[ALARABY.CO.UK] As India continues to silence, oppress and infringe upon the human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
of Kashmiris, through startling methods of violence and under the cover of media blackout, the global practice of Moslem repression has now reached new heights.
Alongside China, which has imprisoned perhaps more than 1 million Uighur and other Moslems in its "re-education camps," the world can now bear witness that its two most populous countries - comprising more than a third of the global population - have made the subjugation and repression of Moslems a cruel element of their ongoing nation-building projects.
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Add to this the unspeakable crimes and forced migration committed against Rohingya Moslems in Myanmar two years ago and the manner Moslems and Islam have increasingly become a proxy for western democracies to debate and frame issues around national culture across Europe
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
The evident conclusion: the 'othering' of Moslems has become a global epidemic gripping a range of countries in search of defining the limits of national belonging to serve their own agendas.
This is not the first time a global trend has emerged that places the issue of Moslem belonging - or more accurately, exculsion - at the intersection of debates around culture, politics, and security.
Colonial powers, such as the British and Dutch long harboured fears of an international Moslem conspiracy that could inflict chaos on their territorial possessions and manipulate their populace in presumably nefarious ways.
The US-led global "War on Terror" has long been recognised as a template for other countries to surveil and circumscribe the presence, activities and movements of Moslems in their own territories and abroad. Its language became a potent rhetorical tool for regimes to terrorise their Moslem populations.
Initially, these strategies, laden with conspiratorial and xenophobic thinking as they are, were mostly understood via a singular cultural (western imperial) or security (global terrorist networks) lens through which to view Moslems' presence in the world.
These constructions portray Moslems as dangerous precisely because of their ability to connect with colleagues scattered across the globe in pursuit of a supposedly diabolical agenda. In this view, the danger of "Moslemness" primarily has been seen as an external threat. Territories with Moslems who could be made to avoid, or be immunised from this larger community, were seen to be more secure.
Today's variation of the drive to dehumanise and 'other' Moslems, as exhibited in places like India, China and elsewhere, primarily pertains to how Moslems must be excluded, incorporated, or "re-programmed" to better to conform to the internal confines of a nation's sense of territory, culture, or belonging.
If the imperial and global terror paradigms largely sought to ensure Moslems remain disconnected from their co-religionists abroad, then the current trend is to ensure they are conscripted into nationalist visions at home and, if not, then to be potentially prohibited from entering, remaining, or forcibly removed.
It has less to do with Moslems' inclusion in a community outside of a territory, and more to do with their exclusion within it. This type of thinking is focused less on the Moslems over there, and more on the Moslems over here.
In places where majoritarian religious cultures put Moslems in the minority, the manipulation of cultural nationalism and political populism serve to determine the limits of Moslem national belonging.
Hindu, Confucian, Christian and Buddhist majority societies, the world's largest democracy, largest authoritarian state, and western "liberal" democracies all play off this vulnerability to fulfill their own agenda.
The judicial and extrajudicial tools used and justifications, if offered at all, are equally diverse: Couched in the complexities of a country's individual political system, immigration history, and national culture; extending to and beyond the limits of what each country's legal system will allow, and segments of the population either enthusiastically support or silently deem this to be tolerable.
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