I’m still waiting for some college kids with light courseloads and even lighter brainloads to protest in support of those who massacred dozens of innocents in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir last month. After all, the assailants just want to reclaim territory they see as their own.
A primer: In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the British (now that, kids, was a colonial power) into mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan. The area known as Kashmir is claimed by both countries, and parts of it governed by each. Tensions between India and Pakistan have simmered and occasionally reached a boil over the years, and are roiling at present.
The world is hardly in need of another hotspot (or locus of Islamist barbarity), but the Indian subcontinent has emerged as one. And, considering that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, this spot is particularly hot.
Those killed or wounded in the recent attack included men, women and children; and their killers are part of a Muslim group calling itself the Resistance Front. Indian officials say the group is a proxy for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group, and they blame Pakistan for its tolerance, and harboring, of terrorists.
Pakistan denies complicity in the attack and, to be fair, there are Indian radicals, too: Hindu nationalists who have attacked Muslims. But the recent massacre is part of a pattern of Islamist ambushes going back to 2017, in which the victims have been Hindu civilians.
Although Pakistan isn’t among many people’s vacation destinations, it’s no backwater, at least when it comes to military metrics. It’s the second-largest Muslim state (after Indonesia), and its army consists of 660,000 active-duty troops and 291,000 paramilitary personnel. (Volunteers from the Pakistani air force fought against Israel during both the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.)
And the country has long been a haven for evil. Osama bin Laden lived (until he, blessedly, stopped living) in a nice villa in Abbottabad, in the heart of Pakistan.
Researcher Ratnadeep Chakraborty says that Pakistan not only harbors terrorists but also foments—through its educational system, media, religious institutions, and political bodies—anti-Semitism.
Pakistani children, he explains, “learn from official textbooks that Jews are corrupt, treacherous, and deserving of death.”
“Pakistan,” he recently told Maariv, “is not just an anti-Semitic state, it is a factory exporting anti-Semitism to the entire world.”
Pakistan has nine million citizens living abroad. Some 600,000 reside in the US. “These are people,” Mr. Chakraborty explains, “who were raised on anti-Semitic educational foundations. They carry this hatred with them to Europe, America, and the Middle East—and sometimes act on it.”
A Pakistani man living in Canada was only recently arrested for allegedly planning a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn.
Mr. Chakraborty, who authored a chapter about Pakistan in a new global anti-Semitism report from Tel Aviv University, also warns Israel that, beyond Iran and its proxies, the subcontinental Muslim nation should be considered a strategic threat.
In Pakistan’s parliament, he notes, “lawmakers propose bills praising Hamas’ October 7 attacks.”
Indeed, elements of the recent attack on Hindus in Kashmir were, in his words, “chillingly similar” to Hamas’ attack on Israel. The barbarians wore body cameras, selected victims and shot civilians at point-blank range.
Many of us who are old enough to have memories of the 1960s have seen hostility toward Jews and toward Israel migrate over the years. Back then, Jews in the US were most overtly threatened by racist rightists like the American Nazi Party and the John Birch Society; and the Democratic Party was more reliably pro-Israel than the Republican, many of whose leaders promoted strong relationships with the oil-rich Arab nations.
Today, ultra-conservatives (well, most of them) speak well of us and of Israel, and it’s mostly “progressive” Democrats and leftists on college campuses who are ill-disposed toward us and toward Israel.
Sixty years ago, the most dangerous sworn enemies of Israel were Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Iran, under the Shah, was a friend. Today, Jordan and Egypt are at peace with Israel (jury’s still out on Syria) and her would-be destroyers are Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
One hater, though, remains the threat it always has been. And shouldn’t be ignored.
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