The Israel Defense Forces miraculously rescued a Yazidi woman last week who had been captive in the Gaza Strip for the last 10 years and reunited her with her family in Iraq. She was only 11 years old when she was taken by ISIS in 2014 from the Kurdistan region and sold as a “war bride” to a fellow jihadist in Gaza. What made her eligible to be treated as human chattel? She was Yazidi, and her religion was Zoroastrian. She was not Muslim. Sadly, this same story has played out over and over again in Bangladesh, the country of my youth, where Hindu girls are regularly kidnapped and used as sex slaves and war brides, and never seen by their families again. Over the past two months, since the coup in Bangladesh, the fire of jihad has consumed many more Hindu families.
With the one-year mark of Israel’s ongoing defensive war against jihadist, genocidal forces from Gaza—and Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Authority—it is more important than ever that people understand that the enemy Israel faces is fueled by religious extremism and not by legitimate grievances; that the forces of jihad have many targets and many victims; and that Israel and the Jewish people have natural allies in the region and in the diaspora. The Hindu community is one such ally. Over the past year, my organization, Hindu ACTion, has been honored to stand alongside many other Hindu organizations in numerous U.S. states in solidarity with Israel and in support of efforts to combat antisemitism.
Hindus and Jews share many common cultural character traits. We are both ancient peoples with deep traditions, a peace-loving culture of liberalism and tolerance, and a strong focus on family, community, education and hard work. We run into each other in business life in many fields, including IT, medicine and engineering, but we can certainly stand to get to know each other more deeply.
The Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 represented an earth-shattering trauma for Israel and the Jewish diaspora, as well as a shock to moral people around the world. For many of us, it also opened the collective memory of the Bangladesh 1971 War of Independence—a story rather unfamiliar in America. In 1971, when Bangladesh split from Pakistan, Hindus were over 22% of the population. They were ruthlessly targeted by jihadist Muslims for murder, rape and abuse. In the span of eight months, 3 million Hindus were murdered, and hundreds of thousands of Hindu women and girls were raped, with many kidnapped to be kept as sex slaves and jihad “war brides,” to achieve the goal of conversion to Islam. The Hindu population had fallen to 13% by 1974 and to around 8% today.
Some Holocaust museums honor the memory of these victims by telling this story, but we find it is still not widely known. Needless to say, the pain of Oct. 7 resonated in our community from the start. The anti-Hindu violence of the past two months has brought those old memories even more to the surface.
The media seems not to have any room to report on the renewed saga of jihadist violence in Bangladesh. If you don’t follow Indian newspapers, you can be forgiven for not being aware that in August, a quiet military coup happened in Bangladesh, and that it was immediately followed by Oct. 7-style jihadist attacks targeting Hindus. Angry mobs burned dozens of Hindu temples and hundreds of Hindu homes, and murdered, raped and mutilated dozens of Hindu families. Some 10,000 Hindus abandoned their homes and businesses within the first two weeks to flee for their safety, and order has yet to be restored.
We need to know each other’s stories in order to be able to support each other. On this anniversary of Oct. 7, I am reaching out to share our story with you and to let your community know that our community stands with yours. Wishing success and safety to Israel’s security forces, and praying for the safe return of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
Namaste.