Democracy and Human Rights Unraveling In U.S., India and Elsewhere
Democratic countries like the U.S. and India, supposed bastions of tolerance, multicultural pluralism, civil freedoms and opposition to tyranny and oppression, are retreating further into intolerance, as they are battered by violence, racial hatred and religious animus.
The social deterioration is best demonstrated by the fact that in the U.S., there have been 246 mass shootings in 2022 so far, with at least 18,823 people killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the U.S. That is roughly the population of New City in Rockland County, N.Y.
Democrats call for gun controls while right wing opportunists flip the tragedy on its backside, claiming that whites are in danger as they blame Blacks and left wingers for the increase in deaths due to gun violence, something that is blatantly false. Republican lawmakers have done anything and everything to deny that right wing white supremacists and other domestic terrorists have been responsible for most of the mass shootings in recent years.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that white supremacists or anti-government right-wing extremists were involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities from 2015 through 2020. Far-left extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists were involved in 66 incidents and 19 deaths. Left-wing attacks and plots increased in 2021 to 40 percent of the total, compared to 49 percent by right-wing extremists. Attacks by right wingers, however, accounted for 28 of 30 fatalities.
Despite the facts, at Tuesday’s
The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony on gun violence on Tuesday. Never to let facts get in the way, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, raged that Blacks are responsible for much of the mass violence.
“The Brooklyn subway shooter was a known Black supremacist who called for racial violence,” said Cruz. “The Waukesha attacker … was a viciously left-wing Black nationalist bigot. Another Black nationalist gunned down five police officers in Dallas.” Cruz went on, about “the violence of the antifa riots and the Black Lives Matter riots.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, railed that in 2016, “two Black racists killed eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge,” and in 2018, when “members of antifa in Philadelphia assaulted two Marines.” Extremism, Grassley said, “includes Black racism and antifa ideology.” And Sen. Mike Lee , R-Utah, focused on a (Black) man and (Asian American) woman who “had thrown a Molotov cocktail into a police vehicle during the antifa riots.”
Republicans have been utterly and willingly dishonest in trying to find out why a teenager in Uvalde, Texas bought two AR-15 semi-automatic rifles and proceeded to kill 21 innocent people. Laura Ingraham of Fox, blamed the violence on weed. Her co-propagandist, Tucker Carlson, said COVID lockdowns are the reason for such pent up anger and Cruz insisted that doors, or not enough locked doors, are the real problem.
Rep. Billy Long, R-Mo., had the most outrageous theory about gun violence. He said in a radio interview that it is wrong “to blame inanimate objects for all of these tragedies” and that the real cause is abortion.
“When I was growing up in Springfield, you had one or two murders a year. Now we have two, three, four a week in Springfield, Missouri. So something has happened to our society, and I go back to abortion — when we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mothers’ wombs. Life has no value to a lot of these folks,” Long said.
Incidents of police killing unarmed African Americans continue and a virulent and ever-bolder white supremacist and anti-Semitic movement grows as groups blame Jews and Blacks for the violence, while the absurd “Great Replacement” theory has migrated from the lunatic fringes to mainstream politicians and media mouthpieces who use the false belief to justify their xenophobia and racism toward people of color.
And trump still reigns supreme among millions of Americans, as he continues to turn America into a petty, vindictive nation that humiliates the oppressed, as he claims to lead the country back to a time when America was great, a dog whistle to racists, anti-Semites and Islamaphobes if I ever heard one. And the chasm between the right and the left just inflames like an infected, puss-filled wound, fueled by the Internet.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, in India, religion continues to fuel traditional and persistent hatred between the majority, ruling Hindus and the minority Muslims. The nation of 1.35 billion people, the largest democracy on earth, was formed in 1947 in the ashes of British colonialism. Its founders, including Mahatma Gandhi, Abul Kalam Azad and Rabindranath Tagore, sought to create a secular nation that welcomed all religions, in contrast with Pakistan, which was conceived as a home for the subcontinent’s Muslims. Those founders would weep to see how their great nation has devolved into religious violence.
The Hindus, about 80 percent of India’s population, continue to systematically restrict civil rights and foment violence. Most recently, leading Hindu officials denigrated the prophet Muhammad, enraging the nation’s Muslim minority of more than 200 million Muslims.
Nupur Sharma, then the national spokeswoman of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), went on television and insulted the prophet Muhammad and made negative comments about the prophet and his marriage. The party’s Delhi media director, Naveen Kumar Jindal, later tweeted another offensive comment about Muhammad, the most revered figure in Islam. The response from the Muslim world was quick and sharp, not just from Muslims in India but from at least 15 majority-Muslim countries.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently commented on the seething religious hatred in India while releasing the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report. In many ways, the problems mirror those engulfing the U.S.
Reading from the report, Blinken said, “In India, the world’s largest democracy and home to a great diversity of faiths, we have seen rising attacks on people and places of worship.” He could have been reporting on the animus between the left and far right in the U.S.
Rashad Hussain, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, wrote that some Indian officials were “ignoring or even supporting attacks on people or places of worship.” That sounds like the words of trump and those who supported the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Narendra Damodardas Modi, a Hindu and member of the BJP, has been prime minister since 2014. Under BJP control, the government has cracked down on Muslims by making religion a criterion for citizenship for the first time; building a Hindu temple at the site of a demolished mosque in Ayodhya; ending the special status that granted the majority-Muslim region of Kashmir a measure of autonomy; and banning the wearing of hijabs in schools and colleges in the southern state of Karnataka.
“And all societies, including our own and across Europe, must do more to combat rising forms of hate, including anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment,” Blinken noted in the report.
In enumerating the most violent incidents, Blinken explained that the predominantly Muslim Rohingya were victims of genocide perpetrated by the Burmese military in 2017.
“Intent that was evidenced by, among other things, attacks on mosques, the use of religious and ethnic slurs, the desecration of Korans, among, again, many other actions,” Blinken wrote.
In Eritrea, only four religious groups are permitted to practice their faith freely, while members of other religious minority groups have been detained, arrested, and forced to renounce their faith as a precondition for their release.
“In Saudi Arabia, publicly practicing any faith other than Islam remains illegal, and the government continues to discriminate against members of religious minority communities,” the report noted.
The predominantly Muslim Uyghurs continue to be targeted by China. Since April 2017, more than 1 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others have been detained in internment camps in Xinjiang.
The report said the Chinese government “continues to harass adherents of other religions that it deems out of line with Chinese Community Party doctrine, including by destroying Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Taoist houses of worship and by erecting barriers to employment and housing for Christians, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners.”
In Afghanistan, conditions for religious freedom have deteriorated dramatically under the Taliban, as they quash the basic rights of women and girls to get an education, to work, to engage in society, often under the banner of religion. Meanwhile, ISIS-K is conducting increasingly violent attacks against religious minorities, particularly Shia Muslim Hazaras.
In Pakistan, at least 16 individuals accused of blasphemy were sentenced to death by Pakistani courts in 2021, though none of these sentences has yet to be carried out.
In Vietnam, authorities harass members of unregistered religious communities; in Nigeria, several state governments are using anti-defamation and blasphemy laws to punish people for expressing their beliefs.
“At its core, our work is about ensuring that all people have the freedom to pursue the spiritual tradition that most adds meaning to their time on Earth. It’s about giving people the chance to express themselves freely, which is part of being their fullest selves. That’s the progress. That’s the progress that this report hopes to help create,” Blinken wrote.
Rashad Hussain, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, noted that the report “gives voice to countless individuals around the world who have been killed, beaten, threatened, harassed, or jailed for seeking to exercise their beliefs in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. The United States will continue to stand for those who are oppressed all over the world.”
Hussain said that non-state actors have attacked places of worship, and vilified religious, ethnic, and racial groups in their hateful narratives, including on omnipresent social media platforms.
“From Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia; Jews in Europe; Baha’is in Iran; Christians in North Korea, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia; Muslims in Burma and China; Catholics in Nicaragua; and atheists and humanists around the world, no community has been immune from these abuses,” Hussain wrote.
He wrote that anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred, and xenophobia are on the rise in many countries.
“Democratic backsliding and the rise of nationalism and nativist rhetoric and policies have been used to justify violence towards members of ethnic or religious minority groups and historically marginalized peoples,” Hussain wrote. “Social media platforms are used to spread hate speech and to incite violence by vilifying and threatening members of religious minorities.”