Obama said, “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along lines of religious faith, splintered along any lines and it is unified as one nation.”
President Barack Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday (February 5, 2014) again repeated the religious tolerance in Indi by stating, “In past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs— acts that would have shocked Gandhiji,” meaning Mahatma Gandhi.
“Michelle and I returned from India — an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity — but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.” He also said, “We see faith driving us to do right. But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or worse, sometimes used as a weapon.”
Comparing Hinduism to Islam and Christianity is outrageous
It is unfortunate, outrageous, deceptive, prejudiced, unwarranted and totally misleading to imply that Hinduism is involved in acts of intolerance. President has done a disservice to associate Hinduism with Christianity and Islam. Both Abrahamic religions are exclusive, meaning that if you do not believe in my way of worship and my God, you are condemned to hell. Hinduism is tolerant, accommodative, open minded, pluralistic, and embraces the philosophy of “live, let live.” It does not believe in conversions, and does not exploit the poor by offering bribes and inducements. Hindus believe in freedom, discussion, dialogue, debates, and questioning the scriptures. They have not annihilated any civilization, destroyed any places of religion, not massacred other religious people, not engaged in deceptive conversions, and not terrorized the humanity. Hindus see only divinity in all living and nonliving entities and never abhor the individual for their religious believes. They have not conquered and subdued any nation for establishing their religion. They never play the role of victim in order to incite the media and turn the public opinion against other religions. Hinduism is the most philosophical, spiritual, and scientific religion. Any person in authority should go beyond one’s own religion, should take high road and should not plunge into this quagmire of religious controversy. Small mindedness is the character of an educated, and intelligent person. Religion should not pull any body down to whirlpool where nobody can out without being bruised. Equating such a religion with Christianity and Islam is beyond reason, objectivity, rational and scientific. Ignorance or the ploy to cloak behind the religious faith is not the answer for today’s mindless terror, brutality, deception and destruction. This is the discussion that should have taken place in the class rooms but not the halls of US Congress and Whitehouse. Unfortunately, it is the President of the United States who ruffled the feathers of religion and instigating the Muslims and Christians to demean them and humiliate them by playing their traditional victim role.
India Reacts
Indian government officials responded with restraint and with decency. India has been failing consistently to give appropriate and fitting response to the clandestine statements made over the years. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, “India has a huge cultural history of tolerance. Any aberration doesn’t alter the history … its part of India’s tolerance that even he found it comfortable and India found it comfortable to absorb him in the society.” He appropriately said the best example of Indian tolerance was sitting next to President Obama referring to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who exiled to India in 1959 and set up a government of Tibet in exile in Dharamshala.
Similarly Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister said, “as far as religious tolerance is concerned, it is embedded in our Indian tradition. India is the only country in the world where all the communities including various divisions of Muslims and all sects of Christians are present … In India, Parsis and Jewish are also there.”
His Holiness Dalai Lama on India
President Obama made these remarks in front of His Holiness Dalai Lama who was given shelter in India. They are most inappropriate, disturbing, surreal and stealthy considering what Dalai Lama said about India. “India is a model. Different religious traditions live peacefully and harmoniously. Please keep this tradition,” Dalai Lama said at the valedictory of the year-long celebration of the 1,960 year-old Malankara Orthodox Syrian church in Kochi in 2012. “India has great heritage. There is harmony among different religious traditions. India is a land where people of different religious faiths can live peacefully and harmoniously here. India’s tradition is very relevant in today’s world.”
Former President of India, Abdul Kalam
It is worth remembering the words of the former President of India about the rich heritage of India.
“In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Portuguese, the British, the Mughals, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others.” –President Dr. Abdul Kalam
US Press Reacts to President Obama
Reacting to President Obamas remarks, Charles Krauthamer appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s Radio program said that he is insulting India. “What the hell is he doing bringing India into this? I mean, it’s the first time I’ve heard India drawn into this discussion. Here he is essentially insulting, and it’s because it’s a Hindu country. It’s not Muslim. I mean, he’ll say in the name of Christ. He won’t say in the name of Muhammad and in the name of Allah. He won’t use those words. And then he goes after India, which is probably our strongest, most stable, most remarkable, democratically on the planet, considering all the languages and religions that it harbors. It has the second-largest Muslim population on Earth. And yet he goes after it as a way of saying hey, everybody here is at fault. They are not at fault.”
President Obama is failing in his responsibility to clearly look at the horrific history of the Abrahamic religions and to equate them with Hinduism, the most tolerant religion the humanity has ever seen or experienced. He is distorting the history, he is misguiding his shepherds, pleasing the Muslims, and trying to be in the good books of people who were successful in banning Visa to Narendra Modi in 2005. Both Abrahamic religions have been professing from their inception that anybody who would not embrace their faith would be condemned to hell, death and torture. They can be destroyed, sacrificed and killed. Both Quran and Bible have hundreds of verses that allow the nonbelievers to be slaughtered and their places of would be destroyed. In return what do Hindus do? As Swami Vivekananda said, “The difference is this. They had not the fanfaronade of the reformers of today; they had no curses on their lips as modern reformers have; their lips pronounced only blessings. They never condemned.”
Look How India Blessed the Abrahamic Religions
The Presidents of India: The country that has elected four Muslims and one Sikh as Presidents should not be the target for President Obama’s insensitive remarks about acts of intolerance. India had five Presidents who belong to other religions. Dr. Zakir Hussain, Mohammad Hidayatullah, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam were Muslim and Giani Zail Singh was a Sikh.
Chief Ministers in Five States: Although Christians are only about 3 percent of the population, Hindu dominant voters elected five Chief Minister in India. Hindus have elected them in Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.
Christians and Muslims occupied important positions
Chairperson of the country’s ruling political alliance UPA is Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi were practicing Catholic Christians.
Country’s Defense Minister – A.K. Antony, (Christian) the Foreign Secretary – Ranjan Mathai, (Christian)
Head of the Air Wing of military – Anil Kumar Browne, (Christian)
P.J. Kurien – Dy. Chairman Rajya Sabha, (Christian)
P.C. Chacko, newly appointed Congress Spokesperson, (Christian)
The country’s Foreign Minister Mr Salman Khurshid, (Muslim)
Minister of State for External Affairs Mr E. Ahmed, (Muslim)
Chief Justice of India Mr Altmas Kabir, (Muslim)
The nation’s Vice President and Chairman of Rajya Sabha Mr Hamid Ansari, (Muslim)
Chief Election Commissioner Mr S.Y. Qureshi, (Muslim)
Attorney General of India Mr Goolam Essaji Vahanvati, (Muslim)
Minister for Minorities Affairs – K. Rahman Khan, (Muslim)
Rashid Alvi – the Congress Spokesperson is a Muslims.
President Obama VS his administration
President is failing to name the names. He is abrogating his responsibility to call spade a spade. He is refusing to identify Islam as the source of violence, extremism, torture, beheading and radicalism. He is hiding behind the words such as radical terrorists, and Islamic terrorists. You cannot defeat the enemy if you cannot identify the source.Thomas Friedman says that, “When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians.” The administration officials acknowledge that they have list of individual who cited Islam as the source of their violence. “But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community.” And Josh Earnest continues to say that “purposeless violent extremists rummage through the scriptures of great faiths, looking for some verses to cite to support their mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy texts of Islam.” But Obama refuses to acknowledge that almost all terrorist are Muslims and cite Quran as the source of their terrorist acts.
Religious Tolerance in India
For centuries Hindu have welcomed by almost all the religions with open hands, respected them and allowed them to practice their religion. Jewish people openly declared that India is the only country that has not discriminated. Likewise Parsees, the descendants of Zoroastrians, were thrown out from their homeland, Persia, to be welcomed by India. Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and many others religions lived peacefully. Hindus have no history of killing, raping, rampaging, terrorizing, decimating and destroying other religions and annihilating the civilizations. It is worth remembering the former Presidents words we quoted earlier.
BUDDHISTS: In fact, on December 1, 2011 Sri Dalai Lama proudly announced that “I consider myself as a son of India” and carried the message of ahimsa across the globe and says that the country’s spiritual leaders should promote love and harmony in India and outside. Further he observed “that India has so many languages and dialects, yet remains strongly united because there is the freedom of speech and rule of law.”
JEWS: Jewish people lived in peace in India without any discrimination for more than 2000 years. Gary Weiss observed that in India the ethnic diversity “is a historical fact. Much as we in the West may resent it, India has a lot to teach us when it comes toreligious tolerance. India may be the only country in the world that has been free of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout its history.
That’s really a bit astonishing, if not ridiculous, when you think about it. Compare that with any Western nation, be it France or Russia or even the U.S., where discrimination against Jews in housing was a fact of life as recently as the 1950s. But in “backward” India, from the beginning, the Jewish communities have not only been free of discrimination but have dominated the commercial life of every place where they have settled–something that has fed traditional European anti-Semitism.
Why has India remained free of this scourge? Various reasons have been advanced for that–such as, the Hindu religion does not seek to convert those from other faiths. What we do know is that anti-Semitism seems alien to the Indian character.”
MUSLIMS: Shah Rukh Khan, the Muslim movie actor said, “that we in India are extremely safe and happy. We have an amazing democratic, free and secular way of life. In the environs that we live here in my country India, we have no safety issues regarding life or material. As a matter of fact it is irksome for me to clarify this non-existent issue.”
PARSEES: Chief Justice of India, S H Kapadia, observed, “I am proud to be an Indian. India is the only country where a member of the minority Parsi community with a population of 167,000, like myself, can aspire to attain the post of the Chief Justice of India. These things do not happen in our neighboring countries
Maria Wirth brings up the question, “Are Indians good natured?” They generally are, and probably more than other people. There are few countries where the attitude of “live and let live” is as pronounced as in India. “All are one family” is the traditional attitude.
It is worth remembering the words of A L Basham about Indian humility, gentleness and kindness: ‘To us the most striking thing feature of ancient Indian civilization is its humanity….Our second general impression of ancient India is that her people enjoyed life, passionately delighting both in the things of the senses and the things of the spirit….India was a cheerful land, whose people, each finding a niche in a complex and slowly evolving social system , reached a higher level of kindliness and gentleness in their mutual relationships than any other nation of antiquity. For this, as well as for her great achievements in religion, literature, art and mathematics, one European student at least would record his admiration of India’s ancient culture’
CHRISTIANITY
That is absolutely correct if Christiana and Muslims have lived with few principles of respecting other religion, if they have not claimed as the exclusive religions where nonbelievers in their religion are dammed to hell, where torture, terror, bombings, killings, explosions, rape, jihad, deceptions, hatred toward ‘idol’ worshippers, allurement are used to create fear and convert the Hindus into their intolerant, dishonest and brutal religions. Both religions should stop cheating, deceiving, forcing and coercing Hindus to get converted to their respective religions.
Comparing Hinduism with other faiths, Josh Shrei stated that “Hinduism” is Open Source; and most other faiths are Closed Source … “Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code…. India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free reign to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and documented.” He goes on to say, “The results of India’s God Project — as I like to refer to Hinduism — have been absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge — scientific, faith-based, and experience-based — that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness, and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been specifically identified to work with one’s own mind are without compare.”
In comparison, aces to God in Christianity is considered a trade mark that means it is considered most closed system. Josh Shrei observed that, “The ability to reinterpret the bible, or the teachings of Christ, or the Old Testament, or to challenge the basic fundamental authority of the church has been nonexistent for most of the church’s history. Those who dared to do so were quite often killed.”
Dithering any longer identify the culprit for all the atrocities will be result in more bombings, massacres, beheadings, decimation and untold brutality.
“Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoilation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.”Will Durant
Avigdor Liberman, Foreign Minister of Israel said on February 15, 2015 that “The chain of terrorism incidents in Copenhagen at the synagogue and at the freedom of expression conference, proves what we have said throughout the years – Israel and Jews have been made to absorb terror attacks first and foremost because we are the front line in the war of terrorism being waged against the West and the entire free world.”
“The international community should not settle for declarations and rallies against this, but shake up the rules of “political correctness”, and wage total war against Islamic terrorism and its roots,” Liberman said.
Thomas Jefferson, “Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.”
Goa Inquisition 
The Big House with 200 cells Inquisition was conducted was known as the Big House where the screams of agony of men, women, and children could be heard in the streets, in the stillness of the night, as they were brutally interrogated, flogged, and slowly dismembered in front of their relatives. Eyelids were sliced off and extremities were amputated so carefully that a person could remain conscious, even though the only thing that remained was his torso and a head.
Three kinds of torture were practiced against the Hindus
- The torture by rope consisted of the arms being tied backwards and then raised by a pulley, leaving the victim hanging for some time, and then let the victim drop down to half a foot above the floor, then rose again. These continued up and down movements dislocated the joints and made the prisoner emit horrible cries of pain.
- The torture by water made the victim to lie across an iron bar, and was forced to imbibe water without stopping. The iron bar broke the vertebrae and caused horrible pains, whereas the water treatment provoked vomits and asphyxia.
- The torture by fire was definitely the worst: the victim was hung above a fire, which burnt the soles of the feet, and the jailers rubbed bacon and other combustible materials on the burning feet. The feet were burnt until the victim confessed, “I am Christian.”
