A reminder to those who imagine that anti-Semitism is a particularly \"Muslim\" problem today.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Cuddly, non-Muslim India has it, too.\u00a0 In spades.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
And this despite the fact that, unlike most Muslim countries, India is closely allied today with Israel.\u00a0 By no stretch of the imagination is India locked\u2013either militarily or culturally\u2013in a cold war with a Jewish state.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
From \"Hitler-themed eatery draws fire\"<\/a> on MSNBC.com:<\/p>\n A new restaurant in India\u2019s financial hub, named after Adolf Hitler and promoted with posters showing the German leader and Nazi swastikas,<\/strong> has infuriated the country\u2019s small Jewish community.<\/em><\/p>\n Hitler\u2019s Cross, which opened last week, serves up a wide range of continental fare and a big helping of controversy, thanks to a name the owners say they chose to stand out among hundreds of Mumbai eateries. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWe wanted to be different. This is one name that will stay in people\u2019s minds,\u201d owner Punit Shablok told Reuters.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Looks like they succeeded.<\/p>\n What this article failed to report, however, is how popular Hitler is in modern India.\u00a0 In recent surveys among India\u2019s best and brightest, he\u2019s been ranked in the company of the Mahatma!\u00a0 (How\u2019s that for a soundbyte from Hell?)\u00a0 Radha D\u2019Souza reports on ZNet (\"The Return of Hitler As Hero: The World Through Cracked Lenses<\/a>\"):<\/p>\n A recent article in the Times of India, Mumbai reported on a poll of students from India\u2019s premier academic institutions about the country\u2019s political future. 17% of the students polled, favoured Hitler as the ideal model for the kind of leader India ought to have<\/strong>. The present Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was ahead of Hitler at number two and oddly, Gandhi ranked number one. Hitler represented discipline, efficiency and nationalism to the students (Times of India, Mumbai, December 26, 2002).<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Pretty disturbing.<\/p>\n Had this report been about madrassah students in India\u2019s\u00a0 beleagured and oft betrayed neighbor Pakistan,\u00a0 Washington would be consumed with righteous indignation and would fixate on the incident every time the country was mentioned for the next decade.\u00a0 In the case of India, however, such a sobering and illuminating tidbit of information will go straight down the Memory Hole<\/a> of geopolitical myopia.\u00a0 <\/p>\n \"But unlike in Pakistan these things are abberations in democratic India!\" some no doubt will protest.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure the contrast is so stark when you look beneath the surface and beyond the headlines.\u00a0 <\/p>\n For all its serious problems I don\u2019t think Pakistan has witnessed state sanctioned ethnic cleansing<\/strong> of a minority community as was seen in 2002 in Gujarat<\/a> (see also the chilling report from Human Rights Watch<\/a>).\u00a0 <\/p>\n The treatment of Pakistan\u2019s Christian minority is shameful, but I think it\u2019s fair to say that it is more the result of the good old fashioned elitism and racism that infects many a developing society today (India included) than a dangerous ideology like Hindutva<\/a> (here\u2019s another interesting discussion <\/a>by a secular Indian).\u00a0 \u00a0 In Pakistan, Christians tend to be darker complected and hail from the poorest backgrounds,\u00a0 tending to work in the most menial and unprestigious of professions, which not surprisingly makes them particularly vulnerable to prejudice and discrimination in so class conscious a society as Pakistan.<\/p>\n As everyone knows today thanks to round-the-clock coverage of Pakistan\u2019s faults, Pakistan has its own dangerous ideologies (some of which were developed with active US support), but contrary to the hysterical rhetoric of Chicken Little Islamophobes, their primary victims have been and continue to be mostly other Muslims.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t heard of any cases of Christian missionaries gettting burnt alive in their car with their families<\/a> in Pakistan, for example.<\/p>\n My point is not to bash India, but to highlight how differently its problems are treated by the American and international media.\u00a0 It has \"mullahs\" every bit as fanatical, intolerant and dangerous as the Taliban and India\u2019s Hindutva zealots wield considerably more political power than their mullah colleagues across the LOC<\/a>, yet you\u2019d never guess that from media coverage.<\/p>\n But back to the restaurant\u2026\u00a0 <\/p>\n As disturbing as this case is, I think it\u2019s\u00a0 important when pondering such cases to remember that most Indians (and most Muslims around the world, for that matter) are much less aware of the horrors of the Holocaust than Westerners.\u00a0 That\u2019s lamentable, but it\u2019s a fact.\u00a0 They also lack a collective experience of complicity in ideologies that culminated in pogroms or the Nazi nightmare.\u00a0 <\/p>\n None of this justifies complacency in the fact of such sinister social developments, of course, but it does necessitate a more nuanced psychological analysis than simply declaring Indians neo-Nazis because many express admiration for Hitler.<\/p>\n That careful analysis comes naturally when Westerners (e.g., When try to explain the success of Jorg Haider, we don\u2019t make generalizations about Austrian culture being inherently prone to anti-Semitism) or admired non-Western cultures (e.g., India) are on the dock, but we\u00a0 find it exceedingly difficult and unnatural to extend the same courtesy to peoples for whom we lack that warm & fuzzy feeling, like, well, pretty much all Muslim societies.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n
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