Holi is a Hindu festival celebrated on the full-moon day in the month of Phalguna (February-March). In this festival, the participants throw colored (usually blood-red) waters and powders on one another and disregard the age-old social divisions of caste, sex, status, and age. A general frivolity and ribald language and behavior often mark its celebration in the streets.

A different kind of holi is now being played and replayed with Muslim blood throughout much of the world, with participation or compliance by Muslim governments and individuals themselves. It is a holi in which the actors have forgotten their differences as rightists and leftists, centrists and extremists, liars and rapists, racists and human rights priests, and so forth. In this holi, some military powers of the world are actively engaged and others are clapping.

Khalil Bendib has painted this condition of the Muslim community slightly differently in the cartoon "Blood Brothers^!!!" published in this March/April issue of the ISNA newsmagazine Islamic Horizon. In this cartoon, the holi with Muslim blood comes alive as a drinking orgy. The cartoon shows how four monstrous men--representing Russia, China, Israel, and India--are cheering each other to a drink of Muslim blood, sitting around a round table. The table has a bowl with the inscription "Muslim blood" at its center, and the bloods are surging out of the cups they are holding, with the cups being identified as Chechnya, Xinjiang, Palestine, and Kashmir respectively. Not far from them are iconic pictures of Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton, and an IMF man clapping to their cheers.

Bendib rightly and subtly suggests that the U.S. administration is encouraging or feeling happy with Muslim carnage by the four powerful countries--Russia, China, Israel, and India. The U.S. and its current surrogate Europe have funded Russia's carnage, plunder, and rape in Chechnya. Even in the wake of credible reports of what is euphemistically called human rights abuse and war crimes in Chechnya, they have welcomed Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin, the architect of the holocaust in Chechnya. Keep in mind that most of those reports of this holocaust are yet to make inroads to the mainstream press.

Indeed, the U.S. is not just clapping to the orgy with Muslim blood in Chechnya, Palestine, Xinjiang, and Kashmir. The U.S. is supporting those orgies in diplomatic ways and suggesting a more sinister way of draining the Muslim blood.

Essentially, the U.S. government leaders are telling Putin, "Welcome aboard bloody, just tone down your brutality a little bit, learn our PR techniques, and don't make us look too bad. Look how smartly we caused the holocaust in Iraq! We've quietly killed 1.5 million kids, women, and other civilians and yet earned the fame as savior of the Muslim lands! The political 'bastards' who rule much of the Muslim world have even greeted our action with gratitude. Use carrots and sticks, kill them in greater numbers, but do it in a way that doesn't make much of an effective noise."

Just as a way of saying is also not a way of saying, Bendib's cartoon leaves out one important dimension of the whole picture, which is how most Muslim government leaders are kissing the legs of the killer monsters to show them gratefulness. After all, the Muslim governments themselves have cheapened the lives, honor, freedom, dignity and property of Muslims throughout the world. They cannot but be grateful at what the Putins are doing.

As the play of holi with Muslim blood continues, let us hope it wakes us all very soon at the dawn of the night. For any play has its time limit. As Allah says in the Qur'an, "verily, with every difficulty, there is relief," or as Shelley said in a poem, "if winter comes, can spring be far behind?," after this night of the deadly holi or revel with Muslim blood, the dawn of peace may not be far ahead. That is only a wish. For we do not know how long this night, difficulty or winter is in the Creator's scheme of things.