Two alleged members of the Taliban have been arrested in connection with an attack on a college professor in India for “inflammatory references” to the founder of Islam.
The 52-year-old professor, T.J. Joseph, was ambushed by a gang of eight, who chopped off his right palm on Sunday morning after first beating him up. Joseph was yanked out of his van and brutally attacked by a gang of eight while returning home from church in the southern state of Kerala with his family.
The attack came a few months after he was arrested for writing a question paper that allegedly had “inflammatory” references to the founder of Islam.
Joseph, a Malyalam language teacher, had been suspended by Newman Christian College in Thodupuzha, near Kochi, after numerous angry demonstrations by Muslim groups. Kochi police said in April that Joseph had told them “the question paper was prepared by adding certain lines from a book, which is a collection of screenplays.”
Police said the attack was clearly connected to Muslim extremists. “The immediate provocation of this crime appears to be the question paper issue,” a local police official told reporters. Education Minister M.A. Baby condemned the crime, as did the supreme head of the Indian Union Muslim League, Panakad Hyderali Shiyab Thangal.
“They smashed the glass of our car and pulled my brother out and hacked him. Our aged mother was also in the car and witnessed the crime,” Joseph’s sister, Mary Stella, told the Daily Times of India.
Joseph, who was freed on bail following his arrest, had been taken to a specialty hospital in Kochi to re-attach the palm following the attack, but it is still not clear whether the surgery was successful.
Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard nearly suffered the same fate earlier this year for similar reasons. The 74-year-old artist has been the target of numerous death threats by Muslim extremists following the 2006 newspaper publication of his a drawing of the Islamic prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb. In addition, Muslim populations around the world protested, some violently, in the wake of the drawing’s publication.
Israel sells more than a billion dollars’ worth of defense systems to India each year, making that country one of Israel’s leading customers in the global military supplies market. In addition, thousands of young Israelis travel to India every year following their discharge from mandatory service in the IDF.
Jewish have historically lived in India with no local persecution, other than that which came from Europeans who traveled to the area. Jews settled in Kochi – also known as Cochi – as far back as 2,500 years ago.
As in other parts of the world, however, modern India has not been exempt from Muslim extremism, nor have the terrorists failed to search for Jewish targets.
In November 2008, a team of 10 terrorists from a group based in Lahore, Pakistan carried out a multi-site attack on the Indian city of Mumbai. Among the selected targets was the city’s Nariman Chabad House, run by Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, both of whom were murdered in the attack, along with all four of their guests at the time. Their young son, Moishe, was the only Jewish survivor, along with his Indian nanny, Sandy Solomon, and another local staffer.