A day after Opindia exposed the anti-Modi and anti-India rants of ‘journalist’ Sabrina Siddiqui, who tried to insinuate that rights of Muslims and other minorities are under threat in India, dubious ‘fact checker’ and Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair came to her rescue.
In a tweet on Saturday (June 24), Zubair wrote, “Great-Great grand-daughter of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan has to prove her loyalty too, just like thousands of Indian Muslims in India. This is an old trick by Right Wing trolls. One question to people in power, You’ll be labelled as Anti-National, Pakistani, Anti-Hindu, Anti-India etc.”
He also included screenshots of the said Opindia article, besides the old tweets of Sabrina Siddiqui rooting for India’s victory during a cricket match. Zubair had also managed to find a tweet by the same ‘journalist’, wherein she is seen claiming to be the the great-great grand daughter of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.
The dubious fact-checker thought it would be a good idea to make references to her ancestry to paint her as a patriotic Indian. In his desperate bid to give her a clean chit, Zubair glossed over the controversial past of the founder of the Aligarh Muslim university.
The controversial past of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was no ordinary Islamic scholar but a bigoted and radical cleric, baying for the blood of Hindus:
During a speech on March 14, 1888, he said –
“…You must remember that although the number of Mahomedans is less than that of the Hindus, and although they contain far fewer people who have received a high English education, yet they must not be thought insignificant or weak. Probably they would be by themselves enough to maintain their own position. But suppose they were not. Then our Mussalman brothers, the Pathans, would come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier in the north to the extreme end of Bengal.”
In the same speech, he had claimed –
“Now, suppose that all English, and the whole English army, were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations — the Mahomedans and the Hindus — could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.“
In 1876, he made similar claims in Benaras –
“I am convinced now that Hindus and Muslims could never become one nation as their religion and way of life was quite distinct from each other.”
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan also stated that it was the duty of Muslims to be loyal to the British Empire. He even called the Revolt of 1857 an act of ‘haramzadgi’. He further asserted that being subjects of the British Empire, which was Christian, was preferable to being under Hindu as the former were ‘people of the book’.
Bizarre claims of patriotism
As such, the argument that a descendant of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan will be ‘patriotic towards India’ by virtue of lineage is ridiculous at best. Nonetheless, Opindia pointed out in its last report that ‘journalist’ Sabrina Siddiqui is an American citizen.
She was born to a Pakistani mother and a father, who was raised in Pakistan even though he was of Indian descent. Sabrina on the other hand was born in the United States. All in all, she is an American of Pakistani descent.
The ‘journalist’ has no compulsion to be patriotic, given that she does not hold the citizenship of India. But her antics during the joint press conference of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden have clearly shown that she certainly does not have the best interests of India at heart.
She cunningly raked up the issue of the ‘treatment of Muslims and minorities in India’ to give the impression that those groups are being ill-treated here. This narrative is a part of the larger leftist-Islamist imagination of ‘Dara hua Musalman.’
Sabrina Siddiqui tried her best to sour the press conference with an ill-intentioned question but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi nonetheless gave a befitting reply.
Now, the likes of Mohammed Zubair are pointing out her old tweets, wherein she pledged allegiance to India during cricket matches. As leftists love to ask, will a trivial thing such as a cricket match now be considered the yardstick of patriotism?
