ipaul on Islamic State

Nobel laureate V.S.ipaul has done the world yeoman service by writing a 2,500-word article in Britain’s Mail on Sunday on the Islamic State (IS) where he paints the diabolic outfit in its true colours, compares it to the zis and urges the responsible tions of the world to join hands in annihilating it. ipaul points out that the reaction of most Western leaders to beheadings and other acts of extreme violence and cruelty by the IS has been to distance it from genuine Islam and insist that its members represent a fringe element among Muslims. ipaul does not entirely agree with this view, and does not hesitate to call a spade a spade. “ISIS (the Islamic State) could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich (as opposed to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich),” says ipaul. “Like the zis, ISIS fatics are anti-Semitic, with a belief in their own racial superiority. They are anti- democratic: the Islamic state is a totalitarian state, absolute in its authority. There is even the same self-regarding love of symbolism, presentation and propaganda; terror is spread to millions through films and videos created to professiol standards of which Goebbels would have been proud. Just as the Third Reich did, ISIS categorizes its enemies as worthy of particular means execution from decapitation to crucifixion and death by fire. Whereas the zis pretended to be the guardians of civilization in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, ISIS destroys everything that arises from human impulse to beauty,” ipaul adds.

Adolf Hitler died in 1945 and so did the zi movement, even though a neo-zi movement has maged to survive in Germany without being able to do anything noteworthy to disrupt Germany’s elected government today. People of the present generation might, therefore, forget how strong the zi hatred of Jews was and how this hatred was fanned and stoked until it engulfed almost the entire German consciousness. A total of six million Jews were killed, either in gas chambers or by being shot down. No one stopped to think that this irratiol behaviour of the zis in isolating the Jews for annihilation was linked to the accident of one’s birth as a member of some ethnic group—a situation over which no one can have any control. The IS, likewise, is not merely anti-Jew but also anti-everyone not born a Muslim and is particularly inimical to those who are opposed to the idea of jihad. There is clear evidence of a total lack of tolerance towards other religions and an obsessive sense of superiority of one’s own. Such intolerance of other faiths and the kinds of grotesque and cruel punishment meted out to those of other faiths has no place in the 21st century when most of the governments functioning are democratic ones. The other major cause of fear stems from the perseverance of the IS and the eagerness of converts from other faiths to join the outfit and to participate in its beheadings.

ipaul’s views that educated Muslims all over the world have not distanced themselves from the IS in sufficient numbers is not entirely borne out by facts. According to Mohammad Sajjad, Professor of Aligarh Muslim University, the comparison of the IS to the zis is flawed as the IS is “a non-State actor while the zis were State actors.” To most people, however, such hair-splitting would seem inconsequential considering that both the IS and the zis had the means to carry out the killings of people that the accident of birth had put in other faiths. Professor Sajjad has also rebutted ipaul’s allegation that progressive Muslims have not condemned the ISIS. “He has to go through the social media to know how many Muslim leaders and intellectuals have condemned the IS action. Even in India, domint sections of clergy and Muslim leaders have come forward and condemned any kind of religious extremism and intolerance,” he said. While this is encouraging, the fact remains that the only way to end the diabolic mece of the IS is to annihilate it. Obviously, one would need the initiative of a superpower like the United States to achieve this objective. The US has estimated that such a task would take nothing less than three years to accomplish. It is important that all civilized tions of the world that cherish human freedom must lend a hand to the total annihilation of the IS as speedily as possible.