An Aryan invader from America

Professor Dr.Michael Witzel, a racist scholar wedded to the cause of  Evangelization of India and the world (if that is feasible) and total distortion of Indian History, divorced from all known principles of classical historiography is now in Chennai city delivering lectures on the languages and cultures revealed by the Rigveda.
 
Yesterday he delivered his lecture at Madras Sanskrit College in Mylapore. I understand that he is delivering two lectures at the University of Madras and Roja Muthiah Library tomorrow. It is understood that he will be going to New Delhi in the next few days to deliver some more talks.

In my article in these columns in News Today on 20 February 2009, I had commented on the dubious academic credentials of Professor Witzel: There is an organized gang of evangelical anti-Hindu academic gangsters in United States led by one Professor Witzel.  Any one can see that he is a man with a closed mind on all things relating to Hindu Religion, Hindu Civilization, and Hindu Culture.  He seems to be very upset (not intellectually but religiously and culturally in the evangelical sense or nonsense!) over the great initiative taken by Dr Nalini Rao and Dr Christopher Key Chapple to organize an international conference on Vedic Sarasvati Hindu Civilization at Los Angeles in June 2009.  He has said  ˜Whenever the Harappan or Indus civilization is relabeled ˜SINDHU-SARASVATI CIVILIZATION everyone involved in the field, if not the public, recognizes that he or she has stumbled into extremists HINDUTVA (Hindu nationalist and/or fundamentalist) Territory ¦. This being said, why ”besides all-too-familiar Hindutva apologists including Subhash Kak, Nicholas Kusanas, BB Lal etc. ”are a handful of major Western archaeologists including most notably Mark Kenoyer, Maurizio Tosi and Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, taking path in the Conference?  Certainly not because any of them would personally endorse the absurd  ˜SINDHU-SARASVATI CIVILIZATION ™ label in print ”since they wouldn ™t.  Instead, to put it frankly, it is due to (1) money and (2) in some cases earlier access to Harappan Archaeological sites on the Indian side of the Indian-Pakistan divide.  It takes enormous funds to run these conferences, doled out freely for honoraria and expenses (the invitees are flown in at huge expense by the rich NRIs (non-resident Indians) who fund them from Europe, India and the United States ™  Evangelical academics like Professor Witzel are known internationally for their simple and Spartan living and tortuously complicated anti-Hindu thinking!

Michael Witzel was born in 1943 at Schwiebus, Germany, now Poland. He studied Indology under Professors Paul Thieme, H. P. Schmidt, K. Hoffmann and J. Narten in Germany from 1965 to 1971. Later in 1972-73, he also studied under Mîmâmsaka Jununath Pundit in Nepal. From 1972 to 1978, he led the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project and the Nepal Research Centre at Kathamandu. Subsequently, he has taught at Tübingen (1972), Leiden (1978-1986), and at Harvard since 1986. He is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University (USA).

Many well known Sanskrit scholars and responsible citizens in USA have told me that Witzel is a viciously brazen and brazenly vicious anti-Hindu evangelical racketeer. All this came to open public light in a Court of Law when an important Hindu Civil Rights case was fought in UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA. This case related to the textbook and educational material prepared by California State Board of Education (CBE) to teach Hindu civilization to 8th grade students. The legal complaint of Hindu Groups in California was that the school textbooks indoctrinate children with Abrahamic religions and teach biblical events as actual facts while treating Hinduism in a derogatory manner. It was also pointed out that the CBE failed to provide equal opportunities and equal representation to every religion and culture. CAPEEM (California Parents for the Equalisation of Education Materials) was formed to represent parents in California in a lawsuit against the State Board of Education.

It was clearly presented in the California court with irrefutable documentary evidence that this evangelical Professor Dr Witzel who was engaged as a consultant by CBE had worked with the Church in Colorado and even edited their Wikipedia entry to suppress the evangelical nature of the church. Asian Invasion Theory is Biblical and that is why Witzel and his anti-Hindu hate group cohorts support it. The intervention of Witzel and co. in California textbook content was part of a plan to induct Biblical beliefs into the curriculum. Witzel was a central figure in the motivated evangelical effort!

Harvard Donkey Trial pits Science against Creationism with Hindus on the side of Science and the Harvard professor Witzel, who has been some sort of a volunteer for a fanatical evangelical group in Colorado, on the side of Creationism. Witzel famously claimed that horses in India were donkeys in order to push the Biblical Japhetic Race Theory into textbooks.

CAPEEM (California Parents for the Equalisation of Education Materials) which is fighting the text book case, which I call Harvard Donkey Trial, served a number of subpoenas to various parties including textbook publishers, Hotmail, Dalit Freedom Network, Michael Witzel, Stanley Wolpert, Charles Munger, and Dalit Solidarity Forum operating out of St. Alban â„¢s Church in New Jersey. The CAPEEM also sought documents from the officials of California Department of Education (CDE) and CBE. In the emerging discovery process, Witzel turned over some more documents including an email uncovering the fact that the CDE had conducted a secret meeting that was previously unheard of. This meeting with anti-Hindu groups was in addition to the secret meeting that CDE had conducted with Witzel and others.

CAPEEM also uncovered a link between Michael Witzel and Dalit Freedom Network (DFN), a group that operates out of a Church in Colorado. I have myself carefully scrutinized many of the e-mails sent by Witzel which are available on the internet. He coordinated his campaign with DFN and planned in advance the details of what would be spoken at meetings. Witzel also sent an email alerting DFN to the description of their organization on Wikipedia and stated that whenever he erased the description, it kept coming back. An office bearer of DFN followed up on this email by saying that she did not want to  ˜start being identified as a missions organization ™ and wanted to know if they could edit it themselves. (Source: http://capeem.org). All this goes to show that Professor Dr.Michael Witzel is an unabashed evangelist who endeavours to be singularly unscrupulous just in order to be magnificently successful in his underground evangelical mission!!

I asked Dr Kalyanaraman as to what he has to say about Professor Witzel ™s views on Hindu Culture:  ˜Michael Witzel is a controversial person for his association with Christian evangelical churches and his contribution to a journal started by Roger Pearson who is the founder of a Nazi group named Northern League. He is also a believer of the discredited Aryan Invasion Theory which has its origins in the Biblical belief that everyone on earth today is a descendant of one of the three sons of Noah and hence came from Central Asia. The most recent controversy he was embroiled in was at Harvard when he taught the Devanagari alphabet as one of his courses for doctoral candidates. Leading critics have even gone so far as to question his intellectual abilities if he believed that something fit for elementary schools should be part of the instructional material for doctoral candidates. ™

Witzel has also attacked those who opposed Biblical indoctrination in California ™s history textbooks. For example, the textbooks teach that the  ˜Lord made the wheels fall off the chariots ™ and this was the reason the Egyptians could not capture the Jews. When several parents opposed such indoctrination, Witzel attacked them and defended the textbooks. He also criticized those who opposed the textbooks for using  ˜hard science, ™ a stance that did not go well with scientists. A lawsuit followed in which Witzel ™s connection to a church was uncovered. After many racist remarks by Witzel surfaced, including one stereotyping all the people of Uttar Pradesh as  ˜proud and empty, ™ the State of California decided not to fight out the lawsuit and instead paid the group of parents a massive sum of one lakh and seventy five thousand dollars.

I put this question to Dr.Kalyanaraman: What do you think of Dr.Witzel â„¢s controversial and contentious scholarship? He replied:

 ˜What type of scholarship is this, even if it is said to be from Harvard? Lokahitam is the touchstone which determines true scholarship. Just as Satyam is truth that is pleasing, scholarship is transparent action which is loka-hitaaya  ˜for the well-being of the society ™. How should such action be performed or such responsibility be discharged? Scholarship should be governed by dharma, that is ethical conduct, a social ethic which respects the responsibilities being discharged by everyone in society. In Witzel, we have evidence of the very antithesis of such scholarship, motivated as he is by a Christian evangelical mission (as exposed during the Harvard Donkey Trial, also called the CAPEEM California textbook case), working for the Colorado church engaged in  ˜Dalit Freedom Network ™ to denigrate Hindusthan. Engaged in a motivated act of faith in the Japhetic Race theory of the Bible to be pushed into the textbooks, Witzel ends up arguing that horses in ancient Hindusthan were donkeys. India can do without such scholarship or emulation of such pseudo-scholarship by those researchers engaged in civilization studies, because such scholarship is a scourge on the academe, particularly when it is evangelical peddling promoted by self-proclaimed  ˜well-known scientists ™.

In my view Dr.Witzel today is a true representative of the Colonial, Imperialist, Racist and Evangelical anti-Hindu scholars like James Mill, Lord Macaulay, Max Mueller and many other English administrators of British India in the 19th century. He shamelessly clings to the Imperialist Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), even after it has been overthrown, with assistance from sordid Missionary Agencies like the Colorado Church. The stern, grim and scorching story relating to this lurid drama will have to be told in the larger public interest of the gullible Hindus of India.

In a recent announcement from Harvard University about Professor Witzel’s conferences in India in July 2009, Witzel has been referred to as a ‘well-known scientist’. He is actually a teacher of Sanskrit in Harvard University peddling the Japhetic theory of Aryan supremacy and Aryan invasion/migration into India founded on Biblical creationism which runs counter to the scientific theory of evolution propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882).
 
 
Dr Michael Witzel The ‘Aryan’ American Invader
 Dr S Kalyanaraman Defender of Sanatana Dharma
 

I am referring to Charles Darwin because 2009 happens to be the Bi-Centenary Year of Charles Darwin’s birth. It is ironic to refer to Professor Witzel— a wily ‘political’ academic—— as a ‘well-known scientist’. Further Witzel’s email shows him to be a racist; during the CAPEEM Court case (also called Harvard Donkey Trial), his church connections have been exposed in open Court. He runs an anti-Hindu hate email group continually ridiculing Hindu scholars.

Witzel wanted Hindus and their civilization/history to be depicted in the sixth grade text book in California in a degraded manner. California standards demand that the presentation should be such as to make the children feel proud of their heritage. Witzel tried to deny this standard by intervening in the school book review process, in collaboration with Colorado Church which runs a ‘Dalit Freedom Network’. I have already referred to the dastardly drama enacted by Witzel and his co-horts—an anti-Hindu Brigand—in the CAPEEM Court case (also called Harvard Donkey Trial) yesterday.

Witzel has admitted that he and his cohorts were in contact with one or more of the Members belonging to the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA) in the California Textbook (Harvard Donkey Trial) matter, just as with many other Indians/NRIs and members of many other Indian organizations. FeTNA is a front for LTTE. It is extraordinary that a Harvard academic should be associating with members of such an organization. FeTNA in their letter of Feb. 19, 2006 to California State Board of Education wrote thanking Witzel for the efforts in proposing edits in pursuance of the Colorado evangelical church agenda, denigrating the Hindu heritage to promote Japhetic biblical creationism theories and to achieve conversions of poor people dubbed ‘dalits’ by the church. I am quoting only a few excerpts from FeTNA’s letter given below:

 

President
V.G.Dev 615-377-3172
Secretary
M.P. Siva 703-981-6295
Treasurer
K. Sivaraman 732-274-3436
Communication Director
V.J. Babu 708-599-3116

Regd. Office: Annai Illam, 8844 Oakwood Drive, Hickory Hills, Illinois 60457. USA EIN# 36-3759132, Telephone: 708-599-3116, E-mail: [email protected]

February 19, 2006
Ms. Glee Johnson,
State Board of Education,
1430 N St., Ste. 5111,
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Ms. Johnson,

The Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA) expresses its sincere appreciation to the Members of the California State Board of Education (SBE) and the staff of the California Department of Education for their extraordinary efforts in working to ensure the accuracy of the contents of the History and Social Science textbooks for the sixth grade students in California. We also thank the three scholars, Dr Michael Witzel, Dr James Heitzman, and Dr Stanley Wolpert, for their efforts in reviewing the edits proposed by the Hindu Education Foundation and Vedic Foundation and working to ensure the accuracy of the contents of the abovementioned textbooks.

FeTNA believes that the contents of American school textbooks should be based on critical scholarship and not religious extremism. One of the reasons why FeTNA has taken an active interest in these proceedings is the historical chronology of early India according to the Vedic Foundation is based on a Sanskrit text called Bhagavatam or Bhagavata Purana, which the Vedic Foundation claims to have existed in the 4th millennium B.C. (See http://tinyurl.com/b826e) This chronology contradicts the scholarly view that the Bhagavata Purana was most likely composed in the Tamil country in the 9th or early 10th century A.D. and served as a conduit to export the relatively egalitarian devotional religious movement of the Alvars, the Tamil Vaishnava saints, to the rest of India. (See attachment 1.) A date in the 4thmillennium B.C. or earlier for Bhagavata Purana is not only unscientific, but also elides an important contribution of the Tamils to the overall Indian culture. (It should be pointed out that in 2004, the Government of India recognized Tamil as a classical language of India in addition to Sanskrit.) Another reason why Tamils are interested in these proceedings is the fact that the early Tamil texts clearly distinguish between Tamils and Aryans. These texts clearly associated the Aryans with North India and Sanskrit. (See attachment 2.)…….

Sincerely,
Thillai Kumaran
(Representing FeTNA)

The organizers of July 2009 meetings in Tamil Nadu who invited Witzel knew the speaker was a person connected to a White nationalist church in USA.  One of the organizers of that meeting, conceded, ‘Witzel did not seem intelligent and was very disappointing. The fact that he does not know Sanskrit and believes in unscientific ideas like the Aryan Race Theory shows his incompetence.’ Said a professor from Harvard who spoke on the condition of anonymity, ‘Typically, those who end up in departments that teach foreign languages do so because they have lost out in getting admissions to the preferred courses. That is why many peers of Witzel in American Universities consider people like him to be intellectually incompetent.’

According to Dr Kalyanaraman  Witzel is in league with another academic called Francis Xavier Clooney of the Harvard Divinity School, creating an irrefutable evidence for the Harvard University becoming an evangelical front for promoting Dominus Jesus initiative of Pope Ratzinger of the Vatican. Clooney was an SJ priest recruited from Boston College whose claim to fame is describing Mary as a Mother divinity citing Hindu traditions of veneration for Devi, Abhirami and Sri. An evangelical mission is in operation on the lines of the Roberto de Nobili duplicity to infiltrate into Hindu cultural representations only to denigrate the Hindu heritage. A poster demonstrated in one of the Witzel conferences rightly read: ‘Inky, pinky, ponkey; Harvard had a donkey; it came riding Indra’s elephant’. The allusion was to the Harvard Donkey Trial with Witzel as a deponent.

Witzel and his cohorts were thoroughly exposed in open Court in the CAPEEM Case in California. When this grisly gang of intellectual gangsters realized that they were not going to win the case, Witzel’s collaborator Dr Heitzmann of University of California at Davis pleaded that at least the ‘Aryan Migration Theory’ should be retained. One of the California Education Board (CEB) members, Dr S Metzenberg, himself a biologist, however refused to entertain such ideas. He said that having seen the genetic evidence himself, he did not believe that there is any proof for any Aryan invasion or migration, and that it is merely a theory subscribed to by some historians. Witzel does not like to spare even honest government officials who question his Aryan fantasies. So Witzel derisively referred to Dr S Metzenberg as a ‘budding politician’!

Apparently, when somebody refuses to see Aryan genes, it touches a raw nerve in Michael Witzel, and the intolerant and fascist streak in his character shows up clearly. Coming from Germany he is a true RACIST NAZI in the HITLER AND HIMMLER TRADITION. Only Winston Churchill’s words  on Hitler and Nazidom would be relevant to Witzel and his wickedness: ‘This monster of wickedness! This repository of some of the virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast! Herr Hitler!’.

I have already observed that Witzel is a racist in the true Hitler or British Imperialist Macaulay tradition. Let me give some anti-Hindu  racist quotations from the Armoury of Witzeliana:

1 ‘Many Indians still cannot read their texts critically…..But Indian women are better than men’.

2 ‘The Hindus in North America (HINAs) are not just hiina, ‘lost, abandoned’, but they (understandably) cling to their homeland in all manners they can come up with. ‘Reforming’ our schoolbooks according to an imagined Golden Age (Ram Raj), hoary India is just one of the expressions we can observe. They also tell their daughters to study Classical Indian dance (not exactly a highly regarded occupation back home), they build many temples and have Sunday schools (as many other ethnicities do). But, they hardly invest in Higher Education as other successful Asians have done.’

Similar stereotypical racist remarks about Indian Americans are inserted deliberately by Witzel whenever he writes negative reviews of books or articles authored by an Indian scholar, irrespective of whether that scholar lives in India or elsewhere. Clearly, according the Harvard Professor, Indian expats are wanting in a sense of discrimination and suffer from an identity crisis.

Witzel is one of the strongest champions of the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT). The AIT continues to be one of the most debated and also the most devastating of historical, social, linguistic, archeological and anthropological theories. No other theory has generated more heat, pride, hatred and animosity as this one. Racialism, apartheid, nationalism etc. are all products of AIT. This theory has been uprooted, lock stock and barrel, by the Mitochondrial DNA Tests and Studies carried out by K.A.R. Kennedy and his colleagues. Even if the whole world accepts this finding today, yet Witzel and his cohorts would not have the grace to accept this impersonal scientific finding. As a rabid evangelist sponsored by a Colorado Church, he would rather agree all the time with the following finding of ACL CARLLEYLE’ ‘We British Europeans are Aryans, and far more pure and genuine Aryans than the Hindus and no talk of the Hindus can alter our race, or make us any less or any different from what we are. It is the Hindus who have altered and deteriorated and not we. The Hindus have become the coffee dregs, while we have remained the cream of the Aryan Race. The Hindus are like the monkey who pretend to treat some men with contempt because they had the bare white skins without any fur! The Hindus have become a sooty, dingy-coloured earthen pot, by rubbing against black aborigines rather too freely, and he consequently pretends to despise the white porcelain bowl!’ 

 

(The writer is a retired IAS officer)

e-mail the writer at

[email protected]

 

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