Another conspiracy against Indians
Posted By omar on February 7, 2012
Maybe not.
But of course, Dipak Das has raised the conspiracy defense.
If he were to “revert” to Islam he might have a better case.
Then again, maybe not. What do our readers think? Is it better (in the court of American public opinion) to accuse your accusers of Islamophobia or Indophobia? Which one is more likely to influence the minds of readers and commentators who dont know the people concerned but are only responding based on their own preconceptions of Indians, Muslims, Academia, Media etc etc?
What about variations within the audience…will Indians be likely to believe an accusation of Indophobia? will Indians in academia be more likely or less likely? I am just curious.
I think many Muslims would be inclined to think that Islamophobia was likely in such a case if it involved Muslims. But “liberal Muslims” may have the opposite bias. Red state repubs would presumably regard a Muslim scientist as a contradiction in terms anyway, but liberals may be inclined to believe Islamophobia is real?
Omar is a Pakistani-American with an interest in history. He also moderates the Asiapeace discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/asiapeace/
They would like to convince other Indians (or south asians) that the US is hostile to the immigrants, specially in the urban araes, but they would be disappointed.
The fact that the term ‘Islamophobia’ is 5 years old says all you need to know about it.
Das is delusional if he thinks Indophobia is an effective defense. If there is grant money involved there is no amount of white guilt/colonial colonic-morality present at his Uni’s administration which will excuse losing the money. There was an Indian cancer researcher (Anil Potti) who was caught fudging data at Duke, using his ‘medicine’ in a clinical trial and he’s currently settling quite a few malpractice claims and returning grant money. No attempt to “indophobe” his way out of it:
http://heraldsun.com/view/full_story/15465032/article-Duke–researchers-sued-over-cancer-clinical-trials?instance=most_popular
It’s contingent on the importance of the research to pharma. Potti had many protectors at Duke who shielded his mistakes from the press because he was working on a gene-specific cancer drug. Das’ beat was resveratrol which has really fallen out of favor.