The Existential Angst of a Hindu Terrorist

I was reading a past issue of Time magazine at a hair salon the other day.

An article on terrorism in Iraq by Sunnis caught my attention. On one of the pages of that article was a sidebar. A sidebar authored by a couple of Indians (I wants to riddle you heh: how many Indians does it take to author a sidebar. One to hold it and another to screw it in, no wait, that's a lightbulb, ha, ha).

Now we all know that sidebars serve an important purpose. I don't know what that important purpose is, but this one seemed to serve the important purpose of being a Guilt-ridden Overly-PC Over-compensator.

Terrorism is not the exclusive preserve of Islam, the sidebar informed us. Lest we, the average impressionable reader, think it. A suitable supporting example was provided by the Indian authors who had Hindu sounding names.

A Hindu organization called the LTTE, operating in Sri Lanka, has carried out the most suicide bombings of any terrorist organization in the world, they informed us. 

What, misinformed reader, you thought we Hindus were spineless cows, did you? You wouldn't know it by simply looking at us, but we are second to none when it comes to blowing up women and children. Don't go by our general economic success or levels of education or principles of religious tolerance and secularism. It's all an elaborate charade. We are a violent, bigoted people, bent on converting people to our violent, polytheistic, illogical point of view. Whenever we have been in the majority in any country, we have visited terrors on the minority and exterminated or converted them mercilessly and caused a huge reduction in their population. We have brutally suppressed freedom of religion. We have also been a bunch of prolifically-breeding-royal-pain-in-the-asses when in the minority in any country, and have insisted on our own medieval personal laws and contributed to fragmentation and partition of the host country. 

We are terrible. In fact, we make Islam really look like a "religion of peace."

The above paragraph, minus my weak sarcasm, contains a premise. The premise is that terrorism is not the exclusive preserve of Islam. This is followed by what seems to be an inductive proof.

I follow the premise. I agree with it. Any sufficiently bigoted moron can pick up an automatic weapon and become a terrorist. So it is quite true that Islam does not have an exclusive monopoly on terrorism (even though this fact is scant comfort to people who point out that eighty percent of radicalism in the world today can be laid at Islam's doorstep).

But I have a bit of a problem with the proof.

It is true that LTTE uses terrorism. But what exactly makes the LTTE a Hindu organization? I do not get that. Is it because its leader Prabhakaran is a Methodist? Is it because the LTTE co-founder and primary theoritician Anton Balasingham is a devoted Christian? Or is it because that almost thirty percent of its members are Christians? Or perhaps because their stated aim is to establish an autonomous Tamil homeland within Sri Lanka? And of course, as any cretin with half a brain knows, when somebody says Tamil, they really mean Hindu.

No wait, I know what it is. Most of the members of the LTTE are Hindus. So that's what makes it a Hindu organization. So that's how it is. 

It is crystal clear to me now. In fact, I have just learnt an important lesson. It is always wise to view an organization in terms of the religious identity of its majority group, no matter what the stated aim of the organization is.

Thanks to that epiphany, many things now fall into place. The Republican party is a Christian organization, I have just realized. Come to think of it, so is the Democratic party. FIFA is a Christian organization. The Olympic Committee is Christian. The United Nations is a Christian organization, soon to become Islamic. Microsoft is Christian (Damn those Christians, they control everything). India, however, is a Hindu nation, and don't you forget it.

To take an ethno-political issue and give it a religious spin requires a certain kind of gall and dishonesty. That, and the knowledge that your average reader, an American, is really not terribly informed about anything that goes on to the east of Europe (or even in Eastern Europe, for that matter) and will swallow as gospel anything that is reported in an important-looking piece of glossy paper. That helps too.

Time is a widely respected magazine. Americans--who publish it--place great faith in it. It is also read faithfully and uncritically by the gaggle of brainwashed Macaulyites which most educated Indians, myself included, are.

So I wonder, given the circulation numbers of Time and its associated ability to form opinion, does this (mis-)characterization of the LTTE as a Hindu terrorist organization constitute libel?