FROM ABSURD TO INSANE

A stray piece of news in a relatively obscure website has caused some people to go into apoplexy over what they say MIGHT be another cause for an anti-Muslim campaign in Sri Lanka to please the Americans! Certainly these April days are hot, and it is understandable that those who go out in the noonday heat may develop heat-induced delirium. But nevertheless, this kind of creative storytelling is pathological.

It may or may not be that some Sri Lankan and some Bangladeshi Muslims were involved in some way, in piecing together a terror plot to blow up people at the finish line of the Boston marathon last week. Does that mean that the government is ready to sacrifice all Sri Lankan Muslims at the altar of the American defence establishment, just because - it is suggested - Sri Lanka now needs to curry favour with the US, after Geneva 2013?

All that these crazed nuggets of fiction suggest is that this is the kind of value system that these commentators in the so called liberal establishment subscribe to. This might be the scenario that would unfold if these people or their political idols were in power - the sacrificing of Muslims because their natural proclivity of course is to ingratiate with the Americans.

The history of this country is different. Despite certain aberrational behaviours by certain isolated aggressors such as the then politically led July '83 rioters, the Sinhala majority has been remarkably closely knit to the Tamil and Muslim minorities. This is why there are more Tamils living among the majority Sinhalese in Colombo, and this is why there is a majority from among the minority races in Colombo which fact in most part accounted for the election of a Muslim Mayor.

That is the almost bucolic picture of ethnic amity that obtains in Colombo and the rest of the island, and it's why yesterday this newspaper led with the account of a Tamil physician who in an open letter to the Indian Prime Minister stated that Tamils can live anywhere in Sri Lanka with dignity, also noting that the Sri Lankan Army helped rescue Tamil civilians from the clutches of the LTTE - as he put it.

That the Sinhala Buddhists of this country love to be Sinhala Buddhists is by itself not a crime against the Muslims and the Tamils of this country! Yet, the very fact that the Sinhala Buddhist majority has been existing amicably with the Tamils and Muslims of this country is being more often than not interpreted as a mark of their unnecessary patrimony!

What exactly can the Sinhala Buddhists do? It's by accidents of their births that they belong to the majority community, and majority communities anywhere in any part of the world tend to rule as that is the result of a numbers game that is called democratic franchise!

By itself, this certainly does not disqualify the Sinhala Buddhists from being regarded as a peace loving, fraternal, amiable lot that celebrates diversity and plurality, and that has had a longstanding history of getting on with the minorities in this country.

Those who want to connect some dots between a terror attack at the Boston marathon and the treatment of Muslims in this country - via an alleged news report in an obscure website - are clutching at straws, but drowning men and women do clutch at straws, and so do folk in drowning political campaigns.

At bottom, the incessant campaign out there to paint the Sri Lankan regime as being manipulatively racist, is a political campaign and has nothing to do with the rights aspirations and living conditions of the Sri Lankan minority Muslims. This campaign is now unraveling as the Muslim countries are aware that the Sri Lankans - regime and people - are friends of the Muslims both Muslim Sri Lankans and Muslims worldwide.

Therein lies the explanation for the strained almost plaintive effort on the part of the unelectable and their cohorts, to get the people to believe in the palpably unbelievable that there is a intricate finely woven but at the same time crude campaign against the Muslims of this country. How ludicrous - how ugly, and in the end how risible can amateur fiction get!