On April 13, 2014, Franzier Glenn Cross, 53, a long time KKK leader attacked people near two Jewish community centers in Kansas. His shooting spree killed a teenager and his grandfather outside a Jewish community center, and a woman visiting her mother at a nearby Jewish retirement home. It was a bitter irony that none of the victims was Jewish. The boy and his grandfather were members of an area Methodist church and the woman attended a Catholic church. The teenager was at the center to audition for a singing competition. The woman who died was visiting her mother who lived at the retirement home.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said that Cross is a “raging anti-semite”. He idolizes Hitler and Hitlerism, and is a long time KKK leader. HMSA (Hindu Congress of America) strongly condemns these attacks on Jewish centers. This attack on a minority religious group arouses anger amongst the Hindu community in USA because we too are a minority religion. We have great sympathy for the Jewish people who faced persecution for many centuries in Europe before the Nazi Germany’s Holocaust which was a systematic mass murder or genocide of six million Jews during World War II. The Jewish people have also been persecuted in the Middle East for centuries. Though they originally lived there, there were driven out of that region and scattered all around the world.
The Hindu people too have faced persecution and mass murder at the hands of the Mughal invaders and the British colonialists. Even today Hindu people are being violently attacked in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Their places of worship are being demolished. Their women are being raped and converted into Islam. It is only natural for the Hindus to share the sorrows of the Jewish community in Kansas.