ONE BILLION ALLIES
If I ask you to think of India, the image that most likely appears in your mind’s eye would be the Taj Mahal.
Arguably the most famous building in the world and considered by many to be the most beautiful structure mankind has ever created, it was completed in 1648 by the ruler of India, Shah Jehan, to immortally entomb his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
There is a painful problem with this image, however, for the great majority of folks in India: the Taj Mahal isn’t an Indian building. It’s Moslem, and thus for Indians a symbol of Islamic imperialism.
Shah Jehan was not Indian. He was the fifth in a succession of Moslem conquerors of India known as Moghuls who came from Central Asia.
The founding Moghul was a Moslem Turk, Zahiruddin Mohammad Babur, from the Fergana Valley in what is now Uzbekistan, who claimed descent from two genocidal mass-murderers, Tamerlane on his father’s side and Genghiz Khan on his mother’s.
Babur’s claimed Mongol ancestry resulted in Indians calling him a “Moghul,” their pronunciation of Mongol.
Yet when Babur’s horde poured through the Khyber Pass to defeat the rulers of India at the Battle of Panipat in 1526, it was to displace a previous Moslem tyranny called the Delhi Sultanate. The Moslem invasion of India had begun with Mahmud of Ghazni (now in present-day Afghanistan) in 1001. Historian Will Durant observes:
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. (The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1, “Our Oriental Heritage”, p. 459, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.)
For eight and a-half centuries, Hindu India was oppressed, looted, and pillaged by Moslem foreign invaders.
From Mahmud of Ghazni who killed 50,000 Hindu inhabitants of Somnath in one October day in 1026 and demolished its famous temple…
To Firoz Shah who paid bounties on 180,000 severed Hindu heads, to Sultan Ahmad Shah who held a celebratory feast whenever his Moslem soldiers killed a minimum of 20,000 defenseless Hindus in a single day…
To Shah Jehangir (Shah Jehan’s father) who delighted in seeing Hindus flayed alive and torn apart by elephants, to Aurangzeb (Shah Jehan’s son) who destroyed thousands of Hindu temples throughout India and taxed Hindus who refused to convert to Islam into poverty…
To the Turcoman chieftain Nadir Shah who sacked Delhi and massacred its citizens in 1739 — Moslem Crusaders waged a relentless Jihad against the ancient Hindu civilization of India.
India’s Islamic Nightmare finally came to an end on June 23, 1757, when British forces led by Robert Clive defeated the army of Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, in the Battle of Plassey.
The famous battle was the death knell of Moslem rule and the birth of the British Raj, which allowed the Hindu religion to flourish once again.
Thus it is with both pride and anguish that Hindu Indians look upon the Taj — designed by Hindu engineers and constructed by Hindu artisans, yet built by a man who murdered his own brothers to seize his father’s throne, and ordered the ruthless and wholesale destruction of countless Hindu shrines.
Now you can see that Hindu India’s antipathy towards Moslem Pakistan is not so shallow to be based simply on a dispute over Kashmir, or even on resentment from splitting India apart to give Indian Moslems their own country.
(Ultimately two, as East Pakistan eventually broke away from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh).
No, the antipathy has deep, deep roots dug a thousand years into history.
Because of these roots, because of this history, the one billion Hindus of India can become our allies in the War on Moslem Terrorism. No country, no people, no religion has suffered more and suffered longer at the terrorist hands of Islam than India, Indians, and Hinduism.
No American understands this better than Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India, Harvard Professor of International Security, and currently White House Deputy National Security Advisor. He is President Bush’s closest personal advisor on Iraq.
During the two years of Blackwill’s ambassadorship (July 2001-July 2003), he ceaselessly worked to strengthen military and intelligence cooperation and create an anti-terrorism alliance between India and the US.
He repeatedly and publicly recognized that Moslem terrorists in Kashmir, Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere are all conducting the same Islamist Jihad against civilization.
As he increased India’s security ties with the US, so he increased them with Israel. India now annually purchases well over $1 billion worth of military and electronic intel hardware from Israel.
This week on December 10, Lt. General James Campbell, chief of the US Army’s Pacific Command met in Pune, India, with Lt. General B.S. Takhar, Director General of Military Operations for the Indian Army.
Their purpose was to create “a joint defense mechanism to thwart increasing threats of global terrorism.” Joint anti-terrorist operations conducted by counter-terrorist specialists from elite units in the US and Indian militaries are to be deployed in Kashmir, Iraq, and “other locations of terrorist activity.”
We can thank Bob Blackwill’s guiding hand in this.
I’d like to ask you to re-read Will Durant’s quote above, and focus on how its “evident moral” applies to us.
Western Civilization is as precarious as any other in history. While Islamic barbarians attack America from without, Moslems are multiplying in prodigious numbers throughout Western Europe. We need all the help we can get.
Now, thanks to folks like Bob Blackwill, assistance may be on the way from people who have endured more Moslem terrorism than any other — one billion new allies from India.