Buddhist Extremism AKA Illang Kema

Apparently there have been some issue with the creation of a mosque at Kadawatha Road down Dehiwala. Navigating on Balance blog had a backgrounder.

In Ramazan this year, some Muslims started a thakkiya (small mosque) on Kadawatha Road , Dehiwela and were conducting tharaweeh prayers. The mosque was operating on a very low key and causing no hindrance to anyone. However some Sinhalese villagers banded together, along with a few monks who then sent a delegation to this mosque demanding them to stop conducting prayers. The activities of the mosque were stopped overnight. Some Sinhalese villagers had already started intimidating Muslims in the area and dumping garbage right in front of the building in question.

Deane summed up the situation pretty well. Upto now, Sri Lanka only had the some LTTE guys strapping bombs to themselves and jumping in front of the Secretary of Defence. We didn’t have the type who strapped bombs to themselves and jumped in front of school buses yelling “Allahu Akbar”.

Sri Lanka has some paramilitary factions, and segments of the established military forces which are religiously biased.

The second thing which we need to remember is that even though Sri Lankans are smart when considered as individuals, when taken as “people”, the majority of Sri Lankans are bleeding stupid. This was evident in the 1983 July series of incidents, when CBK lost her eye, and even now, when the cost of living is shooting through the roof.

Sri Lanka is not a secular state. If it was a secular state, the constitution wouldn’t give prominence to Buddhism. And when you have a president who came into power on the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist wave, the people who voted for him are also high on Buddhist-Nationalistic meth. And you don’t want to piss them off. They’re not the type to burn themselves, but to take to arms in a very non-Buddhist manner.

You won’t go around Texas wearing a “Fuck Bush” T-shirt, you wouldn’t ask for a bacon sandwich aboard Emirates, you wouldn’t publish a blog post on the Prophet Cartoons incident after three years without getting hammered, you shouldn’t build a mosque down Kadawatha Road. In an ideal world, you would. But then, that’s the ideal world. This place we’re living in, is far from that.