Terrorists may be religious fanatics with murderous tendencies and armed with the will to kill, but their sympathisers are the self-proclaimed liberals, armed with a keyboard who will almost always find something to blame, usually the State, which triggered the otherwise peace-loving, God-fearing person into being a terrorist.

Mohammad Rafi Bhat was recently neutralized by Indian security forces in an encounter with the terror organization Hizbul Mujahideen with which Bhat had aligned himself. He was an assistant professor at Kashmir University. The usual suspects were out in full force to defend him saying that the soft-spoken and humble Bhat took to arms because of unrest in Kashmir.

Controversial publication The Quint, which had declared Kulbhushan Jadhav an Indian spy, decided to show Mohammad Rafi as a victim of the state.

As if that was not enough, media entrepreneur Raghav Bahl, who otherwise doesn’t quite believe in fact-checking, and founder of the website ‘The Quint’ added his two cents by trying to blame the State for ‘PhD scholars taking to arms’.

Propagandist TV anchors will swoop down on Dr Rafi Bhat’s “anti-nationalism”, but unless we break away from this binary of hate, and begin to understand the desperation that is pushing even PhD scholars to take to arms, Kashmir will continue to bleed. https://t.co/rC4DNRs29e

— Raghav Bahl (@Raghav_Bahl) May 7, 2018

The article goes on to state how growing up in Kashmir, he witnessed violence which ‘sorely troubled him’ but the neutralization of Burhan Wani (armed terrorist touted as headmaster’s son by “eminent journalist” Barkha Dutt) by security forces was perhaps the last straw.

The article block quotes his last call to his father where he asks for forgiveness, because nothing like bringing in the old parents, who are oblivious of their children’s murderous intentions, to sensitize the audience.

And then The Quint goes on to explain how the slain terrorist was a ‘prisoner of conscience and not a religious fanatic’ because he ‘always talked about human rights violation by Indian forces’.

People who had met the young scholar advocated peace and didn’t subscribe to the idea of violence for political struggle. Till now only barbaric acts of Mughal and other Islamic invaders were whitewashed but now, even terrorists and terror enthusiasts are also whitewashed under the garb of liberalism.

Terrorist Mohammad Rafi Bhat, who was also selected as PhD research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, couldn’t keep his promise to his wife of five years of returning home, because just after delivering a lecture to his students like every day, our man just decided to join a terrorist organization to ‘meet Allah‘.

And then as if on cue, in block quotes comes the blame on Indian state for ‘soft-spoken’ scholars turning jihadis.

Amusing how Indians state is responsible for churning out Islamist terrorists who picked up guns because of violence in the name of religious fanaticism, but we have hardly ever heard of Kashmiri Pandits taking up arms for the exodus of 3,00,000 Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir on 19th January, 1990.

This is not the first time The Quint has tried to humanize terrorists. Earlier, too, The Quint had tried to show how Osama was a caring father and husband.

We’ve seen in the past how the media and self-styled intellectuals sympathised with Burhan Wani, the slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, who was actively recruiting and inspiring many young and educated boys in South Kashmir, including Mohammad Rafi Bhat, and turning into terrorists. While former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah and senior NDTV journalist Vikram Chandra had even dished out clean chits to the terrorist, Barkha Dutt even attempted to humanise him by adding that he was the son of a school teacher, as if being the son of a teacher obliviated him of his crimes. Leftist heroes like Kavita Krishnan had also referred to the terrorist’s killing as ‘extra-judicial killing’. India Today journalist Rahul Kanwal tried to justify Wani’s radicalization on lack of economic opportunities.

Which makes one wonder, lack of which economic opportunity triggered the professor at Kashmir University Mohammad Rafi Bhat to pick up guns? And lack of what triggers the so-called liberals to justify terrorist activities?