Notice anything? Sharjeel Imam, the Shaheen Bagh mastermind and The Wire columnist is now a “Scholar”. “Activist”.
He called openly for tearing India into pieces. Said that the chicken’s neck belongs to Muslims and they should cut off Assam and the North East from India. Said openly that non-believers can only join their cause as second class citizens on terms set by Muslims.
Still a scholar? Still just an activist?
And now, get a load of this.
Intellectuals are out to defend this one too. Not surprisingly, Sharjeel Imam is still a victim. This time his comments are being cherry picked.
When Faiz’s poem on breaking idols was being recited, that was supposed to be a poetic metaphor.
One wonders exactly what a liberal would have to say for his comments to be considered as hate speech. Apparently, there are no limits. If anything, liberals are using Sharjeel Imam to push the envelope even further, demanding even more abject submission to Islamism.
We have to realize that with each passing day, we are becoming conditioned to the subjugation of our country.
Rewind to the days of 2015-16 when the Bharat ke tukde and Azaadi slogans first surfaced. Liberals were terrified, scrambling to dissociate themselves from the event. They knew public opinion would not spare them.
The liberal ecosystem was spooked. They threw the kitchen sink, calling the videos fake, doctored, saying that the slogans were shouted by BJP agents planted in the crowd and what not. The key is that liberals were on the defensive.
Not any more. Day by day, the chant of Azaadi was normalized, moralized and even glamorized. A slogan taken from terrorists in Kashmir was branded as a form of dissent.
So what is wrong in a slogan such as “XYZ se Azaadi”, where XYZ could be poverty, unemployment, or maybe some social evil? Nothing if you take it literally. But the slogans are intended to work on a more subliminal level, gradually normalizing the form and idiom used by terrorists.
Liberals understand this marketing trick very well. And there is a reason they are choosing to use the idiom of terrorists. Otherwise, do you think that Hindi and English are so short of vocabulary that liberals could not have picked any alternative words to express their dissent?
Why do you think liberals repeatedly morph the Hindu Swastika or sacred Om symbol into a Nazi hooked cross? What point are they making? Has Hitler or his hateful ideology ever had any significance whatsoever in the Indian political context? Liberals do it because they understand the power of subliminal messaging. They are constantly trying to create an association in Indian and Western minds that Hindus are somehow connected to Nazis.
The same with Faiz’s poem on breaking idols. Was there no other way to verbalize dissent against CAA than use the metaphor of breaking idols? Of course there was. But liberals wanted us to see the world using an Islamic idiom.
When some people objected, top liberals put them down by calling them culturally illiterate. Take that! Unless you subscribe to an Islamic idiom, expressed in high flown Urdu, you’re an illiterate. If you read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, language is the most potent weapon of controlling the mind. They want to cripple our ability to express any thoughts against the supremacy of the Islamist worldview. When we criticize our government, we are required to adopt rhetoric that sees idol worshipers as inherently low.
Read: Into the Islamist’s mind: The role of educated Muslims in Sharjeel Imam’s ‘Plan of Action’
Notice how they reject Vande Mataram, but embrace Faiz.
A metaphor of the nation as a mother goddess makes you a bigot. You have to think of idols as the ultimate metaphor for evil and express all your thoughts as per those rules of rhetoric.
Once you adopt their rhetorical scheme, you won’t even have the words to resist Islamist subjugation. Your mind may feel unhappy, but your words will fail you. And when your words fail, your ideas will never spread. You are finished.
Remember the ‘sheroes’ from the Jamia protest last month. People dug into their social media histories and discovered that they were fans of Yakub Memon. But in 2019-20, the discovery barely made a scratch on their public image. Remember that Yakub Memon was involved in a terrorist attack that killed 250 innocent people. His sympathizers are ‘sheroes’ today. Let that sink in.
Even worse, ordinary people now take liberals sympathizing with Yakub Memon for granted. It does not shock them.
If you dig into Sharjeel Imam’s social media history, you will find the same tropes about sympathizing with Yakub Memon and Afzal Guru. Nobody is surprised any more. We have become numb, desensitized to such rhetoric. Remember that Afzal Guru was hanged in the UPA era. Would the UPA have hanged Afzal Guru today? I doubt it.
Now liberals are extending intellectual cover to Sharjeel Imam. Four years ago, the nation was shocked by slogans of Bharat ke tukde and Azaadi. Today we have a man who calmly gives the details of a plan to actually tear the country into pieces. Liberals are no longer shy of defending him. They don’t deny. They don’t distance themselves. They demand that we retreat.
If they win this rhetorical war, tomorrow they will all speak openly about strategies of tearing India into pieces, state by state.
This is how far we have been pushed as a country. Where do we draw the line?
