Tavleen Singh writes: If Osama can change from being monster to hero, we all need to be worried

What does this have to do with us in India? More than most ‘liberals’ are prepared to admit. There are Indian politicians of ‘liberal’ disposition who have been shrill in their demands on social media that the bombing of Gaza stop now. They have been backed by liberal intellectuals who find it hard to condemn Hamas terrorism. It is because of this supposedly liberal worldview that jihadism has spread like a virus through Muslim communities across India. It manifested itself most recently in the support Muslim girls got when they demanded the right to wear hijab in schools and colleges. It turned out that the girls who started the protest were linked to the jihadist Popular Front of India whose worldview is the same as Hamas.

This outfit has now been banned but the Islamism that gave it birth continues to spread through Muslim communities across the country. It is backed openly by those who see themselves as liberals and leftists. When I have asked my own liberal friends why they do not condemn Islamic fundamentalism as strongly as they do Hindutva, they always avoid answering the question. Something similar is now happening all over the world. If Osama can suddenly change from being monster to hero, we all need to be worried. It is no longer about Hamas and Israel, it is now a war of ideas.

Just before sitting down to write this piece, I was cruising social media and came upon a video of an American Muslim addressing a crowd in New York. In this video he says loudly that there will only be true peace in the world when everyone has been converted to Islam. He then shrieks ‘La Illaha Il Allah, Mohammad ul Rasool Allah’ and orders his audience to chant with him. The question really is why Muslims of his kind ever leave their ‘Islamic lands’ and build new lives in London and New York. Their ideas would be seen as piety in a Muslim country but are seen as terrorism in secular and democratic countries.

Next week marks yet another anniversary of our own 9/11 that we call 26/11. As someone who lives in Mumbai, it is a date imprinted in my mind, but most Indians have forgotten this date and forgotten that the ten killers who came from Pakistan justified the killing of innocent people on the grounds that India had committed atrocities in Kashmir. The killer who shot people dead after dragging them to the rooftop of the Oberoi Hotel said this to a Turkish couple whose lives he spared. Their lives were spared, he told them, because they were Muslims and so his brothers.

Hindus, westerners, and Jews were fair game as far as Allah’s warriors were concerned. So, on those two horrible days in Mumbai, in the last week of November 2008, they were hunted down and shot dead. Torture was reserved for Jews held captive in the Jewish Centre who suffered horribly before finally being killed. The kind of religious fanaticism that teaches young men that killing non-believers is sanctioned by Allah must be crushed but instead of this happening in our own secular land, jihadism is fueled by support from those who call themselves liberals.

It is this kind of toxic liberalism that allowed jihadist ideas to spread in India long before 9/11. I remember seeing magazines with Osama’s face on their cover on a trip in Coimbatore just after an attempt was made to kill L K Advani at a public meeting. When I asked moderate Muslim friends why Osama was seen as a hero, they said he was fighting for Allah against the ‘evil western world’ and this made him a holy warrior. How ironic that he has become a hero once more in the eyes of young people bred in the very world that he set out to destroy. How ironic that our own liberals and leftists could end up on his team because they refuse to accept that jihadism is terrorism.