How Whoopi Goldberg and Munawar Faruqui remind that fight against Hinduphobia, anti-semitism and racism aren’t over

India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ambassador TS Tirumurti spoke up, commendably, for the second time recently about the lack of institutional recognition of violence against three religions from India: Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. He pointed out that while Islamophobia, Christianophobia and anti-semitism are mentioned in the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, “religiophobia” against non-Abrahamic religions hasn’t been noted at all.

This is a long overdue move necessitated not only by old geo-historical wounds of displacement, refugee suffering, and cultural genocide from Bamiyan and Kashmir to various sites of indigenous heritage desecration across the subcontinent, but also by more recent events such as the terrorist attacks that plagued India in the early 2000s, and the brazen persecution and displacement of Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

But to join the conversation on “religiophobias” as existential human rights threats on behalf of a long-suppressed “elephant in the room” requires, in my view, a deeper understanding of the conversation as it stands today. That conversation, at least from the way I see it being shaped by propagandistic states, transnational lobbies and foundations, academia, news media, NGOs, celebrities and PR firms, sees itself in certain ways that need to be carefully engaged with, debated, and challenged.

‘Hinduphobia’ first used in 1866

The key point of contention, or the blind spot, deliberate or otherwise, in the current discourse on human rights is that it focuses on race, and a particularly American definition of racism, to the detriment of religious persecution as a valid category of understanding.

Islamophobia, in common American classroom understanding, for example, is seen as human rights abuse akin to anti-black racism, and not as a religious issue. On the other hand, Hinduphobia, although a far older term as recognized even in an official dictionary entry now thanks to the work of Hindu Human Rights (HHR) researcher Sarah Gates, is dismissed by academia as a recent coinage by Hindutva leaders pushing “Hindu Supremacism.” The validity of Hinduphobia as a human rights issue is being doggedly resisted by the legitimising authorities of our time like universities and human rights bodies, and will need a lot more organised and well-funded research work to make its case in the mainstream. But the fact that it is being talked about is a good beginning, and the fact that it was coined as early as 1866 (by British anti-colonial writers at that) will have to be recognized by academia and other institutions inevitably.

***

Also Read

Reality of Hinduphobia must be established to challenge otherisation and persecution of Hindus in academic, media discourse

At UN, India urges nations to recognise ‘Hinduphobia’; calls drone attack in UAE ‘blatant violation of international law’

Hinduphobia is very much real in United States, so is great American ‘awokening’

Raucous Hindu groups are scoring self-goals, living up to Western stereotypes feeding Hinduphobia

Why India needs more than a ‘ministry’ to fight propaganda

***

All the same, in order to be listened to, we will also need to listen more carefully ourselves to the different voices and histories that make up the so-called “Abrahamic” trinity of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Christianphobia, and respect the differences between them.

Anti-semitism today

I began reading former New York Times editor (and rising free-speech hope) Bari Weiss’s book How to Fight Anti-Semitism just a few days before Whoopi Goldberg made her incredibly ill-informed and hurtful comments about the Holocaust. As a popular advocate against racism herself, Goldberg put herself in an awkward position by claiming on her TV show that the Holocaust wasn’t about racism because Jews and Nazis were both whites. It was “inhumanity,” not racism, she insisted. Even as apologies and suspensions followed, the argument was made that it was the American view of racism (experienced in terms of Black versus White) that precluded Goldberg from realizing that the Nazi genocide against Jews was very much an act of racism too (and some Hindus naturally couldn’t help remembering that the “Aryan race” theory at the core of the Holocaust was something that continues to inform Hinduphobic racism in America to this day, even on the so-called liberal white “South Asia” side).

But Whoopi Goldberg’s ignorance was not the only issue about the Holocaust at hand. Since then, two more troubling examples of media stars playing recklessly with the memories of those who have suffered in mass violence have surfaced. British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr joked on a Netflix programme that the genocide of thousands of Roma people (some of whom trace their ancestry to migrants from India) at the hands of the Nazis may have been a “positive.” It was so appalling that Jewish groups had to send him educational materials.

The third bizarre example of extreme insensitivity (and perhaps anti-semitism combined with Hinduphobia) about the Holocaust came from the Indian stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui. Faruqui, who has been hailed by the BBC and other media outlets as a champion of free speech in India in the past, apparently delivered a whole routine on how the Holocaust might unfold if Hitler was Gujarati. Amidst a clumsy, crazy, callous cacophony of names and puns, one unbelievably dehumanising line comes through: Gujarati Hitler won’t have “gas chambers” he says, because he’ll serve Gujarati food like Dhoklas and then the people will die of “gas” (flatulence).

Selective silence about indigenous religions

There is of course, little criticism at the moment of the anti-semitism of a man who in the past also joked about the Hindu women and children burned alive on a train by a Muslim mob. There is a little more attention to the British comedian’s joke about the Roma genocide, but even that is not quite there as well. This selective silence in the media echoes Ambassador Tirumurti’s own observations about the UN’s biases. The global consensus on what is racism is so colonized by its own biases that even antisemitism, which is so widely recognized, can be brushed under the carpet on occasion. What hope do indigenous traditions and people have indeed?

It is in this context that Bari Weiss’s book becomes a useful guide for us to recognize not only the distinctness of the experience of anti-semitism in comparison to more recent discourses about Islamophobia and Christianphobia, but to also compare the still nascent conversation on violence against Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism. While it is important not to appropriate the pain or work done by one community for another (like using “Holocaust” as a generic label, or “Lives Matter” for example), it is necessary also to recognize the interconnected global roots of what is simply called “racism” these days.

Weiss begins by questioning the validity of “racism” as a substitute for the word “anti-semitism,” interestingly enough (though not quite in the way Goldberg dismissed the Holocaust). She notes that “racism” has become the way for anti-semitism to be talked about in America because “racism is at the center of America’s conversation with itself.” But the reality is that anti-semitism has existed long before the United States did, and continues to play out violently and menacingly in the Middle East and in Europe. “Racism” may be America’s greatest “sin,” at least in its present phase, but global experiences of pain cannot be reduced to the prescriptive categories of one country, and within that country, one group’s experiences alone (the displacement of Native American people for example, really has not been spoken about of late with the same intensity as anti-black racism).

The ‘Punching Up’ myth

Weiss outlines not only the long history of antisemitism, but conveys its present manifestations in America very well (and very chillingly, for Hindus in America, as far as the parallels at least at the argumentative level go). Antisemitism, she argues, is different from other racisms today because it is seen as a case of “punching up” (a phrase used often in comedy and activist circles to differentiate between who can be mocked and who should not; less powerful people can mock more powerful ones, but the other way around is unethical and should not be done). Whites, for examples, mocking Blacks, is “punching down,” and racist. Men, for example, mocking women, is “punching down,” and sexist. Blacks mocking whites, is seen as “punching up” (and that sort of thinking led perhaps to Goldberg’s gaffe). And of course, Munawar Faruqui mocking Hindus and Jews dying in burning trains and Nazi gas chambers, is also seen by his fans and supporters in the world press perhaps as “punching up” against privileged groups by a persecuted minority comedian.

It is this strange, and often false, classification of groups of people into hierarchies of oppressiveness and oppressedness, that confronts us today, and remains the key argument that must be dismantled in institutions ranging from human rights bodies to schools and colleges. It is far more complex and pervasive than a simplistic Right wing-Left wing dichotomy (and its “good terrorist- bad terrorist” spin off, as the Ambassador alluded to).

In the case of the Jewish community, as Weiss writes, the dangers come from both the Euro-American Right-wing and the Left-wing (and, as she writes in a separate chapter, contemporary Islamism too). But all three sources of contemporary anti-semitism operate on the “punching up” mythology. Right-wing extremists accuse Jews of controlling the world and importing immigrants who will take white Americans’ jobs. Left-wing intellectuals and academics (of whom Jews were and are a large part) use “anti-Zionism” as a cover for naked anti-Judaism. And Islamists (including their posh academic supporters) openly proclaim the disappearance of Judaism and Jews as a moral necessity for the good of the world. All antisemitism, she quotes the writer Dara Horn, can be reduced to two types, “Purim antisemitism” (“Kill all the Jews”) and “Hanukkah antisemitism” (which “asks the Jews to take part in their own destruction” by abandoning festivals, converting etc.).

Anti-Hinduphobia and Anti-semitism

The most poignant observation in Weiss’ book though (amidst hundreds of examples of horrible violence and open hate, and shameless cover ups), is about how Jews are being asked by the American Left to “erase more and more of themselves” and how “some don’t even know they are making this choice, having grown up with little Jewish education.” Hindus in America (and perhaps even in India) can see a parallel as schools overzealously shame Hindu children out of their festivals and traditions in the name of pollution, equality, social justice and so on.

I don’t know how much Weiss knows about the past and contemporary intersections of Hinduphobia and anti-semitism (probably not too much, considering an awkward dig she makes about India being established by foreign imperial powers just like Israel but no one says that about India), but I hope she will go beyond the Columbia South Asianist bubble someday (Aravindan Neelakandan, J Sai Deepak, and others can add so much to this dialogue).

To return, in conclusion, to the bigger problem of terrorism and “religionphobia,” I think that there is a real case to be made for broadening global dialogues against hate beyond the awful propaganda that has been foisted on us over the years mostly by well-meaning (“useful idiot”?) academics and activists.

Ambassador Tirumurti should try, if it is within his power, to establish an appropriate commission to systematically study and operationalise Hinduphobia and other forms of systemic hatred and violence directed at indigenous religious and cultural groups by predatory and intolerant forces. One aspect of this should be an expert committee to study and dismantle global propaganda about such groups. The United Nations, as I have come to learn, was at the forefront of a large international effort to make laws on propaganda and hate soon after World War II ended and Nazi propaganda was recognised for the hateful role it played in the genocide (an important scholarly work, which may be of interest is Propaganda and World Public Order: The Legal Regulation of the Ideological Instrument of Coercion by Dr BS Murty, Yale University Press, 1968).

A new global media, information and entertainment policy on issues like racism, religionphobias, and hate can perhaps help companies like Netflix and global celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg use their power for good, and also cut off the tacit moral support for terrorism and violence that global media narratives about underdogs and “slumdogs” are currently providing.

The writer teaches media studies at the University of San Francisco. Views expressed are personal.

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.