Richard Benkin quotes
Scholars, journalists, activists, and others have an almost knee-jerk tendency to praise Bangladesh's beginnings as a secular nation and trace its slide into Islamist domination from the 1975 assassination of its founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. That praise is warranted - but only to a limited extent, for secularism and any semblance of democratic ideals were in their death throes long before Sheikh Mujib was.
Richard Benkin
Bangladesh is heavily invested in advertising itself to Americans and other potential trading partners as a "moderate Muslim country." ... Over the last few decades, however, they have come more and more under the thumb of radical jihadis. Yet, they have not stopped trying to portray themselves as what they perhaps were at one point, and few Americans know that the reality is not what they are saying it is.
Richard Benkin
Rabindra Ghosh, I said " has extensive evidence that there are Members of Parliament heavily involved in stealing land from Hindus, and even in rapes and other atrocities. You know what your enemies think of you as you sit next to them smiling? 'We can steal their land, rape their daughters and sisters, and just give them a few Taka.'" (xiii)
Richard Benkin
This book contains quite a few references to Nazi Germany, and there is a tendency for many people to discount such comparisons because they are so overused and often in simplistic and inappropriate ways. I am no less tolerant of such facile uses of a horrific set of events; and I find their overuse an insult to the memories of the victims. But I am using it rather extensively in this book precisely because the parallel is appropriate, certainly in the similar end foreseen by Islamists for Bengali Hindus and Nazis for Jews. If that recognition awakens the world to action, then this will be one of the most important uses of the comparison since World War II. (6-7)
Richard Benkin
One incident that is becoming more and more common was related to me in almost every colony I visited between 2008 and 2010: the random abduction of young Hindu women and girls. With a numbing consistency, their testimonies would tell of a young female walking by the side of the road. In some cases, she was going to draw water; in others she was on her way to school; and in some, she was just walking o her way to see a relative or friend. out of the blue, a gang of Muslims would drive up and snatch the woman and then take her to a vacant building or field and rape her repeatedly. (85)
Richard Benkin
15 year old Fulfuli Rani Roy was kidnapped by local Muslims from Dolapar in the state of Rajshahi. Her father filed a complaint with the local police, identifying the perpetrator as Mahabul Islam, the son of Rayaz Uddinbut. The police, however, said that they would not pursue a case in nthe matter, refusing as well to try and located and recover the girl. As a result, Fulfuli Rani Roy has not been seen or heard from since, and her father along with others allege that her kidnappers murdered her. (99)
Richard Benkin
![The embassy [in Washington], however, has not commented on incidents of anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh from 2009 forward; a period roughly consonant with the installation of the Awami League government in Bangladesh...(117) (Richard Benkin)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/48/richard-benkin-consonant-embassy-971548.webp)
In June (2008), a large mob of approximately 5,000 Muslim fundamentalists, "comprised mostly of Bangladeshi infiltrators", attacked a major religious gathering of Hindus at one of their holiest sites at one of the pilgrimage points of Gangasagar in West Bengal. They outnumbered the pilgrims by 25 to one, and focused assaults on women and children... the West Bengal police... did not charge any of them. But in a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany, which would charge the Jewish community when they were attacked, the West Bengal government arrested 15 of the religious pilgrims "under several sections of the Indian Penal Code for inciting communal disharmony, while the perpetrators roam Scott free." (152-3, citing Survey of Hindu Human Rights West Bengal)
Richard Benkin
While the act has been used against other religious and ethnic minorities on occasion, only Hindus have faced a consistent and organized effort to use the law to eliminate them from the Bangladeshi polity. Hindus are the VPA's real targets. Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University undertook the most authoritative study of the VPA and concluded that by 1997, 40 percent of Hindu families in Bangladesh had been affected by it and more than half of all Hindu-owned land already had been confiscated under thee act. Much more land and many more Hindus have been affected in the fourteen years since then. So, there is no doubt that the VPA is a critical ingredient in ethnic cleansing. The fact that the percent of Hindus in Bangladesh has been cut in half concurrent with the act is evidence of those even more sinister, ethnic cleansing, motives behind the law. (177)
Richard Benkin
