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The mainstreaming of anti-Muslim Hindutva Pop in India 

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Hindutva Pop in India

Ever since Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India, there has been a rise in the production of Hindutva pop and anti-Muslim music. What was earlier fringe has now become mainstream. Blazing anti-Muslim music that caters to Hindutva ideology during Hindu festivals and other functions organized by Hindutva ideologues is very common. Every day, Hindutva watchers on Twitter share several video clips of Hindutva supporters dancing to these hateful songs. Recently, during the Hindu festival of Ram Navami, a video clip shared on Twitter showed a large crowd of Hindutva supporters dancing and grooving to a song titled “Miyan Madarchod hain” (Muslims are motherfuckers). Similarly, in a video from Lucknow where Muslims had set up stalls to serve juice to celebratory Hindus, there is a song playing in the background, “Our swords will speak, Hindustan will speak and Topiwalas (Muslims) will bow their heads and say Jay Shree Ram too”.

This provocative music has led to communal riots in many places. During the Ram Navami festival, Hindutva supporters were seen gathering in front of mosques, chanting slogans and playing music that demonized Muslims. There were also many incidences of Hindutva supporters taking out their processions through Muslim majority areas and blazing out anti-Muslim songs in order to provoke Muslims.  

India has also had a history of gun violence through means of the infamous acts of celebratory gun firing. In various videos of the right-wing processions, Hindutva supporters are seen carrying guns and pistols unapologetically that they are brandishing while singing to the music of anti-Muslim hate.

Also read: Hindutva Pop: Anti-Muslim Music in India   

Hindutva Pop Singers

Al Jazeera recently published a report on Hindutva pop singers who produce this anti-Muslim music in India. Most of these singers are supported and endorsed by the ruling party BJP and its Hindutva supporters. 

Krishnavanshi is a Hindutva pop singer from BJP ruled Uttar Pradesh. He wanted to become a Bollywood Singer but due to fierce competition, he turned to this new genre of Hindutva pop. He has been pretty successful after his shift to Hindutva pop music. His songs contain a warning for Hindus to wake up before Muslims force them to offer Namaz. In many of his songs, he alleges that Muslims are “anti-nationals” who should go to Pakistan. He was recently awarded by the state government of Uttar Pradesh for his song praising the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

Laxmi Dubey is a female Hindutva pop singer from Madhya Pradesh. She has been singing anti-Muslim songs since 2014. One of her songs is “Agar Hindustan mein rehna hoga, To vande mataram kehna hoga” (If you want to stay in India, then praise the motherland). Dubey has a YouTube channel with 2.39K subscribers. During the 2019 general elections, she uploaded a song on her YouTube channel titled “Phir Modi Ko Lana hai” (We have to elect Modi again). The song praises Modi for his supposedly good work. As of now, the song has garnered more than 5.3 million views. The female singer has given her performance at many functions organized by Hindutva supporters and BJP leaders.

Another Hindutva pop singer is Upendra Rana from Uttar Pradesh. His Hindutva pop journey started in 2017. He has 370K subscribers on YouTube. One of his famous songs is “Dharm ke naam zameen gayi, Islami mulk banaye” (In the name of their religion, we lost our land; they made it an Islamic nation). The video for this song has Hindutva leader Yati Narsinghanand brandishing a sword.

The lyrics of Hindutva pop songs use the trope of stereotypical words and phrases commonly used to refer to Muslims based on their religious identity and lifestyles like the word “Kasaayi” meaning butcher, which not only reduces Muslims to their eating habits but also dehumanizes them based on them. They also take a dig at the apparently celebrated notion of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood being the essence of democracy in India- “Bahut ho chuka Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai” (Enough of this Hindu Muslim brotherhood now).

Also read: Festivities And Lawlessness- Appropriation of Laws in India

Why should Hindutva Pop worry us?

The most disturbing part about the production of these hateful songs is the amount of audience that it attracts. Names like Sandeep Acharya, Prem Khrishnavanshi, and Pawan Verma that were unknown in the mainstream music industry of India till lately, are gaining rapid popularity with a fan following that goes beyond lakhs. These self-proclaimed singers have gained massive fandom solely based on Hindutva pop songs that not only hurt the Muslim religious sentiments but are outrightly threatening the Muslim community. The rate of production and public approval of this kind of Islamophobic music is seen to be the inception of the Hindutva music industry.  

Hindutva pop used to be fringe but it has now become mainstream. Earlier, it used to be produced by political parties, mostly during election campaigns. However, of late there has been mass production of Hindutva pop and anti-Muslim music. It has become a new cultural phenomenon and Hindu extremists now play this music during Hindu festivals, religious processions, and even Hindu weddings. Whether it is during festivals or smaller intimate gatherings like wedding ceremonies, this music has become a customary practice which makes sure that the “othering” of Muslims happens. 

Legally speaking, even though most of the Hindutva pop comes under hate speech, the government or the social media websites do not seem to care about it. The BJP-led government in fact awards endorses and supports these singers. They are invited to the functions administered by Hindutva organizations, as well as other small-scale factions that work under the BJP and get highly paid to perform.

Also read: Indian Media’s Neglect of The Ruthless Opportunism in “The Kashmir Files”

Normalization of Islamophobia

India is currently witnessing a phase of gross normalization of such Islamophobic content through the medium of songs that are easily blended into pop culture music. It should go without mentioning that the target audience for this kind of hateful music is the majority Hindu population of India, and these singers are giving their music a sacrilegious tone quite literally by playing the sound of temple bells in the background. To go with the offensive lyrics and instigating sounds, the videos of these songs are as provocative as they can get. Dressed in saffron-coloured clothes with images of Hindu gods like Ram displayed in the background, these self-proclaimed singers attempt to display themselves as the warriors of Hindutva.  

Music and Genocide

Hindutva pop is eerily reminiscent of the music that was produced in Nazi Germany and during the Rwanda genocide. Under the Nazi regime, “music and song forged community, camaraderie and shared purpose.” Music was not limited to being a mere form of entertainment. It was used to promote a shared cause and bring people together. Similarly, the role of music in the Rwanda genocide was crucial. For Tutsi survivors in Rwanda, “genocide was like a festival”.

Genocides happen on a sliding scale. It is common knowledge that hate propaganda precedes genocide. Music also forms a part of the hate propaganda that caters to the genocidal tendencies of a population. Many experts have warned that what is happening in India might culminate in a genocide.

The emerging Hindutva music industry is following in the footsteps of the Nazis, who also utilized a combination of provocative music to go with mass gatherings to normalize and celebrate violence. The Nazi rule, much like the Hindutva used songs to help them forge a sense of community-based on the common purpose of inflicting violence. Music was more than just a means of entertainment in public places and even at the execution sites. It was also used as a weapon for bringing people together and promoting violence. Hindutva has also weaponized music in India in the form of Hindutva pop to serve their ulterior and violent motives against Muslims.

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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