The October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Hamas, during which waves of Islamic terrorists slaughtered over 1,500 people, including infants and Holocaust survivors; raped hundreds of women; and took around 200 hostages, including babies and toddlers, will rank as one of the most apocalyptic events of the century. The invasion, which was broadcast almost in real-time by the terrorists, brought the atrocities right into our living rooms, leaving no ambiguity about Hamas’s policy of terrorizing the world. One video shows a woman bleeding into her shorts as the terrorists force her out of a vehicle in Gaza; in all likelihood, she was either gang-raped or bayoneted. Another clip shows a woman, later identified as 22-year-old Shani Louk, stripped down to her underwear and lying face down in a truck, her legs twisted at unnatural angles. Hamas terrorists sit on her body, and Palestinian bystanders spit on it. [2]

Instead of condemning Hamas’s brutalities, many Muslims and liberals around the world have not only doubled down on the terrorist group’s actions, they are bizarrely blaming Israel for the outbreak of hostilities. These two groups, in coordination with the mainstream media, are also attacking Hindus for supporting Israel. While Hindus have every right to back whoever they want, the main reason there is widespread Indian support for Israel is that, just like the Jews, the Hindus have suffered horrible atrocities at the hands of both Islamic and Christian invaders.

When Hindus see hundreds of Islamic terrorists paragliding into Israeli border neighborhoods and raping women, they are reflexively reminded of the countless invasions mounted against India over the past millennium in which Islamic invaders destroyed Indian cities, killed adult men, and carried off women and young children. In fact, during the previous millennium, the concept of Jauhar – in which Hindu women committed mass immolation – became popular because it was preferable to becoming the slave or concubine of an unwashed, illiterate, lascivious marauder from Afghanistan, Iran, or Tatarstan. [3]

Author Omendra Ratnu points out another significant reason for this painful choice of burning themselves while still alive. This was due to the Islamic practice of necrophilia – the sexual abuse of Hindu women’s dead bodies. “After Jauhar, all that the barbarians would get were ashes.” [4]

Author Omendra Ratnu points out another significant reason for this painful choice of burning themselves while still alive. This was due to the Islamic practice of necrophilia – the sexual abuse of Hindu women’s dead bodies. “After Jauhar, all that the barbarians would get were ashes.”

According to Kreately, this behavior stems from their religious doctrines and beliefs. Additionally, the four orthodox Sunni schools of jurisprudence – al-Hanafi, al-Hanbali, al-Maliki, and al-Shafi’i – implicitly permit necrophilia. [5]

As per the Maliki compilation, adultery is described as follows: If a husband enters his dead wife — any which way, from front or behind — there is no penalty for him. (Sharh Mukhtasar al-Khalil fi al-fiqh al-Maliki)

As per Imam Shafai’s instructions mentioned in the compilation, A dead body need not be washed after you have sexual intercourse with it. Rather, you just need to wash your penis. (Book of Purity – Chapter of Washing)

Such atrocities of Muslim invaders have left an indelible scar on the collective Hindu psyche. This is why many Hindus are saying: We are all Israelis in this war. If you dig deeper into history, you’ll find enough atrocity material to fill up an entire encyclopedia, but in this article, we will focus on the atrocities committed against Hindus in the modern era. A word of warning, though – if you are prone to depression or easily get sick, it is recommended you stop reading right now.

Early Islamic attitudes towards women

First, why does only one group – the radicalized Islamists – focus so exclusively on rape and sex slavery. You see, among the world’s leading religions, Islam is unique because the Koran and the Hadiths allow Muslims to have four wives and an unlimited number of slaves and concubines. Abu al-Waqidi, the eighth-century biographer of Muhammed, quotes the prophet: “In my ummah, he is the best who has the largest number of wives.” [6] 

The company of women had a very important place in Muhammad’s life, explains historian Sita Ram Goel. For instance, the prophet’s favorite wife, Aisha, used to say: “The prophet loved three things – women, scents, and food; he had his heart’s desire of the two first, but not of the last.” [7]

William Muir, the 18th-century Scottish Orientalist, comments: “According to these aphorisms and sayings attributed to the prophet, the place of women was prominent in his mind, a preoccupancy in his psyche.” [8]

Goel adds that one of the factors that determined Muslim psychology about women was Muhammad’s lifestyle as a model. “Muslims try to imitate, as far as possible, the lifestyle of Muhammad. He is the model, the paradigm of every pious Muslim. There is nothing unusual in this phenomenon.”

The misogynistic attitudes of Islamic invaders were evident as soon as they established a strong base in India. The Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Akbar’s court poet and friend Abul Fazl mentions an aphorism that was popular in the Mughal court: “A man should marry four wives — a Persian woman to have somebody to talk to; a Khurasani woman, for his housework; a Hindu woman, for nursing his children; and a woman from Mawarannahr (Transoxiana), to have someone to whip as a warning for the other three.” [9]

Goel observes that the mention of so many nationalities in the saying shows that obtaining wives and concubines through all kinds of means – capture, purchase, enslavement – was in vogue among medieval Muslims. “Islam permits polygamy with unbelievable liberality. A man can have four wives at any point in time; that is, if he chooses to have a fifth one, he can divorce one of the already at hand and keep the number within the legal limits of four. Besides, he can have as many slave girls or concubines as he pleases.”

Now that we have established that the misogyny that pervades radical Islam is not accidental, isolated, or a new phenomenon, let’s explore how it has filtered into the thinking of modern-day Islamists, resulting in violence and rape on an industrial scale not seen since the Jewish Holocaust.

1971 War: Rape of Bengalis

On March 10, 1971, a group of senior military officers assembled for a meeting at the Operations Room of the headquarters of the Pakistan Army’s Eastern Command at Dhaka. Among them was the head of the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh), Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi. His hatred of Bengalis was so intense that he said: “Main is haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga. Yeh mujhe kiya samajhtey hain.” (I will change the lineage of this bastard nation. They don’t know me.) [10]

The Pakistani general meant that the relatively light-skinned Punjabis and Pathans of the Pakistan Army would change the complexion of the darker Bengalis. This was a diabolic reprise of Nazi Germany’s experiments in eugenics. The difference was the Pakistan Army’s plan of action was the mass rape of Bengali women.

On the night of March 25, 1971, in an exercise codenamed “Operation Searchlight,” the Pakistani Army began a brutal massacre that lasted nine long months. Pakistani soldiers not only killed three million Bengalis (approximately 70 percent of them Hindus) but also raped as many as 600,000 Bengali women and little girls. [11] The Pakistani generals fixed rape quotas for their soldiers, and porn movies were shown to stir up these Punjabi and Pathan troops. [12]

On the night of March 25, 1971, in an exercise codenamed “Operation Searchlight,” the Pakistani Army began a brutal massacre that lasted nine long months. Pakistani soldiers not only killed three million Bengalis (approximately 70 percent of them Hindus) but also raped as many as 600,000 Bengali women and little girls.

According to US-based Bangladeshi journalist Anushay Hossain, the first time rape was consciously applied as a weapon of war was during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. She writes: Each time I go home to Bangladesh, a relative, usually male, takes me aside and whispers stories to me about the “piles, and piles of bodies of rape victims” you would find under bridges in mass graves. “How many women were raped and killed in the hands of Pakistani soldiers,” my uncle tells me as his voice whimpers. “You cannot imagine, Ma.” [13]

Bangladeshi scholar Bina D’Costa tracked down Australian doctor Geoffrey Davis, who was brought to Dhaka to perform late-term abortions and facilitated large-scale international adoption of the war babies born to Bangladeshi women. Her conversation with Davis was published in a Bangladeshi publication, including stories of women being tied to trees and gang raped, breasts hacked off, dumped in mass graves, and being held in Pakistani rape camps.

When asked if the usual figures of the number of women raped by the Pakistani Army, 200,000-400,000, are accurate, Davis states that they are underestimated: “Probably the numbers are very conservative compared with what they did. The descriptions of how they captured towns were very interesting. They’d keep the infantry back and put artillery ahead, and they would shell the hospitals and schools. And that caused absolute chaos in the town. And then, the infantry would go in and begin to segregate the women. Apart from little children, all those who were sexually mature would be segregated. And then the women would be put in the compound under guard and made available to the troops… Some of the stories they told were appalling. Being raped again and again and again. A lot of them died in those [rape] camps. There was an air of disbelief about the whole thing. Nobody could credit that it really happened! But the evidence clearly showed that it did happen.” [14]

On August 2, 1971, Time magazine published details of the massacre: “The Hindus, who account for three-fourths of the refugees and a majority of the dead, have borne the brunt of the Moslem military’s hatred. Even now, Moslem soldiers in East Pakistan will snatch away a man’s lungi (sarong) to see if he is circumcised, obligatory for Moslems; if he is not, it usually means death. Others are simply rounded up and shot. Commented one high US official: “It is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland.” [15]

Genocide researcher Professor R.J. Rummel said: “These ‘willing executioners’ were fuelled by an abiding anti-Bengali racism, especially against the Hindu minority. Bengalis were often compared with monkeys and chicken …. And the soldiers were free to kill at will.” [16] 

The Women’s Media Center lists the pattern of rape by the Pakistanis. Thousands of Bengali women were abducted and held by force in barracks, where they were raped night after night for months. Captive women and young girls were raped by anywhere from two to 80 men a night. A 13-year-old survivor interviewed in an abortion clinic by a female photojournalist was at first “gagged to keep from screaming during attacks.” But as months passed and “the captives’ spirit was broken, the soldiers devised a simple quid pro quo. They withheld the daily ration of food until the girls had submitted to the full quota.” [17]

One survivor stated that when her fellow captives died due to continuous torture, she and the other women were forced to dig graves and bury their peers. Pornographic movies were shown to soldiers “in an obvious attempt to work the men up.”

Women of all ages were sexually assaulted, from young girls to 75-year-old grandmothers. Young girls were “strapped to green banana trees and repeatedly gang-raped. A few weeks later, they were strapped to the same trees and hacked to death.” Women were often left in mass graves. Women’s bodies found in mass graves often had their breasts cut off.

The US-based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a statement in December 2021: “The atrocities committed by the Pakistan army and the local collaborators—such as Razakars, Al-badrs, and Al shams—included a systematic policy of sexual violence against Bengalis, a majority of them Bengali Hindu women and girls, involving vicious gang rapes, life force atrocities, sexual slavery, sexual torture, and forced maternity.” [18]

Unfortunately – although not surprising given the country was born out of hatred and racism – most Pakistanis to this day refuse to condemn these atrocities. As far as they are concerned, because the overwhelming majority of the people they killed, raped, and maimed were Hindus, it is not at all a crime but a religiously sanctioned jihad. Plus, they didn’t consider Bengali Muslims to be ‘real Momins,’ so their deaths were just collateral damage. The Pakistani attitude is best summed up by the words of General Niazi, who is reported to have said, “One cannot fight a war here in East Pakistan and go all the way to the western wing to have an ejaculation!” This was thought funny at the time. [19]

1947: Genocide at Partition

As the partition date approached in mid-1947, violence erupted in Rawalpindi and other cities of what is now Pakistan. The scale of violence against women was immense, with an estimated 83,000 Hindu and Sikh women abducted by Muslims. [20]

In their book, How Pakistan Was Formed: The Economic Rationale for Partition, Dipak Basu and Victoria Miroshnik assert that most rapes and murders during partition were perpetrated by Muslims. “The carnage began with the Muslim League’s announcement of Direct Action Day in 1946, resulting in over 7,000 Hindus killed in Calcutta alone. As the partition date approached in mid-1947, violence erupted in Rawalpindi and other cities of what is now Pakistan.” [21] 

The authors suggest that the scale of violence against women was immense, with an estimated 83,000 women abducted by Muslims. Furthermore, they point out that the leaders of the Muslim League (the party that represented Muslims in India), including Mohammad Ali Jinnah, took no action to stop or condemn the violence that occurred during the partition. Although violence also occurred in several cities in what is now India, the authors characterize it as defensive and on a much smaller scale.

Hindu and Sikh women became the unfortunate victims of heinous crimes. “This marked the beginning of a series of violent episodes that would forever scar countless lives. The impact extended beyond individual victims; entire communities felt the trauma, from villages to towns and cities, affecting Hindu and Sikh women.” [22]

“More than 30 Hindu women asked this brave man what they should do. He ordered them to plunge into the fire rather than getting raped and killed by rioters, and so all the women obeyed him. Later, this Hindu man also jumped into the fire.”

These atrocities have been extensively recorded. Pakistan’s Punjab province, where all communities had lived in relative harmony, became the epicenter of violence against Hindus and Sikhs. “Hindu women carrying their children desperately pleaded for mercy. They begged and conceded to send their children to village seminaries and even pleaded with Muslim rioters to marry their Hindu girls, converting them to Islam. However, no person heard their cries, as every Muslim was focused on plundering gold, currency, and other valuables stashed in the maari (mansion). They set them all on fire,” recalls Resham Bee, who was a witness to these horrors. [23]

Mola Bukhsh, a 90-year-old resident of Haraaj village, remembers an incident of a Hindu man who showed tough resistance to Muslim rioters in the adjacent village of Gugh throughout that day. By evening, however, rioters had set the building on fire where the valiant man stood. “More than 30 Hindu women asked this brave man what they should do. He ordered them to plunge into the fire rather than getting raped and killed by rioters, and so all the women obeyed him. Later, this Hindu man also jumped into the fire,” Bukhsh recollects the horrific episode.

According to The Jaipur Dialogues, the stories of Hindu and Sikh women during the Partition of India serve as a stark reminder of the horrors that unfolded. “The violence they endured left enduring scars on their lives, both physically and emotionally. Recognizing their suffering is essential in comprehending the full impact of this historical tragedy and a vital step toward preventing such atrocities from occurring in the future.” [24]

Endgame

Like the mass rapes of Israeli women by Hamas, the playbook of Islamists worldwide remains the same. Their prurient upbringing, religious sanction, and historical role models all encourage them to rape and abduct non-Muslim women. This has gone on since jihadi hordes burst out of Arabia. And wherever they are in a majority, the thousand-year-old pattern of violence against women is repeated over and over again. All of this can be distilled into the words of the 19th orientalist Julius Wellhausen: “Victory over an enemy would seem to have been consummated only when the enemy’s daughter was introduced into the conqueror’s harem.” [25

Citations

1. Surah Al-Ahzab 33:41-50 – Towards Understanding the Quran – Quran Translation Commentary – Tafheem ul Quran (islamicstudies.info)
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/kidnappings-israel-hamas-photographs/675593/
3. https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/jauhar-history-collective-self-immolation-during-war-india-002837
4. https://kreately.in/74-1-2-akbars-slaughter/
5. https://kreately.in/johar-prevented-necrophilia/
6. Katib al-Waqidi, Tabaqat, Vol. II, page 146
7. https://voibooks.bitbucket.io/mssmi/ch12/
8. William Muir, Life of Mahomet, page 528
9. Abul Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, page 442, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.529980/page/n441/mode/2up?q=khurasan
10. Maj Gen Khadim Hussain Raja, A Stranger in My Own Country – East Pakistan 1969-1974, page 61
11. https://www.oneindia.com/india/exhibition-showcases-torture-pakistani-army-during-1971-war-1694074.html?story=1
12. https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/conflicts/bangladesh
13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldviews/2012/05/21/1971-rapes-bangladesh-cannot-hide-history/?sh=2c29f92e16df
14. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/risk-disaster-reduction/sites/risk_disaster_reduction/files/bd_genocide_booklet.pdf
15. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,878408-3,00.html
16. https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-affairs/in-east-pakistan-in-1971-a-forgotten-genocide-bangladesh-liberation-war/article38307183.ece
17. https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/conflicts/bangladesh
18. https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-affairs/in-east-pakistan-in-1971-a-forgotten-genocide-bangladesh-liberation-war/article38307183.ece
19. Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror, Chapter 4
20. https://www.thejaipurdialogues.com/itihasa/the-impact-of-partition-violence-on-hindu-and-sikh-women/
21. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/book-review-how-pakistan-was-formed-the-economic-rationale-for-partition/
22. https://www.thejaipurdialogues.com/itihasa/the-impact-of-partition-violence-on-hindu-and-sikh-women/
23. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/horrors-of-partition-they-set-them-all-on-fire-472318
24. https://www.thejaipurdialogues.com/itihasa/the-impact-of-partition-violence-on-hindu-and-sikh-women/
25. https://archive.org/details/mohammedandtheri00marguoft/page/n233/mode/2up?q=enemy%27s+daughter

(The article was published on Hindudvesha.org on October 23, 2023 and has been reproduced here)