Koenraad Elst quotes - page 9

The official guru of the RSS is the Saffron flag [...] "it represents the tradition and history of the Hindus"[...] The flag's saffron colour evokes fire, the medium of sacrifice, and thereby encapsulates the whole Vedic religion. (Koenraad Elst)
Numerous Hindus have been killed by Christian separatists in Nagaland and Mizoram, while the outside world believes that it is the meek Christians who are threatened and persecuted in India by the ugly fanatical Hindus because all the media coverage has been given to the killing of a few Christians in Orissa. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Considering that blood is a priceless influencer of people's sympathies, riot reporting is a favourite hunting ground for aspiring moulders of public opinion. ... the English-language papers which determine the international impression of India's communal situation have specialized in the anti-Hindu variety, at least in the 1980s and early 90s. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Having talked with hundreds of BJP and RSS activists... including notorious fire-breathers like Vinay Katiyar and Sadhvi Ritambhara, I have yet to meet these hidden hardliners. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Contrary to a widespread impression, the typical victim of Hindu-Muslim violence is a Hindu. Not, of course, that this justifies any of the occasional Hindu violence, but the fact itself deserves to be noted. View quote
Koenraad Elst
It is only when the interest in Classical culture was revived and when secular modern medicine discovered the importance of cleanliness, that the missionaries started including this un-Christian value in their kit of trinkets with which to bribe the jungle-dwelling Heathens. View quote
Koenraad Elst
So, the missionaries' rendering of the alleged RSS view of history is hardly incriminating, except that their own whitewash of these violent invasions incriminates them as moral accomplices to aggression and war crimes... the whole "glaring parallel" exists onnly in the eye of the missionary beholder. View quote
Koenraad Elst
It is in this context that in 1940, Savarkar launched his slogan: "Hinduize all politics, militarize Hindudom.” This slogan is nowadays often quoted out of context to impute to Savarkar a fascist-like fascination with "war for war's sake”. But it meant nothing of the kind. He wanted Hindus to get military experience for a specific purpose, viz. that after the war, England would find a vast number of combat-ready Indian troops before her... View quote
Koenraad Elst
Where words lose their meaning, people are about to lose their freedom...By this standard, India is in some real danger, for the elite does use some Newspeak frequently... Thus demanding a Civil Code common to all citizens... counts as anti-secular... When Kashmiri Hindus have to flee their homes after reading open threats in the Urdu papers and seeing relatives butchered, they are called "migrants"; but when Bangladeshi Muslims terrorize their Hindu neighbours and then migrate from their Islamic state to India in search of job opportunities, they are called "refugees". This type of inversion of word meanings is part of a wider mind-set of mendaciousness expressed through more ordinary lies, often of breathtaking effrontery. Thus only in the Orwellian world of Indian secularism is it possible to denounce as "vicious hate propaganda" the VHP's factual observation that the Christian missionaries aim for the complete conversion of India... View quote
Koenraad Elst
Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship. With academic, institutional and media power, a new academic-journalistic consensus has been manufactured denying the well-established history of temple demolition by Islamic iconoclasm to the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site; at least among people with prestige and influence but no firsthand knowledge of the issue. But the facts will remain the facts, and their ongoing suppression is bound to give way as new generations of scholars take a fresh look at the data. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Tellingly, they do not mention the outcome of the debate, but reiterate the ludicrous demand they made while attending the debate as BMAC advocates, viz. that they be considered "independent historians” qualified to pronounce scientific judgment in a debate between their employers and their enemies... Of course, the government representative dismissed this demand as ridiculous. Yet, the BMAC has continued to call them "the independent historians”, and they themselves have continued to demand that the VHP submit its case to "independent arbitration”, i.e. by their own kind. These two telling details of the Ayodhya debate story have, of course, been withheld from the reader in the booklet published by the BMAC team, and in all subsequent publications by the anti-temple party. (Koenraad Elst)
The physical danger in writing against the temple is imaginary; by contrast, it is dangerous to uphold rather than oppose Hindu activist positions. It is a fact that throughout the 1990s, many office-bearers of the RSS, the BJP and their Tamil affiliate Hindu Munnani have been murdered; but that was more because of the demolition and other political matters than because of any statements on the historical background of the Hindu claims on Ayodhya. At one point, the publishinghouse Voice of India, which has published the Vishva Hindu Parishad's statement and several other writings on the Ayodhya evidence, has had to seek police protection for a few days, but the threats had to do with "insults to the Prophet” and not with the Ayodhya evidence. View quote
Koenraad Elst
There is ample archaeological evidence that the whole Ramkot hill was covered with a temple complex, as is only to be expected at the geographical place of honour in a temple city. View quote
Koenraad Elst
A good side-effect of the Ayodhya dispute has been the increased awareness about the ongoing debate over Indian history-writing. The "eminent historians” have been complaining that the writers of evidence-based history are polluting the stream of history scholarship. Those who are too remote from the available sources or not intellectually equipped or simply too lazy to verify these claims may well be taken in by this allegation. Those who care to inquire, however, are bound to find that it the other way around: it is the "eminent historians” who have polluted the channels of history teaching with their systematic distortions. View quote
Koenraad Elst
At any rate, the BMAC's frontal display of contempt for logic and rational method has not pitted any secularist against the BMAC position. For them no allegations of replacing historical knowledge with myth or "faith”; which adds further illustration to our view that the whole rhetoric of historicity vs. faith was never anything else than a dispersionary tactic to put the Hindus on the defensive. View quote
Koenraad Elst
One imagines the scornful secularist reaction if the Vishva Hindu Parishad had based its Ayodhya claims on a dream; yet, the numerous Christians in India's secularist coalition have not made any plans to relinquish the Church's dream-based claims on the pilgrimage sites in Palestine. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Of course, this collection of contemporary, often politically motivated articles and statements does not have any proof value. At best, some of the names under the articles could constitute an "argument of authority”, but even that is diluted by their juxtaposition with political agitators and plain cranks. More than an argumentation, this presentation of many conflicting opinions is a dispersionary tactic to keep the opposing party busy with refuting the weirdest viewpoints. View quote
Koenraad Elst
The political equation behind all this intrigue is rarely understood by non-Indians. Thus, it requires quite a historical excursus to explain why declared Marxists like Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar are making common cause with Islamic fundamentalism in its struggle against Hindu pluralism. View quote
Koenraad Elst
"In the Islamic world many places of worship belonging to the earlier religion have been converted to mosques.” M. Shokoohy: "Two fire temples converted to mosques in central Iran”, Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce, EJ. Brill, Leiden 1985, p.546. View quote
Koenraad Elst
It may be remarked here in passing that Prof. Thapar also demonstrates her very weak grip on religious issues with her little excursus on the occasional Muslim interpretation (rendered more plausible by the imprecision of the Arabic script in transcribing Indian words) of Somanâtha as "Somanât”, and hence of the temple as a place where the Arabian Goddess Manât was worshipped. In spite of her own position, she actually hits the nail on the head in her rendering of what she describes as Turco-Persian myth-making: "The link with Manat added to the acclaim for Mahmud. Not only was he the prize iconoclast in breaking Hindu idols, but in destroying Manat he had carried out what were said to be the very orders of the Prophet.”. View quote
Koenraad Elst
So, this is where the story comes from: an unnamed friend of an unnamed acquaintance of Sitaramayya knew of a manuscript, but he took the details of it with him in his grave. This hearsay in the third degree is the "document” on which secularist journalists and historians base their "evidence” of Aurangzeb's fair and secularist disposition. This is how they go about "exploding the myth” of Islamic iconoclasm. Their "debunking” of genuine history as preserved and presented by Hindu historians stands exposed as sheer bluff. (Koenraad Elst)
The violent tendencies of Islam are not a propaganda bandied about by some querrulants, but a daily fact of life for Hindus in Jammu or Dhaka. It is simply impossible to understand Hindu Revivalism for people who are adamant about disregarding or denying these facts. View quote
Koenraad Elst
The Christian-dominated Korean leadership has even been accused by neutral observers of military persecution of Buddhism, esp. the crackdown in October 1980, see Encyclopedia Brittannica, Book of the Year 1988, entry Buddhism. View quote
Koenraad Elst
These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the "facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities... View quote
Koenraad Elst
Just how silly can you get? While papers and columns keep on being written about the true meaning of "secularism”, shouldn't someone try the meaning "buffoonery”? View quote
Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst - Image
Photo: Rosehubwiki, CC BY-SA 4.0
Occupation: Belgian Author
Born: August 7, 1959
Quotes count: 272
Wikipedia: Koenraad Elst