Denial is at the core of human behaviour. In the psychology of human behaviour, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Uncomfortable truths can be very hard to face and especially to be held responsible for such uncomfortable truths by virtue of belonging to that community can be debilitating in life. An example is the Holocaust denial, the Arab colonialism of non-Muslim lands, invasions, plunders, the conquest of India by Muslims (Turks, Persians, Arabs, Afghans), the Armenian Genocide by Turks, the brutality inflicted on the Yazidis by the ISIS or Daesh and the very recent Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) ethnic cleansing by Kashmiri Muslim terror groups sponsored by Pakistan’s ISI and by extension the United States’ CIA in their 30 years plus proxy war with India.
Why does such a large community deny truths, facts and events recorded with photographic evidence, documentaries, news reports, personal testimonies and through oral history? The Kashmir Files is a 2022 Indian Hindi-language drama film written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri, a well-known veteran of the Bollywood industry. The film presents a fictional storyline centred around the 1990s forced exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from the Valley of Kashmir in Jammu and Kashmir Union Territory of India. It depicts the exodus and the events leading up to the ethnic cleansing and migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley where they had lived for centuries since humans settled in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic times and created one of the most enduring civilizations and cultures on earth – the Indic Civilization or the Indus Valley Civilization. The film claims that such facts were suppressed by a conspiracy of silence.
Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus. The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms. Add to that the Left’s strategy of accommodating selective truths and the ills of cultural relativism and postmodernism, coupled with their alliance with Islamist organizations and movements and you get a very strong global delusion of the greatness of Muslim culture and a grand denial of even Muslims killing Muslims to suit the supremacist agenda of religious domination in the form of a Caliphate and Sharia law-based New Medinas along with what happens to non-Muslims in those areas anywhere in the world.
The coddling of Muslims, or a better term, the “soft bigotry of low expectations” is in play here. Under the umbrella of “Islamophobia” (a term constructed to shut down debate about regressive practices in Islam), Muslims get away with a lot of things, including facing uncomfortable truths in their history and the present. The bleeding-heart social justice warriors, generally from the Left and the Liberal elite class compound this appeasement politics by focusing on the Muslims as victims while completely whitewashing the actual victims. They do this thinking it gives a bad image to the Muslim community, while not realizing the damage it does to bring out the Muslim ‘qoum’ (community) to come out of their victimhood and lost glory doldrums. The White guilt of racism, of ‘othering’, of systematic eradication of Jews and other denominations in concentration camps dotted throughout the landscape of Europe, of support for Hitler’s Nazi Party is a hangover from the 1940s era of fascism. This makes it difficult for people with the right intention but incorrect, misplaced empathy (Jewish Leftists, Indian Hindu Liberals) to call out Muslims for their hypocrisy, their connivance to intellectualize terrorism, and their shrewd strategies.
The strategies of Islamist organisations and Leftist cabal are taken from the playbooks of the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Hamas, and supremacist organizations like the Indian American Muslim Council, Hindus for Human Rights, Stand with Kashmir etc and their armed wings/chapters like The Resistance Front, LeT, al-Qaeda, ISIS and tool kits developed globally to bring down elected governments, oppose ethno-nationalist movements (Hindutva in India) and keep Muslims from progressing, developing a coexistence and syncretism with pagan civilizations that could bridge the gaps between monotheistic and polytheistic cultures.
There is one message for Nadav Lapid – the Palestinians cannot have their own state by eradicating Israel off the map like their ideological representatives Hamas have stated officially in their manifesto. Inflexibility and denial of coexistence will never bring a lasting solution to the repeatedly dismissed two-state solution in the region. Conflict is an industry. Self-inflicted injuries by the creation of Pakistan and the tehreek (freedom) movement in Kashmir were the results of Indian Muslims losing the plot and not even trying to correct their course and trajectory. The Kashmiris tried to inflict a second self-injury of a merger with Pakistan by its terror pogrom of cleansing indigenous Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley. Just like billions of Indians must face the reality of the existence of their millions of Muslim compatriots and find ways to empower them, provided the Indian Muslims accept their lost plots and try to add to the New India’s rising story of the 21st century.