The Criminal as Victim

masanmuthu#321:

``I want to know what verse those dudes are reciting when they behead people in Iraq.``

Yes, they recite verses from the quran. So, there are some islamist jihadists among muslims. Did I deny that?

``Ask your friends. BTW is that in arabic?.. If they reply ``oh that`s a war zone, so you can kill a lady who has worked there for 30 yrs in service of Iraqis``, that`s fine.. Ask them if killing the poor Joe`s and George`s working in the World Trade centre is Ok too. Maybe they are in this eternal war state to convert the whole world to ``domain of islam``.. ``

``My friends``, along with most other muslims were disgusted at how that lady was treated. It is almost as if they were bent on giving a bad name to their cause.

``Also ask them if it`s NOT allowed in Quran why don`t the Saudi mosque issue a ``fatwa`` against Bin laden and co..``

Saudi mosques are the root of all problems with Islam, so why would they issue a fatwa against them? But a Spanish mosque has issues a fatwa. Let`s hope more will follow. BTW how many Shankaracharyas have disowned Modi?

``Also ask your friends if they support ``religious freedom`` in Saudi arabia and please let me know the answer too..``

Most of my friends do not like Saudi Arabia. One of them, an Indian Muslim, curses them because they wouldn`t give a visa to his sister to join her husband working in Saudi Arabia. He is an Irish catholic and I suspect that under Saudi laws, their marriage wont be halal.

harimou:
Thanks. Your answers are informative.

#317 by rsridhar on March 24, 2005 6:54pm PT


Muslims in India today lead a ghettoed existence.


And whose fault is that?


Barring the few who have made a name in Arts, Cinema, they are marginalized from the mainstream. For eg, the number of muslims in IITs, govt jobs is all abysmal and is a thing of concern.


And that`s somehow the fault of the hindu/brahmin dominated system? When was the last time you heard of a muslim rally demanding the good stuff? education and all that....like never? i`ll bet you`ve heard of plenty of rallies against the iraq war or some other ummah cause-du-jour..
If Yusuf Hamied can make it, so can guniram from UP...or abdul from meerut...

maybe they`re marginalized because they chose to live in ghettos? Take a look at the UK...south asian hindus and sikhs do much better than the local population while paki and bangladeshi muslims are far behind...there`s no brahmin/hindu domination there...

Re: # 320

Folks..

``masanamuthu`` is ``masanamuthu``. I don`t take multiple handles.. case closed. I flaunt my ``lower caste`` birth too. :-))

Right now, ONLY very few caste supremacists (mostly old folks) believe in this ``caste supremacy`` crap.. I understand those folks. If somethings come for free why deny them..

Re: # 302
I actually thought YOU were masanamuthu, and was impressed at the sense of humour that took; it`s like blacks calling themselves niggas so no one else can insult them in that manner.
But I see I was wrong.

Ref dost-mittar #316

[On your earlier support of racial theory, since you are such a firm believer in this racial purity business,......]

I flaunt my brahmin birth in the face of the likes of Veerashanmughamoni. I did accept the need for affirmative action in India even when I could not get into a professional college in Tamil Nadu because of that. But it is the decline of India in the world because of this quota business that has caused me to rail against the supporters of affirmative action. As for racial purity, it is the middle and lower castes who will kill their girls and young men for marrying out of their caste; the brahmins used to excommunicate them, now they accept it as part of the Age of Kali and get on with their lives. (I am still looking for unchaste women in this Age of Kali, in case any female readers are reading this!)

[.... would be okay to ask, if by the same criterion, Iyengars have purer genes than Iyers?]

It is okay to ask. However, it is not true. After all, Iyengars use Tamil in their pujas; Iyers don`t. The Four Thousand Sacred Hymns of the Iyengars are all in Tamil. Iyers use only Sanskrit mantras for worship. So, if nothing else, Iyers maintain the Vedic tradition better than Iyengars. We like to say that Ramanujacharya went around converting Shanars (toddy tappers) to Iyengars. I don`t know what the Iyengars say but would be curious to find out.

[For those north Indians smirking at the south brahminic obsession with racial purity, you may be surprised to know that similar views prevailed in north, specifically Panjab, until not long ago.]

As to endogamy (which may result in racial purity), every single caste in Tamil Nadu (or India for that matter) is obsessed with it. That is why you see matrimonial advertisements by caste category in the Indian newspapers.

Re: # 277

dost-mittar:

``I am familiar with those and other passages. But most Muslims believe that they were written in the context of the battles the prophet was fighting and are no longer relevant . To take a somewhat inexact parallel, it would be like saying that Krishna said that one should kill one`s uncles, granduncles, brothers and gurus. It`s a pity that Muslims are afraid to question that every word of Quran is a word of God, but how many muslims, even wahabis, do you know who are out to kill Kafirs? ..``

---

:-)

I want to know what verse those dudes are reciting when they behead people in Iraq. Ask your friends. BTW is that in arabic?.. If they reply ``oh that`s a war zone, so you can kill a lady who has worked there for 30 yrs in service of Iraqis``, that`s fine.. Ask them if killing the poor Joe`s and George`s working in the World Trade centre is Ok too. Maybe they are in this eternal war state to convert the whole world to ``domain of islam``..

Also ask them if it`s NOT allowed in Quran why don`t the Saudi mosque issue a ``fatwa`` against Bin laden and co..

Let me know if you want me to add this to the list of questions to be asked to the pseudo-secularists..

Also ask your friends if they support ``religious freedom`` in Saudi arabia and please let me know the answer too..

With Farzana madam hesitant to reply to this simple question, I think this should go into the top of my list..

Thanks.

re: # 245
``Most Non-Brahmins from South, just like most Indian Christians and Indian Muslims just want to make money, enjoy life, live a modern life-style and be part of the new modern world.``
I think u are an idiot. I would applaud u if u were factually correct but he above statement is factually incorrect.
Muslims in India want to make money, want to enjoy life? What kind of crap is this? Muslims in India today lead a ghettoed existence. Barring the few who have made a name in Arts, Cinema, they are marginalized from the mainstream. For eg, the number of muslims in IITs, govt jobs is all abysmal and is a thing of concern. I have talked about this in the past. Farzana bibi does not like to talk about such matters. But these matters are very important for the muslim community.
Try and focus on the reality and find out why muslims in India are marginalized. Is it your religion? Is it something else?
Sridhar

re:#245 by kkkhurram
``Most of the Indian interactors here like Harimau(aka soysauce aka masanmathu – all are one),...``
I think u have not been interacting in Chowk long enough to witness the verbal (at times ugly) duel between Harimau and Soysauce. There is no way the 2 are the same. I think masanmathu is Gujjubania but i may be wrong.
sridhar

re:#256 by harimau

(While a large number of dark-skinned short (vertically challenged) brahmins exist in the South, one could identify just from their looks the taller folks as non-natives. The height, the length of the limbs including the large hands and feet, facial features, etc., are a dead give-away for some of these people. So, one could presume that at least some amount of racial purity exists in the brahmin stock, which also has been confirmed by DNA studies.)
Interesting but not true.
First of all, Aryan Invasion Theory is being hotly debated now. The more commonly used terminology now is Aryan Migration Theory but many historians do not accept this either. There is gradually accumulating data that there infact was no migration from outside at all.
Of late, a number of studies involve study of DNA of the population to see the pattern of migration. Nothing concrete has emerged. For eg, nobody has shown conclusively that brahmins of the subcontinent are migrants from abroad or that they are in anyway different (genetically) from the rest of the crowd.
http://omniknow.com/common/wiki.php?in=en&term=Aryan_invasion_theory
Mitochondrial DNA is transmitted from mother to progeny and is now being used in research.

(More recent results (Kivsild et al. 2003b, see also Cordeaux et al. 2003) show that the combined results from mtDNA, Y-chromosome and autosomal genes indicate that ``Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.``

The Haplogroup R1a has been previously linked with the ancient Kurgans and/or Indo-Europeans of southern Russia/Ukraine, who supposedly migrated to Europe, central Asia and India between 3000-1000 BC. (Passarino et al. 2001; Quintana-Murci et al. 2001; Wells et al. 2001). However, the high frequency of R1a found in Punjab and in the South Indian Chenchu tribe, together with a highter R1a-associated short tandem repeat diversity in India and Iran compared with Europe and central Asia, indicates that R1 and R1a differentiation may have originated in South or West Asia.(Kivisild 2003b) The defining M17 mutation has also been found in several south indian tribes (Kivisild 2003b, Ramana et al. 2001, Wells et al. 2001). Stephen Oppenheimer, who reports upon the results of the Human Genome Diversity Project in his book ``The Real Eve: Modern Man`s Journey ouf of Africa, (p.152)`` comments these findings with the conclusion that: ``For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; (...),thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a `male Aryan Invasion of India`.`` Oppenheimer further believes, that it is highly suggestive that India is the birthplace of the eurasian mtDNA haplogroups, the Eurasian eves. According to Oppenheimer, nearly all human maternal lineages in Europe descended from only four mtDNA lines that originated in South Asia 50`000-10`000 years ago)
Mt DNA seems to suggest that migration actually started from South Asia outwards. In a very well researched book (The Return of the Aryans), Bhagwan Gidwani argues that Aryans (more accurately called ``Aryas`` of noble people) migrated out from India in a remote past and some of them actually returned home (just like some NRIs returning home in modern times).
AIT refuses to die as it has had a firm grip on people`s mind (as can be seen from the fact that Harimau Iyer actually believes he is genetically different, even superior whereas there is no convincing proof of that). This idea, like the caste system,has kept India in shackles and divided its own people against one another. European studies continue to assert the validity of AIT. Max Mueller mentality persists everywhere, even among people like Romila Thapar. I think, Indians would finally learn someday that they belong to the same genetic pool, with variations inherent due to climate and geographic isolation.
What Harimau did not tell the Chowkies is that Tam Brahms come in different flavors. My own cousin is as dark as an African. Some are as fair as Europeans. This testifies to a racial admixing between migrants from the North of Vindhyas (who were fair colored) and the local population in a distant past. There are a plethora of proofs from mythology and history of such migration having taken place. The first Tamil grammer (Agathiyam) was written by Sage Agashya, who migrated to South from the North. Thirumoolar was also a similar migrant who interpreted the Vedas in Tamil and wrote Thirumantiram. There are a number of such eg. Tamil itsef has so many sanskrit words. Sanskrit was essentially a language of the North imported to the South by the brahmins when they migrated south of the Vindhyas.
Sorry for the long babble. In nutshell, AIT is dead. Brahmins, though racially unique (due to their selective interbreeding) are not genetically very different from the common genetic pool.
Sridhar

Look - there are real problems..like abortion of the female child. (I dont know if it qualifies as `infanticide` . With the latest technology available in every nook and corner of the country the parents dont have to wait any longer for the baby to be born to find out..).

Talking about non-existing issues like sati is a waste of time.

The last case of Sati in India happened 2 decades back.. in early 1980s I think...the Roop Kanwar case. Read about it in Mark Tully`s trilogy on India.

``Sati, like the caste system, is a vestige from the paste. It needs to be condemned in the most brutal manner. But, one must also try and understand why it exists.``

Where does sati exist ? Certainly not in India.

``Sati is about control. It was made honorable by attaching a religious significance to the whole affair. Nobody would want to commit suicide unwillingly. Sati is a crime perpetrated by the religious fundamentalists in India just as suicide killing is a crime by the Islamic fundoos. In both, religious fervour is a common theme. In both cases, glory of God is promised (with the added incentive of the 72 virgins in the latter case).``

Hello !!! There have been 4 known cases of sati in India since indepedence in 1947. Do you even understand that ? 4 cases of sati happening in 58 years. 4 women commiting suicide as per the traditions of sati in a period stretching 58 years. In a country of 1 billion. What does that tell you ?

How can you even compare something that happens every 20th year with a thing that happens every 20th day ?

Threat to Modi`s life in UK, trip called off

TIMES NEWS NETWORK


NEW DELHI/AHMEDABAD: Following a call from PM Manmohan Singh on Thursday night, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi cancelled his proposed UK trip.


Modi, who has been in the eye of a storm following denial of visa to him by the US, was scheduled to attend the `Gujarat Day` function at London`s Royal Albert Hall on March 26. He was to fly to London on Friday afternoon from Mumbai.

Official sources in New Delhi said the PM called Modi at 10 pm and advised him to cancel the trip in view of intelligence reports from Central agencies that there was a specific threat to his life from the Dawood Ibrahim gang and jehadi groups, including Al-Qaida affiliates. Several radical Islamic groups are known to have a strong presence in the UK. When Modi showed reluctance to cancel the trip, the PM, according to the sources, told him that if he went ahead, not only his own life would be in danger but also the consequences for the nation could be grave. Modi finally relented.

In a short span of half an hour, the CM received calls from three Union government functionaries, advising him to cancel the visit. The first to call him was home secretary Dhirendra Singh. When he showed reluctance to heed the home secretary`s advice, home minister Shivraj Patil called him. But in vain.

Meanwhile, Modi held consultations with top leaders of his party, who reportedly told him that in a federal polity, the Centre`s advice cannot be ignored.

The final decision to cancel Narendra Modi`s visit to UK was taken after a call from the PM. Modi is reported to have told him: ``If you are advising me not to go, I`ll not go.

harimou#301

``You should really not twist the words of the Bhagavad Gita.``

I did say it was an inexact parallel. But the fact remains that most muslims believe that those verses were written in the context of the Prophet`s time and do not apply to contemporary events, except during the time of war.

On your earlier support of racial theory, since you are such a firm believer in this racial purity business, would be okay to ask, if by the same criterion, Iyengars have purer genes than Iyers?

For those north Indians smirking at the south brahminic obsession with racial purity, you may be surprised to know that similar views prevailed in north, specifically Panjab, until not long ago. In my parent`s generation, there was a popular saying that one should be suspicious of a dark skinned brahmin or a light skinned choorha (that`s what poor sweepers were called those days and are still called in Pakistan).

``You mean the arabs are grabbing 15-year old brahmin girls now?``

No. But the good muslim men of Hyderabad willingly offer their appropriately burkah clad 14-15 year old daughters for sums ranging from 10,000-20,000 rupees to the good visitors from the sands of Arabia. A nikkah is formalised , and the bride and the groom - old enough to be the bride`s grandfather , embark on a honeymoon lasting 1 or 2 weeks. Job done , the groom recites the dreaded word talaq thrice , and the divorced girl is respectably returned back to her father`s house. And wait begins for the next good muslim visitor from Arabia.

re: Sati and other brutal practices in South Asia
Sati, like the caste system, is a vestige from the paste. It needs to be condemned in the most brutal manner. But, one must also try and understand why it exists. Sati, like bride burning, honor killing, putting women under veil seeks to undermine the woman`s personality, nay the very existence. This was how brutal societal laws of the past operated. They thought that if a society was to be governed, its women had to be somehow made subordinate. such thoughts continue to dominate the rural landscape of India and much of pakistan.
Sati is about control. It was made honorable by attaching a religious significance to the whole affair. Nobody would want to commit suicide unwillingly. Sati is a crime perpetrated by the religious fundamentalists in India just as suicide killing is a crime by the Islamic fundoos. In both, religious fervour is a common theme. In both cases, glory of God is promised (with the added incentive of the 72 virgins in the latter case).
If one sees them in the right context one would realize that these practices are the leftovers from a remote, brutal past. India has enacted many laws (after the first one by William Bentick who outlawed Sati in Bengal) but Sati is still being reported because the rural landscape of India has not changed much (one reason why i am not much impressed with the high tech boom in Bangalore and other places).
So, let no Paki gloat over these practices. India is better situated to eradicate them in the end because of a large scale resentment among the educated middle class. For a feudalistic Pak, eradicating honor killings, atrocities against women are much more difficult.
Sridhar