Words, propaganda and head of a newborn babe, Part 2

Part 1

Did Spencer intend to communicate, directly or by implication, that the baby had been murdered?

As stated above, this hinges on whether Spencer had used the word “beheaded” or “decapitated.” The title of Spencer’s article in Jihad Watch is, “Pakistan: Newborn baby beheaded, head left inside Hindu woman’s womb by government hospital staff,” (my emphasis) a near-verbatim quotation of the title in his source, OpIndia.[1] Spencer, furthermore, actually includes the title of his source article verbatim in his text: “Pakistan horror: Newborn baby beheaded, head left inside Hindu woman’s womb by govt hospital staff in Sindh province,” (my emphasis).

Had Harris Sultan and Nuriyah Khan read Spencer’s report on Jihad Watch, let alone locate his source, rather than attack the man on the basis of a headline in a Tweet, they might have realised that they are engaging in a witch hunt, pull back and reflect before they do real damage to both themselves and the ex-Muslims who absorb them uncritically. Nothing of the sort. It gets worse.

Sultan had taken the trouble to track down the story in a local source, The Hindu news website, whose headline reads, “Newborn decapitated during delivery in Pakistan. Probe ordered as head left inside womb.” To begin with, this is not the source of Spencer’s article on Jihad Watch, and therefore not the source of his Tweet, a detail that seems to escape our witch-hunting duo. I say “seems” because one has to wonder how Sultan managed to find this source without also finding Spencer’s actual source, OpIndia, during the same search.

Furthermore, the content in The Hindu is substantially the same as that in OpIndia, suggesting that either one of them got the story from the other, or they both got it from a common source. That Sultan should be unaware of Spencer’s actual source stretches credulity. Be that as it may, the source Sultan chose to use is one that does not mention the mother being Hindu, thereby cementing their false assertion that it was Spencer who pointed out this detail. But it gets worse still, for Sultan then goes on to reveal to his pliant partner:

This is the actual article. It says, ‘Did this have anything to do with the fact that this woman is Hindu?’ Obviously, he knows it’s not, but it’s just the possibility cannot be discounted.

Not only did Sultan get hold of Robert Spencer’s actual article on Jihad Watch, he glossed right over the title and went straight for the line he wanted to weaponise: “Did this have anything to do with the fact that this woman is Hindu?” Spencer’s very next paragraph consists of one single sentence conveying nothing more than the title of the article in his source, OpIndia. Are we to believe that Sultan did not see the word “Hindu” in the title of the source article hidden in a single sentence buried in white space? Sultan knows very well that Spencer’s headline quotes the headline of his source, in which the word “Hindu” appears. He had just read it. Yet he asks, “Why did he put a headline like that?” It is a question designed solely to poison the minds of his hearing and obeying audience. And hear and obey they do, with alacrity.

All that remained was for Sultan to find another headline that would enable him, so he imagined, to pin the “Hindu” thing on Spencer and thereby attribute a questionable intent to him. Spencer would not have been able to claim that the woman was Hindu, had his source not said so, or it could not be inferred. It turns out, Spencer's source mentions “Hindu” three times, once in the title and twice in the body of the text, and “Bheel” twice. Sultan’s chosen source redacts all mention of both “Hindu” and “Bheel” in exactly the same way as the Western dhimmi media redact, or avoid mentioning, “Muslim” in connection with jihad mass murder, honour killing, mass rape, and the like. This puerile source, The Hindu, that had nothing whatsoever to do with Spencer’s article, is the donkey on which Sultan chooses to charge Spencer.

The Hindu website’s headline also does something else. It describes the severing of the baby’s head as “decapitation,” another critical difference with Spencer’s source. I hope I have shown that this cannot have been the case. While Sultan does not pick up on this headline having all the hallmarks of a whitewash, there is a wider point to be made here.

Omitting that the woman was Hindu, together with downplaying the incident from a beheading to a decapitation, points towards a Hindu elite malaise that has been the bane of India since before Partition: successive Indian governments have tiptoed around not only Muslims, but also the Chinese, despite the fantastic bloodletting and vandalism Hindus have suffered since the Muslims first set foot in their land, and the never-ending Chinese chomping bits out of their territory since the early days of the People’s Republic. There are promising signs that this deeply-ingrained pacifism and propensity for appeasement that has done nothing but embolden Muslims to prosecute their jihad to undo India and to rid it of Hindus once and for all, and the Chinese to more brazen seizure of territory, might finally be on the wane.[2]

Leaving aside whether they knew that Spencer was accurately quoting his source, Sultan and Khan are extremely upset that Spencer mentioned the woman being Hindu. Of course, they are truthfully quoting Spencer in that those words did come at least through him, if not from him. And here deliberate mischief is to be laid at the door of Sultan and Khan. It serves their vindictive purpose that Spencer mentions “Hindu.” The opportunity was not to be squandered.

As the assertion stands, it is true. Spencer did say that the mother is Hindu. But propaganda is seldom about lies. It can be, but that is not what defines it. Propaganda is truth presented in such a way as to achieve a particular effect on the one exposed to it, whether the claim is believed or not is unimportant, therefore whether it is true or not is unimportant. This is exactly why Muslims lie so much. It is never about being truthful; it is about the effect their words have on those who hear them or read them.[3] In this case, the truth of Spencer mentioning the woman being Hindu is irrelevant. The audience sees the machinations of Spencer the anti-Muslim bigot, for implying that the severing of the baby’s head was religiously motivated. This kind of propaganda abounds in Islam, in Communism and in Nazism, yet it is mild compared to all the other stuff in Shari’a.

These ex-Muslims are also taking advantage of a peculiar Muslim mental construct that makes it extremely difficult to differentiate between speaking and quoting. As far as Muslims are concerned, Spencer said it, because, well, he said it. Those particular words there and then came out of his mouth, or his pen, not out of the mouth or pen of the source he is quoting. Welcome to the wondrous workings of the Muslim mind.

Is Sultan and Khan’s claim about Third World Pakistan tenable?

Let us be clear, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a backward, barely functioning entity engaged in a ménage à trois with the Taliban and the Chinese Communist Party – talk about a double-Faustian pact! – while constantly oscillating between loans and bail-outs. That is the long description. What wealth remains available for the nation after all the pockets have been lined is concentrated in Punjab province and in the capital, Islamabad. However, in GDP (PPP) per capita terms, Sindh, where our drama plays out, is wealthier than Punjab. The wealth disparity between urban and rural Sindh is extreme. Pakistan’s two most heavily Hindu-populated districts, Tharparkar and Umerkot, both in Sindh Province and bordering the Indian state of Rajastan, are also the most poverty-stricken in the country and the most ill-served, by both the Central and the Provincial governments. The devastating 2014 Tharparkar drought prompted the Supreme Court to force the government to serve the district. Compliance was far from assured, as the Court came to learn:

“Advocate General for Sindh Salman Talibuddin said the government had initiated a programme to provide pregnant women free-of-cost food. …However, Advocate Siddiqui pointed out that the sessions judge in his report stated that only women with influential men had been given food…”[4]

Advocate General Talibuddin said that the government had announced incentives, such as accommodation, for doctors to work in Tharparkar, but admitted, “The response from the doctors was not welcoming. …Doctors posted in government hospitals of Thar had indulged in private practice in violation of the law.”

Tharparkar district has the highest Hindu population in Pakistan, and borders Umerkot district to its northwest, the only district in the country with a Hindu majority, albeit slim.[5] The mother who was subjected to the horror of having her baby beheaded during birth was Bheel. The Bheel are a tribal people, their largest concentrations being in India (Madya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajastan and Maharashtra), and Sindh. While the Bheel may more or less strongly identify as Hindu, or be regarded as such, especially in Pakistan, their religion is a syncretism of Hinduism and animism.

Historically, Punjab and Sindh have been the principal Pakistani receiving provinces for Muslim migrants from India during the great population exchanges following Partition of British India into the two countries. Muhajirs, meaning ‘migrants,’ as such Muslims are referred to in Pakistan, have every reason to resent Hindus, especially the Bheel, who, as the Muhajirs see it, drove them from the lives in India. According to the Partition Museum:

By November 1947, with the arrival of a large numbers of refugees (Muhajirs) from Bihar and Bengal in Sindh, an atmosphere of fear unsettled the Hindus. These Muhajirs living in crowded refugee camps began to occupy the homes of the Hindu Sindhis. Two major incidents of violence in Hyderabad (Sindh) and Karachi on 17 December 1947 and 6 January 1948, respectively, triggered the decision of the Hindus to leave.[6]

Complicating the Muhajirs integration into Sindh is that up until Partition, Sindhi Muslims were poor and backward compared to the wealthy and educated Sindhi Hindus. When the Sindhi Hindus migrated to India, the social vacuum they created over the Sindhi Muslims was filled by the vastly more educated Indian Muslim migrants, who tended to gravitate towards the urban centres, especially Karachi, where they occupied positions of power, resulting in Sindhi Muslims concentrating amongst the remaining, and poor, Hindus in the countryside. The tables had been turned, and they would turn again decades later, when native Sindhi Muslims and the elites in Islamabad began to marginalise the Muhajirs. Everyone had reason to be bitter, only the Hindus of Sindh have no one beneath them to take it out on.

Chhachro, the sub-district of Tharparkar district where the gruesome act took place, is the only sub-district in Tharparkar with a Muslim majority. The Sindh government now plans to split Tharparkar into two districts, Tharparkar and Chhachro.[7] “The [new] Chhachro District will consist of four tehsils [sub-districts], including Nagarparkar, Chhachro and Dahli. A new tehsil, Gudhuru, will also be included in the Chhachro district.”

This is where my bigotry kicks in, for this plan sets off my alarm bells. Might it just be possible that splitting Muslim majority Chhachro from the rest of Tharparkar finally opens a way for the Sindh government to provide better services to the Muslims, while continuing to avoid providing services to Hindus? I could not find any information on Gudhuru, but my bigotry leads me to wonder whether adding Gudhuru to the new Muslim majority Chhachro district would not help to administratively eliminate the Hindu majority in neighbouring Umerkot, thereby, finally, completing Pakistan. I think that my bigotry is far worse than that of Robert Spencer for merely speculating whether the baby's head being cut off might have had something to do with its mother being Hindu.

The beheading perpetrated in a wretched Rural Health Centre in Chhachro sub-district in Tharparkar district in Sindh province in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is but one detail, albeit a tragic and unforgivable one, in a long saga of the beheading of a people. But I must be wrong, surely, because Harris Sultan assures us that there is no Shari’a in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.[8] Certainly, the fact that Muslims in Pakistan routinely abuse Hindus in general, and the Bheel in particular,[9] does not in and of itself prove that staff cutting off a Bheel baby’s head while it is being born, photographing the gruesome details and then posting the images on social media amounts to Muslim abuse of Hindus. I really must do something about my bigotry.

The way that Robert Spencer reported on this case is proof to Harris Sultan of "How Robert Spencer relates everything with Islam." Sultan is especially irate at Spencer invoking the Shari'a manual Reliance of the Traveller, which he insist could not possibly have had any bearing on what the medical staff did. He makes the point that no one would have referred to the Shari'a manual as a guide to their actions. And he is probably correct. Spencer's question, however, is about the Shari'a culture that pervades Pakistan and makes kafir life so precarious at the hands of Muslims. Pakistan in particular, is rife with gross Muslim abuse of Hindus and Christians. The 212.3 million Muslims in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan behave with far greater Shari'a abandon than the 231 million in the Republic of Indonesia.[10] This in no way suggests that Indonesia is a Muslim liberal democracy (I leave that noble task to Mehdi Hasan), but as a bigot, I just could not help drawing attention to the official names of these two Muslim countries. Yes, Pakistan faces many problems peculiar to the Third World, but the Third World does not face the problems peculiar to Pakistan.

So why the witch hunt?

To Muslims, authority imparts truth. When in doubt, they seek reassurance in authority; when they sense that their arguments do not impress, they appeal to authority. We see this trait also in Harris Sultan. Robert Spencer is a bigot not because Sultan can provide convincing evidence to support that claim, but because Abdullah Sameer says so, because Maryam Namazie says so. He claims that he takes great care not to call anyone a bigot until he has clear evidence of their bigotry, yet he is himself not convinced that Spencer is a bigot, hence the increasingly frantic casting around for new mud to sling at Spencer.

Had Sultan been sure of what he is talking about, then Spencer's speaking to Hindutva, the supposed smoking gun, would have sufficed. QED. Instead, he then has to fall back on Jihad Watch, which has been around long before Spencer had anything to do with Hindutva. Yet, Sultan did not bring up the bigotry on Jihad Watch in his 2021 interview of Spencer when he had the chance, but he has to do so now to supplement his Hindutva argument. Of course, a shaky argument leaning on a shaky argument does not strengthen a case, hence the appeal to authority. The only problem here is that, as Sultan himself revealed and keeps reminding us, Ali Rizvi, Abdullah Sameer and Maryam Namazie have long ago warned him that Spencer is a bigot. He mentioned this during his interview of Spencer. If their arguments were too shaky for him then, how could they possibly shore up two shaky arguments he contrived later? It seems to me, rather, that the ex-Muslim cult's enjoining right and forbidding wrong had got to him. Sultan, in trying to conceal his compliance, is bringing down his own house of cards.

Finally, Sultan says of Spencer, “He knows how to blame everything on Muslims and Islam, but it’s not so.” And here we pass, dear reader, through the looking glass into a world where an atheist condemns a religious man as a bigot for opposing the very religion that condemns the atheist to death. The moral of the story is that a dogmatic prohibition on criticising Muslims slips inexorably into Islamic apologetics.[11] Such descent does not take place in a vacuum. The scenario in the video How Robert Spencer relates everything with Islam, plays out a thousand times a day between Muslim "scholars" and lay Muslims. The "scholar" butchers the evidence right in front of the lay Muslim, and the lay Muslim simply repeats exactly what the "scholar" says. In Sheikh Yasir Qadhi's words, "they memorise it all and regurgitate it out.” Islam did a very good job in instilling fear of doubt. The parallel of Shari'a with political correctness was not lost on the KGB.

The problem that Robert Spencer and all white opponents of Islam face, is that the Western ex-Muslim cult has appointed itself the sole, authentic representative of the opponents of Islam, even over ex-Muslims from the Muslim world. The parallels with the KGB-created Palestine Liberation Organisation are striking. The antipathy of Maryam Namazie, Ali Rizvi, Abdullah Sameer and Harris Sultan to white scholarly opponents of Islam is similar to that of the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter duo eclipsed the "sole, authentic representative of the Palestinian People" to bring peace to the Middle East for whoever wanted it, bypassing the never-without-the-Palestinians precondition. The PLO now has to do whatever it can to bully the "normalising Arabs," for whom it has a special derogatory term, into the margins.

The white opponents of Islam quite evidently know a great deal more about Islam than our coterie of sentimentalist activists, and as such pose a threat to their entitled pre-eminence. Such ex-Muslims, beholden to the racist criteria of identity politics ideology, insist on their never-criticise-Muslims precondition, and feel cleared to bully into the margins those they slander as "bigots." The PLO and the Western ex-Muslim movement are both railway points that sideline effective opposition.

However, when the opponents of Islam are black, such as Lloyd de Jongh, Christine Douglas-Williams or myself, the Western ex-Muslim cult prefer to give them a wide berth, even though such critics can be far harsher in their critique of Islam and Muslims than their white counterparts. I think such special treatment used to be called racism. Further complicating the matter is that ex-Muslim Islam opponent Bosch Fawstin is white, and I was once a Muslim. This, of course, raises the question of how Maryam Namazie gets away with it. In short, she is not an opponent of Islam. Therefore, according to the Newspeak definition of "racism," she isn't white. Interestingly, Namazie calls herself a "freethinker," just one of her contributions to the Newspeak lexicon.

Curiously, evangelical opponents of Islam, such as Christian Prince, Al Fadi and Jay Smith, do not come in for the opprobrium heaped on "bigots," even though they can be be far more vicious in their ridicule of Islam and Muslims. Curiouser, even David Wood, who has made a career out of mocking and ridiculing Muslims, Islam and the man Harris Sultan always refers to as "Prophet Muhammad," rather than just Muhammad, is not a bigot.

So why, then, the determination of the ex-Muslim cult to destroy Robert Spencer? The singular obsession of Abdullah Sameer and Maryam Namazie, Harris Sultan's reference points, is that Muslims never be criticised. There could be reasons that I am not aware of, but considering what is laid out in this two-part essay, it seems to me that it all comes down to Jihad Watch and its relentless nigh on two-decade daily drumbeat of actual news of real incidents of jihad activity the world over. The news that Jihad Watch reports shows Muslims exactly as Shari'a envisages them. If the picture it paints is one of unspeakable cruelty, barbarity, deceit and absurdity, then it is a picture fully consistent with Shari'a, the driving force behind this activity, whether the perpetrators took their instructions directly from the Islamic sources, or they drew inspiration from the culture they have imbibed from their Muslim milieu. And just to help out Harris Sultan here, the reason there are no reports of Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and other religious violence on Jihad Watch is because only Muslims indulge in jihad. Jihad Watch does exactly what it says on the tin.

It is impossible to spread the idea of Muslims as innocent of the horrors Shari'a enjoins while a resource like Jihad Watch exists. Of course there are many Muslims who would never dream of doing such things, but that is not the point. The point is that only Muslims have a full-blown doctrine that commands them to do precisely such things. That doctrine is jihad. Whereas Spencer's books have to read and only the most intrepid read these days, Jihad Watch lands in your inbox. It seems to me that in the witch hunt against Spencer, this tenacious resource is the target. Jihad Watch is an obstacle to jihad and its demise is sought only by those who wish to advance jihad. To that end, its owner must be made into a bigot, and the ex-Muslim cult are just the people for the job.

Thankfully, not every Western ex-Muslim is herded into the cult (referred to by that once good and now quite useless word, "community"), but everyday in so many ways, this cult replicates the Muslim condition. Those inside it will remain stuck, because they owe allegiance to their cult, terrified of stepping out of line and of thinking for themselves. Dissent makes them very uncomfortable, even before the policing kicks in. Freedom and individual autonomy hold no attraction for such ex-Muslims. They are already perfect, with nothing more to learn. Sentimentality is all you need. "One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves." But then, Martin Buber was a Zionist—and he's a dead white man! What am I thinking?

Notes

1. https://www.opindia.com/2022/06/pakistan-newborn-baby-head-cut-off-left-inside-womb/
2. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken some serious steps to confront China in Ladakh, military expert Sushant Singh highlights India's hesitation to go any further: "There's been no discussion in parliament, no questions have been entertained in the Parliament, there have been no official briefings and the domestic media coverage of the China border crisis is absolutely minimal. There is nothing which is seen on the China border crisis in India. So at one level, while we see this major crisis on the border, at another level we see a desire to underplay the crisis, perhaps because there is a significant weakness that India has vis a vis China. And it's a recognition of that weakness, recognising that weakness that India really does not want to push on," which is exactly the wrong thing to do. The way opposition congress Party MP Shashi Tharoor sees it, "Even after the guns have stopped firing, there is absolutely no willingness to talk to Parliament. There's been a couple of unilateral statements read on the floor of each House by the foreign and defense ministers. But no debate, no responses to questions by MPs. It's been quite, quite disgraceful, actually." Despite some bold actions here and there, similar timidity hamstrings India's official response to jihad. There are strong signs that civil society has had enough of capitulation.
3. The origin of the Muslim propensity to lie is to be found in the Shari'a compulsion on them to lie to the kufaar to defend or advance Islam.
4. “SC plans body to examine govt measures in Tharparkar,” 28 December 2018. https://reliefweb.int/report/pakistan/sc-plans-body-examine-govt-measures-tharparkar
5. Pakistan Hindu Council, Hindu Population (PK) https://pakistanhinducouncil.org.pk/
6. Partition Museum, Amritsar https://www.partitionmuseum.org/partition-of-india/. The Sudershna Kumari video, amongst others, are at the above link.
7. Sindh govt to divide Tharparkar in two districts, 28 March 2021 https://www.24newshd.tv/28-Mar-2021/sindh-govt-to-divide-tharparkar-in-two-districts
8. Lloyd de Jongh has a brilliant set of talks on the different degrees to which Shari’a may be implemented, and on the seamless flow of law across the four madhhabs (schools of jurisprudence), making all madhhabs equally accessible to all Muslim ulema, regardless of the madhhab they traditionally follow. I can recommend an excellent overview with substantial exposition of these issues: “The Real Sharia - Islam's Strict Guide & Dictates,” Holy Humanist, YouTube 30 Jun 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaaoAM7ttSk
9. “Pakistan: Bheel family tortured, for fetching drinking water from mosque,” Sabrang, 20 September 2021 https://sabrangindia.in/article/pakistan-bheel-family-tortured-fetching-drinking-water-mosque
10. World Population Review 2022 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-population-by-country It is disingenuous in the extreme for Harris Sultan to claim that there is no Islamic law in Pakistan. It is the kind of amateurish dissimulation one would expect from a beginning-beginning student of knowledge. Just ask Yasir Qadhi.
11. My forthcoming book, Islam Destroys Muslims, devotes several chapters to the Western ex-Muslim phenomenon. "She doesn't pussyfoot around and she doesn't pull punches."