On July 1, 2016, ISIS took responsibility for invading an ex-pat café in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killing at least two and taking twenty hostages.  At the same time, a Hindu priest was hacked to death in his temple. Now the world is paying more attention to this small South Asian country and wondering if Bangladesh is the new hot spot for ISIS, or perhaps al Qaeda.

Whatever the handle used by the Muslim group that committed the latest attacks, there is no doubt that non-Muslim and dissident Muslim Bangladeshi natives have been living with terror at the hands of jihadis. 

Jihadis in Bangladesh have been steadily increasing their rapes, murders, land thefts, and public humiliations against all they deem fit to suffer for their cause:  the spread of sharia.  They do this with impunity. Here are some, but by no means all, of the many atrocities committed by them in just the last few months:

• A seven months pregnant Hindu woman was kicked in the womb by a gang of men until her baby was born, dead. The eighteen-year-old mother died shortly after from her wounds.  At least twenty other of her villagers were also wounded in an attack perpetrated as punishment for staging a Hindu festival, forcing fifty people to leave their homes for the safety of a riverboat.
• A Hindu priest was beheaded with cleavers at his home and a worshipper with him was wounded.  
• A June 13, 2016 issue of USA Today cites reports from terrified leaders of Hindu, Christian and Buddhist communities that murders are being committed with impunity, in spite of Prime Minister Hasina’s promise to hunt down the killers.  ISIS and al Qaeda vie for responsibility for the killings.
• Secular bloggers Avijit Roy and Ahmed Rajib Haider were hacked to death for disagreeing with fundamentalists.  Roy was the founder of the Muktu Mona (Free Mind) blog, a very popular online home for Bangladeshi atheists and liberals.  Even though he had received death threats for five years, he had no protection from officials. Adding insult to injury after Haider’s death, jihadists protested against liberal bloggers, accusing them of blasphemy and calling for their execution. Favoring them, the government responded by arresting some bloggers and cracking down on liberal blog sites. Then in a move apparently designed to please both sides, the government did provide some security to some bloggers, but still offered no real protection for free speech. 
• Other known victims of religiously driven murder in just one month, May 2016, include a homeopathic doctor, a Buddhist monk, an atheist student, gay rights activists, a liberal professor, a Hindu tailor and a Sufi Muslim leader.
• A Facebook group dares to call for the murder of a headmaster, already publically humiliated, and a university professor both alleged to have “hurt the sentiments of Muslims.” Detailed instructions were given on Facebook about how to invade what should be the sanctity of a hospital to finish murdering one of the victims taken for treatment after a beating by the thugs.
• The free thinking blog Mukto Mona details a “slide into darkness” as state sponsored Islamization takes over. The prime minister plans to build “model mosques” everywhere, in all four hundred and eighty nine districts – using state money.  Madrassas are allowed to spring up all over, teaching jihad.  The home minister declares that protecting homosexuals’ civil rights, including it would seem the right to live, is not the government’s concern because ”their rights are not compatible with his country’s society.”
• In the atmosphere of contempt for whatever weak laws might protect minorities, even some members of the Awami League, the Bangladeshi political party that is nominally opposed to jihad and supposed to protect minorities, participate in these crimes. For example, the young mother killed along with her unborn child was attacked by members of the Awami League, among others. Other Muslims join in the sadistic fun simply for thrills and profit, such as running farmers off their ancestral land, according to a report by The Bangladesh Minority Condition.
• People in minority communities have a choice:  hold onto land that has been in their families for many generations while facing increasing risks of being killed, or flee. Many are leaving, most of them to India. Every day around seven hundred and fifty people from minority communities leave Bangladesh, according to Abul Barkat, an economist and professor at Dhaka University.

Keep in mind that before the Muslim invasions began in the late eighth century Bangladesh was dominated by Hindus and Buddhists.  In fact, the Hindu empire once spread all the way to what is now called Afghanistan.  Century by century, it shrank, under Muslim conquest.  Year by year, the number of Hindus who remain in Bangladesh shrinks.  Now they are down to about 9%. 

When Bangladesh became independent in 1971, it was supposed to be a secular country.  Only six years later, secularism as a principle was removed from the constitution, and in 1988, Islam was declared the state religion, although curiously, secularism was restored as a governing principle.  The current problem is the vastness of the Muslim population, which gives confidence to the jihadists who seek domination over others.

Bangladesh’s original problem was the Muslim invasions, and its eventual conquest.

We face the same problem in the United States.  It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Madeline Brooks is a counter-jihad writer. She can be reached at ResistJihad@aol.com