Friends,
Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, USA and the coalition of faith based and community organizations from the East Coast, invite you to join the above rally at Lafayette Park (in front of the White House) in Washington D.C. to express your moral outrage against the decades-long continuous violent persecution of religious minorities in Bangladesh by the Islamic fundamentalists and to offer your support and encouragement to the roughly 25 million endangered minorities that are living hellish life at the jaws of terror, everyday.
Originally established as a secular democracy in 1971, Bangladesh gradually fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who declared it virtually as an Islamic Republic in 1988 (Established Islam as State Religion). That prompted a systematic erosion of the rights of the religious minorities and inspired waves of violent attacks against them and on their interests which ultimately resulted in drastic reduction of minority population from the high of 23% in 1971 to a mere 9.7% today.
The current wave of violence against the minorities transpiring in the wake of the International Judicial Tribunal's verdict against Delwar Hossain Sayedee, a notorious war criminal and terrorist, is not a new phenomenon. This was simply a pretext for the Islamists to attack the minorities to grab their land, loot their property, and drive them away from the country just like they have done during every single election since 1971 and during any International development involving the religion of Islam, or even after many rumors in the past. No matter what it is, when the Islamists are riled up, the story lines are very familiar: Hindu temples desecrated; prominent members of the Hindu community – professors, doctors, engineers, businessmen - murdered in cold blood; Hindu homes destroyed; women and young girls raped in front of family members; Minority girls kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam; ancestral land grabbed; women's modesty ravaged and dignity stripped away; family killed or threatened to leave the country, etc.
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