Islamist Sharjeel Usmani has invoked Martin Luther King Jr. to justify his morbid hatred against the Hindu community despite the fact that Muslims in India have never been subjected to slavery. In a long post shared on Twitter, Sharjeel Usmani has made an attempt to use the iconic American civil rights leader to further his hateful brand of politics.
His post was directed against people he calls ‘centrists’ and ‘liberals’. In the post, he once again justified celebrating the death of Rohit Sardana and called him a ‘genocide enabler’. He said, “Liberals and centrists hate ‘hate’ and want ‘peace’. They want Muslims and other marginalised communities to fight and resist the hate with love. Their definition of resistance and fight are not just empty rhetoric, given both the words fight and resistance are combative in nature, their calling out any language that challenges the prevalent status quo is a form of hatred.”
It was an obvious attempt to whitewash the hatred he has been inciting on social media. Sharjeel Usmani is the same person who had called Kashmiri Pandits the ‘most pampered minority’, a community that was subjected to a genocide by Islamic terrorists in Kashmir.
“Take for example, the death of Rohit Sardana and my comment on the news of his death. Sardana was a genocide enabler who not only proactively worked to dehumanise and criminalise Muslims, he openly justified acts of lynching with Hindutva narrations. However, for liberals and centrists, he was and is a hard-working and caring journalist with whom they had a little difference of opinion,” he continued.
Not merely that, Usmani also attempted to whitewash the crimes of Shahrukh Pathan who was seen wielding a gun during the Delhi Riots and pointing it as the Police. Usmani claims that Shahrukh was saving lives through an act of “self-defense”, a gross lie.
Sharjeel Usmani wrote, “Similarly, the condemnation following Shahrukh Pathan’s courageous act of self-defense is a classic example of how liberal betrayal manifests itself. Pathan saved liberals is not important for liberals and centrists. What is important is that he dared to pick up a gun and fight back, not in the performative sense, but real fight back.”
“Our liberal and centrist friends believe mere performance of fighting back is okay but in a situation Shahrukh was in, sacrificing himself by letting himself and others being killed was better thing to do than what he actually did,” he says. According to the Newslaundry columnist, up is down, left is right and rioter Shahrukh was acting in self defense. It is quite mind-boggling how effortlessly he has manufactured his own version of reality.
Continuing his whitewashing of Islamist radicalism and violence, Usmani slandered Jai Shri Ram and the Hindu community once again. He said, “Jai Shri Ram is used to terrorise people and many of us have witnessed the slogan being used to terrorise and kill people. Me calling that out is not hatred, it is just. Them calling me out is not just hatred but also shameless hypocrisy. One cannot be allowed to enjoy group privileges that Hindu identity brings while distancing itself from the responsibility of being the member of that identity.”
Only recently, Usmani had deliberately given communal colour to a random crime and claimed that the victim was forced to chant Jai Shri Ram without any evidence in order to target the Hindu community. Consequently, an FIR has been registered against him for the same. Yet, that does not appear to have deterred him from fanning communal tensions.
In the current post, it is quite evident that he is using liberal rhetoric dominant in western countries in order to appeal to western audiences. There is also the not-so-subtle attempt to draw equivalence with the Black Lives Matter movement despite the fact that there is no equivalence between the two contexts.
