against Christians all across India. The level of persecution is bordering on the edge of genocide, and as we at Shoebat.com can attest to from our research and work on the ground, there are active plans under way to engage in a mass extermination or forced conversion of all non-Hindus to Hinduism in pursuit of the creation of what nationalists are calling the ‘Hindutva Rashtra,’ or a “pure Hindu” nation based on racialism and a worship of the elite with the caste system restored to its full and ugly state. It is, in a literal a sense, a true form of “Aryanism” and “national socialism” because it is the same philosophy that Germany and Japan of the previous century borrowed for their nations.
While Christian persecution is severe in India, Christians are a fraction of the population, standing at just over 2% of the population. While they are being persecuted and are going to face more severe persecution in the future, the fact is that the majority of the persecution in terms of volume will be directed against the Muslims because the Muslims constitute India’s single largest minority group, standing at approximately 14% of the population. While the Christians may suffer more in terms of proportion, as they are so small they could be completely wiped out, the Muslims will be equally hunted down too.
The comparison between the proportion of Christians as opposed to Muslims in India is similar to the proportion of Chinese people to Hispanic people in the USA. India, Christians are very small in number and tend to be concentrated in the southern areas of India in the states of Goa, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu just as how in the USA the Chinese populations tend to be concentrated in select urban area.. Muslims in India are everywhere, and there is not a place you can go where you will not see at least one, similar to how owing to the tremendous Hispanic populations such persons will be found even in the smallest and most isolated American towns.
Can you imagine in America if somebody said “we need to wipe out the Chinese and the Hispanic people to create a pure ‘American’ society? Would somebody of good will in such a situation say “we will just save the Chinese- those Hispanics will get what they deserve” or “we will just help the Hispanics, those Chinese deserve to be massacred anyways?” Such an idea or statement would be monstrous because it would involve the murder of millions of people simply for the cause of nationalism, yet this is exactly what the Hindu nationalists are proposing to do, and the moral position is to stand against all evils because of the fact that they are evil. It does not matter if Obama is Muslim or not, if Obama was a good president or not, or even if in this particular case Obama was making a malicious statement or not because what he said reflects a reality, that there is a growing intolerance of all non-Hindus in India by the Hindu supermajority, and they are preparing to engage in a full-scale massacre of all minorities- Christians and Muslims alike- in their quest to make a ‘racially pure’ India.
It is true that Muslims commit violence against Christians. However, one cannot fight evil by supporting evil in the name of defeating evil, because all are just different faces of the same object. Christ said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and evil will not cast itself out. It can only be cast out with that which is good, and while Islam is an evil religion, the Muslim people have the potential as long as they live to renounce Islam and accept the salvation that Christ offers. Islam cannot be defeated by mass murdering the Muslims just as the Spanish did not defeat the Aztecs by a wholescale massacre of the Indians of the Americas, but by fighting against them when necessary and converting the others to the true Faith.
However, mass murder is NEVER an answer to any problems, especially for Christians. God died so that man might life, and while fighting is at times necessary, the kind of wholesale, indiscriminate murder of innocent people that these and other nationalists are calling for is a sin that cries to Heaven for vengeance just as with homosexuality, the abuse of the widow and the orphan, and the depriving of a working man of his justly earned wages. Sin is never the answer to sin, and Christians must respond with love, balancing mercy and justice, and not the ways of the world, for it is the ways of the world that cause the rise of such ethnonationalism and was one of the many reasons Christ had to come in the first place.