The film “Hotel Mumbai” is a Must-See in order to understand what’s happening in India

 by Phyllis Chesler

A few weeks ago, Hindu friends and colleagues in India turned to me in desperation about the way in which the Western media has been covering the latest chapter in the forever ongoing Hindu-Muslim wars. Every single article in the mass media has blamed Hindus only and has presented the Muslims as the most innocent and non-violent of beings. Missing entirely is the history of eight hundred years of Muslim persecution of Hindus in India; what happened in 1948 that led to partitioning India into a Hindu state and into two Muslim states: Pakistan and thereafter, Bangladesh, both states where Hindus and Christians are persecuted. I had no time to update a piece of mine on this very subject which appeared a decade ago. Nevertheless, various India-based Hindu news services picked my 2010 piece up and ran with it for the second time.

Also missing from the Western coverage is also the fact that criminal Muslim gangs have been invading Hindu India for many years, bringing drugs and guns, and kidnapping, raping, and forcibly marrying young Hindu and Christian girls. While Hindus may be as fierce in battle and in matters of self-defense—the Western media is still giving us a very one-sided picture of a much larger and very tragic story.

As we are all quarantined, I suggest that we watch a great film, “Hotel Mumbai,” directed by Anthony Maras, which has brilliantly dramatized the Pakistani Muslim Jihad attack on the city of Mumbai in 2008. The film is gripping, believable, and heartbreaking, and so we come to care about each of the characters played by Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Jason Isaccs, and Tilda Cobham-Hervey.

Amazingly, the Western media reviews of the film were mainly negative. One reviewer wondered who had the “right” to tell this tale; another reviewer claimed that there was only “one Muslim” in the film: Zahra, the wealthy wife and mother played by Nazanin Boniadi. Excuse me? Were not the ten jihadist members of Lashkar-e-Taiba not also Muslims? A third reviewer thought the film was in bad taste, it made him “queasy,” given that a mosque had also been attacked in Christchurch, in New Zealand—but that was ten years after the attack on India’s financial center in Mumbai in 2008—but only weeks before the New York Times’s Ben Kenisberg’s review appeared.

Either journalists, academics, and film reviewers do not know any history or they are not encouraged to be even-handed or to provide context if Muslims are involved.

What kind of crazy reasoning and false equivalency thinking are upon us?  Apparently, we are not only in the midst of a world-wide medical pandemic, we are also living in a time of severe Thought Control which cancels and falsifies reality in favor of the most politically correct of one-sided lies.

To be clear: I am not saying that all Muslims are Jihadists; but most Jihadists are Muslims.

I am also not saying that peaceful Muslims do not exist; they do, but they are also very much at the mercy of Muslim Jihadists.

I am saying that ten Lashkar-e-Taibi terrorists attacked civilian Mumbai in November of 2008, killed 160 people, wounded many more, terrorized a country, and tortured and butchered the Chabad rabbi and his wife merely because they were Jews.