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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Sun Nov 30th, 2008 11:47 pm |
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So, just who were these people? Is this "Al Qada"? Is it the result of our policy toward Israel and Iraq? Or is this the continuation of a long-held policy by the more radical element of the Mulsim world going back to the attacks on Constantinople, preceeding by centuries the Crusades?
Mark Steyn: Mumbai Could Just About Happen Anywhere
Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Comments 19
When terrorists attack, media analysts go into Sherlock Holmes mode, metaphorically prowling the crime scene for footprints, as if the way to solve the mystery is to add up all the clues. The Mumbai gunmen seized British and American tourists. Therefore, it must be an attack on Westerners!
Not so, said Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. If they'd wanted to do that, they'd have hit the Hilton or the Marriott or some other target-rich chain hotel. The Taj and the Oberoi are both Indian-owned, and popular watering holes with wealthy Indians.
OK, how about this group that's claimed responsibility for the attack? The Deccan Mujahideen. As a thousand TV anchors asked Wednesday night, "What do we know about them?"
Er, well, nothing.
Because they didn't exist until they issued the press release.
"Deccan" is the name of the vast plateau that covers most of the triangular peninsula that forms the lower half of the Indian subcontinent. It comes from the Prakrit word "dakkhin," which means "south." Which means nothing at all.
"Deccan Mujahedeen" is like calling yourself the "Continental Shelf Liberation Front."
OK. So does that mean this operation was linked to al-Qaida? Well, no. Not if by "linked to" you mean a wholly owned subsidiary coordinating its activities with the corporate head office.
It's not an either/or scenario, it's all of the above. Yes, the terrorists targeted locally owned hotels. But they singled out Britons and Americans as hostages.
Yes, they attacked prestige city landmarks like the Victoria Terminus, one of the most splendid and historic railway stations in the world. But they also attacked an obscure Jewish community center.
The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.
In the 10 months before this atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed more than 200 people in India, and no one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas.
In Mumbai the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you're supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city's emergency-response system.
And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).
What's relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets, and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin's New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan's deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement.
After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you'll find local lads and wily outsiders: That's pretty much a given.
But we're in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It's the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK-47 and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You're sitting in some distant foreign capital but you're of a mind to pull off a Mumbai-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological front organizations.
You've already made landfall.
It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the "Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It's not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow.
There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Mumbai is a crime scene, so let's surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the D.A. to file charges.
There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: "A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station." The photo of the "suspected gunman" showed a man holding a gun. We don't know much about him – he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of Western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers embarking on an exciting midlife career change – but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a "suspected gunman" but a gunman. "This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services worldwide," wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. "They think they're being scrupulous – the man hasn't been convicted of being a gunman yet! – when, in fact, they're just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn't just silly, it's dangerous."
Just so. This isn't law enforcement but an ideological assault – and we're fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology's advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population's demographic advance among everybody else.
So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don't seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn't about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It's bigger than that. And if you don't have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you'll lose.
Whoops, my apologies. I mean "suspected ideology."
Last edited on Sun Nov 30th, 2008 11:50 pm by Roy
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Roy
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Posted: Sun Nov 30th, 2008 11:56 pm |
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Here is one from the LA Times reciting the obvious that India's own Muslm community will be seen as part of the problem because there was support. And, because it appears that this action was designed to negate the prime minister of Pakistan's position that they would now concentrate on some kind of peaceful resolution to the Kashmir problem.
A Cloud Over India's Muslims
By Martha Nussbaum
November 30, 2008
If, as now seems likely, last week's terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that's more bad news for India's minority Muslim population. Never mind that the perpetrators were probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir. The attacks will feed a powerful stereotype of the violent and untrustworthy Muslim, bent on religious conquest, who can never be a good democratic citizen. Such stereotypes already shadow the lives of Indian Muslims, who make up 13.5% of the population.
But it's important to consider Indian terrorism in a broader context.
Terrorism in India is by no means peculiar to Muslims. A string of recent incidents has been linked to Islamic groups, most of these with foreign ties and pertaining to Kashmir. However, the most bloody recent example of terrorism in India was the slaughter of as many as 2,000 Muslim civilians by Hindu right-wing mobs in the state of Gujarat over several months in 2002.
This horrendous pogrom was portrayed at the time as retaliation for an alleged Muslim torching of a train car carrying mostly Hindu passengers. Two independent inquiries have since concluded that the fire was, instead, a tragic accident caused by passengers' kerosene stoves.
But even if that was not known at the time, most of those killed -- or raped or beaten -- lived long distances from the original incident and could have had no connection to it. Moreover, there was copious evidence of pre-planning: Hindu right-wing groups had kept lists of Muslim dwellings and businesses.
Evidence that Gujarat's state government egged-on the perpetrators was also overwhelming and led to the U.S. State Department in 2005 denying a visa to Narendra Modi, Gujarat's chief minister. Recently, the Indian investigative journal Tehelka uncovered even more proof of government complicity in the murderous, anti-Muslim attacks. A Tehelka reporter using a hidden camera interviewed participants in the Gujarat violence, who described how bombs were manufactured in factories owned by members of the Hindu right; how arms were smuggled from other states; how the police were instructed to look the other way.
One leader of the Bajrang Dal (a paramilitary Hindu right-wing group) described his own role with pride: "There was this pregnant woman, I slit her open. ...They shouldn't even be allowed to breed. I say that even today. Whoever they are, women, children, whoever, nothing to be done with them but cut them down. Thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards. ... The idea is, don't keep them alive at all; after that, everything is ours."
The revelation that members of the Hindu right have embraced ethno-religious cleansing should amaze nobody. Since the 1930s, their movement has insisted that India is for Hindus, and that both Muslims and Christians are foreigners who should have second-class status in the nation.
This year, in the eastern state of Orissa, members of the Bajrang Dal have murdered scores of Christians who refused to reconvert to Hinduism. (Most Indian Christians are descendants of converts, often from the lowest Hindu castes.) Peaceful villages have been reduced to ashes; a church-run orphanage was torched; dozens of churches have been destroyed; missionaries and priests have been murdered in cold blood. Thousands have been forced to flee their homes, and at least 30,000 are homeless. The rallying cry: "Kill Christians and destroy their institutions."
In August, the Catholic bishops of India closed Catholic schools across the country "as a protest against the atrocities on the Christian community and other innocent people." Such actions, aimed at transforming India's pluralistic democracy into an ethnocentric regime, pose a grave threat to India's future.
All of this is terrorism, but most of it doesn't reach the world's front pages. When it does make it into newspapers outside India, the word "terrorism" is rarely used. The result is a perception, in India and abroad, that Muslims are the bad guys in every incident of terrorist violence.
Such stereotypes are so prevalent that many state bar associations in India refuse to defend Muslims accused of complicity in terrorism -- despite the fact that India's constitution guarantees all accused a cost-free defense.
Meanwhile, Muslim youths are often rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence, an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.
Some Muslims are criminals. However, this does not justify demonizing Muslims, any more than the violent acts of the Hindu right justify stereotyping all Hindus as rapists and murderers. Let's go after criminals with determination, good evidence and fair trials, and let's stop targeting people based on their religious affiliation.
Martha Nussbaum is a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago.
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Roy
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Posted: Mon Dec 1st, 2008 12:06 am |
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So, does the "Axis of Evil" exist or not? Yes, yes., one could argue that Iraq was not the problem, but AlQada'a objection was to our troops being in Mecca, and we couldn't get them out of Mecca without getting rid of the reason for them being in Mecca: protecting Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein.
The real problem is defining the war on terror. It is not a conventional war and it is far beyond a police action.
Ahead for Obama: How to Define Terror
By JONATHAN MAHLER
WASHINGTON — Early last Tuesday morning, a military charter plane left the airstrip at Guantánamo Bay for Sana, Yemen, carrying Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan. Once the Bush administration’s poster boy for the war on terror — the first defendant in America’s first military tribunals since World War II — Mr. Hamdan will spend less than a month in a Yemeni prison before returning to his family in Sana, having been acquitted by a jury of United States military officers of the most serious charge brought against him, conspiracy to support terrorism.
The turn of events underscores the central challenge President Obama will face as he begins to define his own approach to fighting terrorism — and the imperative for him to adopt a new, hybrid plan, one that blends elements of both traditional military conflict and criminal justice.
Until now, much of the debate over how best to battle terrorism has centered on the two prevailing — and conflicting — paradigms: Is it a war or a criminal action? The Hamdan case highlights the limitations of such binary thinking. As the verdict in his tribunal this summer made clear, Mr. Hamdan was not a criminal conspirator in the classic sense. Yet, as an aide to the world’s most dangerous terrorist, neither was he a conventional prisoner of war who had simply been captured in the act of defending his nation and was therefore essentially free of guilt.
So how should Americans think about Mr. Hamdan? More broadly, how should they think about the fight against terrorism?
The problems with the war paradigm are by now familiar. Because the war on terror is unlike any other the United States has waged, traditional wartime policies and mechanisms have made for an awkward fit, in some instances undermining efforts to defeat terrorism. The traditional approach to dealing with captured combatants — holding them until the end of hostilities to prevent them from returning to the battlefield — is untenable in a war that could last for generations.
If you treat the fight against terrorism as a war, it’s hard to get around the argument that it’s a war without boundaries; a terrorist could be hiding anywhere. Yet by asserting the right to scoop up suspected terrorists in other sovereign nations and indefinitely detain and interrogate them without hearings or trials, the administration complicated its efforts to build an international coalition against terrorism.
“The war-against-Al-Qaeda paradigm put us in a position where our legal authorities to detain and interrogate didn’t match up with those of our allies, so we ended up building a system that’s often rejected as strategically unsound and legally suspect by even our closest allies,” says Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia who worked on detainee issues in the Bush administration.
Perhaps the most problematic consequence of the war paradigm, though, is that it gave the president enormous powers — as commander in chief — to determine how to detain and interrogate captured combatants. It was the use, or abuse, of those powers that produced the Bush administration’s string of historic rebukes at the Supreme Court, starting in 2004 when the justices ruled in Rasul v. Bush that the president had to afford the Guantánamo detainees some due process.
Some critics of President Bush are now urging President-elect Obama to abandon the war paradigm in favor of a pure criminal-justice approach, which is to say, either subject captured combatants to criminal trials or let them go. This will almost certainly not happen.
Mr. Obama may be more inclined to prosecute suspected terrorists in the federal courts than Mr. Bush has been, and he may even avoid referring to the battle against terrorism as a “war.” But ceding the military paradigm altogether would severely limit his ability to fight terrorism. On a practical level, it would prevent him from operating in a zone like the tribal areas of Pakistan, where American law does not reach.
“If you seriously dialed it back to the criminal-justice apparatus you will paralyze the executive branch’s ability to go where they believe the bad guys are,” says Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “When people talk about a return to the criminal-justice system, they’re ignoring the geographical limits of that system.”
In fact, the military approach to fighting terrorism predates the Bush administration. After Al Qaeda attacked two American embassies in Africa in 1998, President Clinton launched cruise missiles against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan thought to be making chemical weapons. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said he would not hesitate to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan — an act of war — if that country’s government was unwilling to do so itself.
Going forward, the fight against terrorism will have to be something of a hybrid. This is a novel idea, as the Constitution lays out only two distinct options: the country is at war, or it is not. Such a strategy may require building new legal systems and institutions for detaining, interrogating and trying detainees.
There has already been talk of creating a national security court within the federal judiciary that would presumably give more flexibility on matters like, say, the standard of proof for evidence collected on an Afghan battlefield. Similarly, it may be necessary to set clear legal guidelines for when the government can detain enemy combatants, and how far C.I.A. agents can go when interrogating terror suspects.
This won’t be easy. It will require striking a balance between the need to preserve and promote America’s rule-of-law values, protect its intelligence gathering and ensure that no one who poses a serious threat is set free.
Such an infrastructure is not likely to survive unchallenged, let alone win popular support, if the executive branch builds it alone. Its chances would be far better with input from Congress, acting as the elected representatives of the people to ensure that any new systems protect both the public and America’s values. And direct advice from the courts could ensure that they are found to be constitutional.
Paradoxically, such an approach might ultimately enhance a president’s power. “We need a strong president to fight this war,” says Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard who worked in the Bush Justice Department, “and the way to ensure that there’s a strong president is to have the other institutions on board for the actions he feels he needs to take.”
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power.”
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Roy
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Posted: Mon Dec 1st, 2008 12:15 am |
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So what about this claim of a "new face"? What new face? Just a somewhat new location, but not even really that.
Terror's New Face
By AMIR TAHERI
November 29, 2008 -- THE world confronted a new face of terror this week - operating with brand new tactics and a host of goals.
Earlier this week, for example, Pakistan President Assif Ali Zardari announced his readiness to settle the dispute with India over Kashmir, promising an end to a conflict that has led to four wars and countless terrorist campaigns over the past 50 years.
On Wednesday, terror organizations that do not wish the Kashmir problem to be solved offered their opinion of such a shift, in the form of a series of coordinated attacks against sensitive targets in Bombay (Mumbai), India's business capital and the engine of its recent economic takeoff.
The message was clear: Even if Pakistan scales back its old policy of backing terrorist groups in the name of liberating the Muslims of Kashmir, radical Islamists are capable of continuing the low-intensity war that has cost India billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
The attacks in Bombay likely were carried out by Hindi-speaking, homegrown Islamists with possible links to elements within the Pakistani intelligence community who have built their careers and personal fortunes around the Kashmir issue. These elements are serving notice that they would resist Zardari's dramatic departure from a long-established policy of enmity against India.
While the attacks, which claimed more than 100 lives, may have been addressed to Zardari, their primary target was India.
India is home to nearly 200 million Muslims, making it one of the world's largest "Muslim" countries. Until recently, however, a majority of Indian Muslims have steered clear of radical politics. Apart from the issue of Kashmir, which has at times turned them against the authorities in New Delhi, most Indian Muslims have been loyal to the Indian republic, appreciating its secular and democratic nature. India is the only country that allows its Muslim minority to apply the rules of Sharia (Islamic cannon law) to a range of issues of private life.
That India may now face a homegrown Islamist terror movement operating far beyond Kashmir is certainly bad news. This may be an indication that pan-Islamism is gaining ground among the younger generation of Indian Muslims. The key feature of pan-Islamism is its goal of "liberating" all lands that once were ruled by Muslims - from India to Spain and southern France, passing by parts of China and Russia, as well as the Balkans.
That the Bombay attackers wish to advertise their Indian identity is indicated by the name of the group that has claimed responsibility. Unless it is a cover for other groups, the name Mujahedeen (Holy Warriors) of Deccan is clearly designed to underline the group's ambition to strike throughout India. Deccan, a region in south-central India, has been the cultural heart of Indian Islam for centuries.
India is targeted for a number of reasons. Its recent close ties to the United States, symbolized by a nuclear-cooperation accord signed in Washington recently, has angered the Islamist movement all over the world. Jihadists also hate India for the financial support it provides to the government of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, while also helping train the new Afghan army and police.
The Bombay attacks had two other messages. The first was that India's recent economic boom is fragile and vulnerable to pressure from radical elements. The second was that India is no longer hospitable for Western citizens, especially Jews and other non-Muslims. The fact that US and British citizens were specifically targeted to be taken as hostages and that one group of the terrorists raided Bombay's largest Jewish center was meant to discourage non-Indians from visiting, let alone working, in the mega-city of 12 million.
One reason that Islamists may be looking for bases within their own homelands is the loss of training sites and safe havens in Afghanistan, while Pakistan has also become inhospitable territory.
Meanwhile, part of the media has tried to link the Bombay attacks to al Qaeda. This may be saying too much or too little. As an organization capable of exercising operational control over any group, al Qaeda is all but dead. The best information available, plus the buzz in Jihadi circles, indicates that al Qaeda is still collecting some funds, especially in the Persian Gulf, and funneling part of it to militant groups across the globe. Beyond that, however, al Qaeda is more of a brand, a kind of franchise, and a source of inspiration rather than command and control.
In Bombay, the Jihadis used a new style of attack, consisting of a range of operations that are traditionally used one by one. They have seized control of territory, carried out suicide operations, conducted military-style attacks and seized hostages, all in the context of a single multiform campaign of terror.
This new style, a kind of smorgasbord of terrorist tactics served at one go, confused the Indian counterterrorist units and army elite. Terrorism is a mutating monster, and Bombay's experience could be repeated in other big cities across the globe.
Counterterrorism doctrine needs to readjust itself for what is a major tactical change in the way Jihadism works.
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Roy
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Posted: Mon Dec 1st, 2008 12:25 am |
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This article by a CNN correspondent means that libs will have to go along with severe measures, as long as Obama does them.
It reminds me of when the chief of police and the mayor of Philadelphia authorized a compression bomb to blow a hole in the house of a black radical group.
The mayor and the police chief didn't know that gasoline had been stored in the roof where the bomb was set off. The resulting fire destroyed an entire block. What if the mayor and the police chief had been black?
What if Janet Reno had been a heterosexual republican when Waco happened?
This Fire Needs to Be Put Out
The horrific attacks in Mumbai should be a call to arms for the region.
Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 8, 2008
My first memories of the Taj Mahal hotel are probably of when I was 8 years old, going to the Sea Lounge restaurant with its lovely view of Mumbai's harbor to eat sev puri, a savory Indian treat. I also remember passing through its grand ballroom a few years later, while it was being decked out for a dinner in honor of the president of Bulgaria—crystal chandeliers, ice sculptures, bouquets of roses, platters of shrimp carted around by liveried waiters.
My family would celebrate special occasions at the Golden Dragon, one of the best Chinese restaurants outside of China. The Taj is a fixture in the life of Mumbaikers (or Bombayites as we used to call ourselves). Last week, those memories came flooding back as I watched from New York, and saw the Taj hotel on fire.
The terror attack on Mumbai has been called India's 9/11. For me there is another similarity; like 9/11, this attack hit close to home. My brother worked next door to the Twin Towers, at the World Financial Center, on 9/11 and he evacuated his office staff when the first plane crashed.
I knew people who worked in the World Trade Center and some who died there. This time, the tragedy is also personal. My mother's office is in the Taj hotel (she is the editor of the Taj Magazine). Luckily she was out of town on the day of the attack.
My brother-in-law and niece, however, were in their apartment, which overlooks the Oberoi, the other hotel that was attacked. A dozen commandos took over their apartment, positioned snipers at the windows, and began giving and receiving fire. (My niece is keeping the bullets as souvenirs.) And as with 9/11, I know people who have died. The general manager of the Taj hotel, a young man, lost his family.
These kinds of events bring out the best in ordinary people. There are reports of hotel employees taking pains to get guests out of harm's way, at risk to their own lives. Some of the freed hostages have told stories of the bravery of the Indian armed forces.
But not everything went well. By all accounts, the initial response of the local authorities was slow, haphazard and incompetent.
These terror attacks have highlighted one of the key weaknesses of modern India. Its private sector is dynamic, efficient, responsive. Its public sector is not. Government in India is dysfunctional. With the exception of a few elements of the national government—the armed forces and antiterror commandos, for instance—the Indian state is simply not up to the challenge that it now faces. India has a decentralized political system that is plagued by weak coalition governments, patronage and corruption, with little emphasis on professionalism and competence. If this is India's 9/11, then it should be a spur to the country to finally get its house in order and reform itself to succeed in an age that requires smart government.
India also has a political problem with its Muslims. It remains unclear whether any Indian Muslims were involved with these attacks, but it is quite possible that the terrorists had some small pockets of support in the country. President Bush likes to point out that India has 140 million Muslims and, because it is a democracy, not one is a member of Al Qaeda. Even if this is still true, it is simplistic. The cancerous rise of fundamentalism and radicalism that has swept up Muslims everywhere has not spared India. In addition,
Muslims there are disaffected and vulnerable to manipulation. They are underrepresented at every economic, political and social level—with a few high-profile exceptions. A perverse consequence of the partition of the Indian subcontinent is that Muslims are everywhere a minority—which closes off the chance at political power. (The parts of British India that had Muslim majorities became Pakistan and Bangladesh.) They have not shared in the progress of the last two decades and face a Hindu nationalist movement, parts of which are ugly and violent. None of this is to excuse in any sense the cruel choice anyone might make to join a jihad. But moral clarity does not always yield intellectual clarity.
This is not just India's problem. The terrorists seem to have had foreign connections. This might have included Qaeda support, though more likely inspiration. They almost certainly got both support and training from groups in Pakistan. Let us assume that the Pakistani government was in no way involved. There remains the basic and enduring problem: the Pakistan government has created, supported and trained Islamic jihadists for decades. The Pakistani military needs to genuinely embrace the idea of zero tolerance for jihadists, not distinguish between good ones (those that keep Afghanistan and India on edge) and bad ones (those that set off bombs within Pakistan). These groups blur into one another and cannot easily be segregated. And they are all enemies of modernity and democracy.
The problems of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are now bleeding into one another, and any purely national approach is not going to work. The best outcome of these attacks would be if they spurred cooperation and reform. If instead they feed rivalry, bitterness and finger-pointing, the victims will have died in vain, and there will be more victims and an insecure neighborhood.
The crucial point is to remember the common enemy. When discussing causes and cures, never forget who is to blame first and foremost: the terrorists, the evil men who chose to deliberately kill innocent men, women and children, to burn young families to death.
They are the ones who did it.
And while Indians have many troubles, they have one great counterterrorism policy—resilience. The Mumbai stock exchange reopened last Friday and closed higher. The country will persevere, the city will bounce back, and all those who have reasons to go there should not be deterred.
I have a trip to India planned in a couple of weeks. I'll be there as scheduled. And I will make a special point to pay a visit to the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, which I am sure, will be humming with life.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Posted: Mon Dec 1st, 2008 03:14 am |
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| You know Obama is going to be tested. Tested by the Islamic radical countries, terrorists, and also by Russia.
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Roy
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Posted: Sun Dec 7th, 2008 06:02 pm |
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Yes, Mark Steyn, the writer who got into a legal dispute in Canada for writing a book critical of Islam, writes here about the absurd lengths that many journalists went to to avoid using the term Islam about the terrorists in Mumbai recently.
The most, absolutely the most, absurd take was to speculate on how and why the Jews came to be targeted.
Silence=Acceptance
Silence=Acceptance
Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy.
By Mark Steyn
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution “practitioners.” “Practitioners” of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for “going after the wrong people” and inflaming moderates, and “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”
Really? The inflammation just “appears”? Like a bad pimple? The “fairer” we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.” Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity — and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving “militant” revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they’re any more important than the Indians, Britons, and Americans targeted in the attack on Bombay, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.
In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If they were just “teenage gunmen” or “militants” in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: “Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous.”
And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani “militants” in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Muslim” or “terrorist,” we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men......more..
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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Posted: Tue Dec 9th, 2008 05:54 am |
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Inconvenient Truths by Christopher Hitchins
This is another article like Steyn's above, which talks about how spineless and self-delusional the world press has been about the real identity of the various thugs and murderers of Mumbai and in Lebanon.
How is it that left-leaning journalists are so incapable of admitting the truth to themselves? What would it compromise? What sin, what macula, would appear on their journalistic souls?
This is the force of compulsion bending obvious interpretations so as to avoid obvious conclusions.
The answer is: they have no plan "B", and, if they concede, they will experience a collapse of the inventory of their minds. They will experience what is called acculturation, what happens to Brazilian Indians when they move into a city and don't have a real clue as to how things work or how to behave.
They are real moral cowards.
Inconvenient Truths:
The media's disingenuous failure to state the obvious.
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them.
An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2206233/
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"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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