My unpleasant encounter with self-proclaimed intellectual Tarek Fatah on ABP News

On Friday, I was invited to be a part of the ABP News’ flagship programme, Press Conference with Pakistan born Tarek Fatah.

For those who don’t know about the RSS’ new poster boy, he was allegedly kicked out of Pakistan for his vitriol and attempts to poison the society there. Since then, he’s made hating Muslims around the world his life’s sole objective. It’s almost like avenging an insult meted by Islamic Republic of Pakistan by hurling constant abuses against the whole of Muslim community.

He doesn’t like a liberal Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, because one of his close aides is allegedly a Saudi agent. He detects another Saudi conspiracy behind democratic Hillary Clinton’s nomination for US President’s job.

But he loves Donald Trump because he represents the ‘growing anti-Muslim sentiments’ among the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Among his other gems, the RSS’ fundamentalism has always been in reaction to extremism shown by India’s minority groups.

And the signs of his impeccable intellectualism doesn’t end here. He reckons there’s an effort to please Saudi and Irani regimes behind Indian Muslims preferring Arabic or Persian names for their children. So, according to him, a family chooses to name its son Shams (Sun) as opposed to Suraj is a sign it has succumbed to the slave mentality for Saudi.

And that’s not enough. He claims to know about Islam but seldom has he succeeded in backing up his extraordinary allegations against the religion with evidence.

He was a little known writer in Toronto in Canada before he shot to fame using the same methodology that catapulted many other Islamophobes to international fame overnight.

Soon, his continuous hate-mongering coupled with utterly nonsensical statements found him an untapped constituency in India- a country that’s experienced phenomenal rise in the right-wing ideology since BJP coming to power in May 2014.

With his rant, bereft of any intellect or grace, there were many takers for him in the RSS fold, who were more than happy to project him as its new poster boy to counter the ‘jihadi’ anti-nationals in India.

Under the RSS’ new definition, anyone with critical views against Sangh Parivar or the BJP government qualified for the coveted title of anti-national. If you are Kanhaiya or Rohith Vemula, then you are only anti-nationals until a communist Umar Khalid joins the bandwagon, who earns additional reputation of being a jihadi for his criticism against the RSS and the BJP.

Fatah’s breed appears to be a great proponent of this bigotry.

Lately, this self-proclaimed intellectual has been a regular guest on TV channels wanting to represent anti-Muslim ideologies in their debates and discussions.

Fatah couldn’t have believed his luck over his amazing transformation from being a small-time writer in Canada with about four crore of population to a popular hatemonger in India, a country with 1.2 billion population. He now has an even bigger audience at his disposal.

He can potentially sign more lucrative book deals and be known to more people than he would have ever wished in his wildest dreams.

But, as all ill-informed bigots do, Fatah was left exposed by his offensive behaviour on the ABP show. It took just one uncomfortable question and the man, who claims to know everything about Islam, was left incredibly rattled.

I asked if it was right for a person, who could not be patriot in his own country of birth i.e. Pakistan, to lecture Indian Muslims on how to become true nationalists.

This prompted him to lose it completely as he began to resort to insinuation and bullying to ensure I didn’t ask my second question.

My second question was about whether his constant rants against Indian Muslims were to seek cheap publicity as there were more takers of such filth in India today than he could ever imagine in Pakistan or Canada.

This became unbearable and the 66-year-old self-proclaimed intellectual completely lost it (you can see just how badly he loses it in the embedded video on this page).

His subsequent body language corroborated how shaken my two uncomfortable questions had left him.

After the recording was over, I told him that his disproportionate reaction was in poor taste. To which a rattled Fatah screamed to someone standing next to him, ‘arre yeh jhootha hai.’

Typical response from a bigot and an opportunist.

Fatah is known to have little respect for facts or evidence. Lies are what he’s accustomed to spreading and lies are what has made him a little star in his own world.

Fatah, on the show, confessed that he wanted to acquire Indian citizenship and that will explain his unending filth to please his new ideological masters in India.

People like Fatah fail to realise that Indians in general and Indian Muslims in particular don’t need to learn patriotism from a ‘traitor’ like him. A person, who has struggled to return to Pakistan since 1989 wants Indian Muslims to learn all about nationalism from him.

One wonders, why his love for India has suddenly exploded even though he had been banished from Pakistan more than two decades ago. Clearly, he had few takers of his uncouth ideology during the previous Indian regimes.

Indian Muslims are and will be proud of India’s multiculturism and one intolerant foreigner can’t and mustn’t be allowed to poison the peaceful co-existence of people from different faiths.