Selected Editorials - The Sikh Bulletin

In this country I personally know two Kesadhari Sikhs, one medical doctor and the other a dentist, both
recently retired from the United States Army after honourably serving in their Kesadhari and turbaned
sarup. But in this issue you will also find the story of two more Kesadhari Sikhs, interestingly one a
medical doctor and the other a dentist, whose professional training was paid for by the United States
Army in exchange for their future service to the country. Now they are being told that they have to shave
their hair and remove their turbans. Their case is being pursued by the Sikh Coalition, one of three
known Sikh Organizations in this country, the other two being the United Sikhs and SALDEF. All three
are doing useful work for the benefit of the U.S. Sikhs. After we started publishing the Sikh Bulletin in
1999 we wrote to all three organizations offering them space in the Bulletin for their projects with the
faint hope to persuade them gradually to unite to create a more effective and forceful Sikh lobby. None of
them responded.
We have people close to the power center in Washington D. C. whom we had also approached to work
together. We were rebuffed there as well. Same was the case with self styled Sikh human rights activists
in U. K. and India. In case of these individuals we soon found out their reasons to stay away from
working in collaboration with others. They had the Indian State as their master to whom they owed their
‘leadership’ status. They have all been named in the previous issues of the Sikh Bulletin, including their
authentic Green Cards and Indian passports but under false names; and their involvement in covering up
and protecting child molester ‘priests’. Even those who know all this still rub shoulders with them. Sikhs
will have to wait for its leadership to emerge.
Hardev Singh Shergill
*****
A BIGOT IS DEAD; LONG LIVE BIGOTRY
W. H. McLeod (1932-2009)
[Editorial from July-August 2009 Sikh Bulletin]
Dictionary defines a bigot as, “a person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief or opinion that
differs from his own”. Despite his assertion that he never really believed in any religious system or held
any belief in God, and that he really has always been an unbeliever, the fact still remains that he was born
into a Christian family, was a student of Christianity, his education was funded by the Church, was an
ordained Christian Minister, overseas Christian Missionary, who never ever not only did not renounce his
birth and professional religion, he never wrote anything critical about Christianity. He seems to have
saved his venom for Guru Nanak. If any of his students has any of his writings that deny Jesus’ virgin
birth, resurrection, second coming, that Jesus multiplied fish, walked on water, gave eyesight to the blind
and limbs to the crippled, God made the world in six days, made man in His image and woman from
man’s rib, there is life after death in heaven or hell (other than during this life and on this earth, as Guru
Nanak preached) and a Minister can forgive someone’s sins, I would love to receive them and promise to
publish them in the Sikh Bulletin.
That he went after Guru Nanak to belittle and denigrate him becomes clear from the following quotations
from his book`, “Sikhs and Sikhism”, Oxford University Press 1999 edition:
P. 6 “If he (man) refuses (life of meditation on the divine self-revelation and of conformity to it) he
follows the path of spiritual death and remains firmly bound to the wheel of transmigration.”
In Guru Nanak’s message ‘meditation’ was only one among three commandments: “kirat karo, wand
chhako, naam japo” Transmigration, along with reincarnation, are Hindu beliefs. There is no belief in
either of these in Sikhism.
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