FULL ARTICLES

SHERLOCK HOLMES MODE

Whodunit!?
By Mark Steyn
National Review Online
November 29, 2008

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-Qaeda? 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 community center catering to Jews. 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 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-Qaeda 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.”

 

THE EXPLANATISTS GO TO WORK

Psychotic terrorists in search of a grievance
Those who wreaked havoc in Mumbai were not thinking of Kashmir. They were brainwashed by an ideology of hatred
By David Aaronovitch
The Times (London)
December 2, 2008

So, why kill the rabbi? There is a branch of apologetics – which I take crudely to be the belief that the crime is the fault of the victim – that assumes a milder form, and which I’ll call explanetics. So the explanatists view of the Mumbai massacres last week is that the cause lies in what concretely has been done to, or in the vicinity of, the young, cool-looking men with the grenades and the machineguns.

On the day after the attacks began the Indian writer, campaigner and serial explanatist, Arundhati Roy, lambasted her own country on The World Tonight on Radio 4, for its rural poverty and its fluctuating support for Hindu nationalism. These, she seemed to suggest, were root causes of the terror. Elsewhere, analysts have pointed to the 60-year-old Kashmiri crisis as fuelling the jihad. More exotically the writer Misha Glenny now suggests that organised crime in the Pakistani city of Karachi is “the operational key” to such attacks (he has just written a book about international organised crime), but that the origins of last week’s nightmare lie “in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India”. Well, these things are bad. Kashmir is bad. Hindu communalism is bad.

Poverty is bad. You can see the reasons for warfare in Kashmir, for riots in Hyderabad and for Maoist uprisings in the deep rural areas of India. But why kill the rabbi? Why invade the small headquarters of a small outreach sect of a small religion, which far from being even a big symbol of anything, you would almost certainly need a detailed map and inside knowledge even to find?

From what has been learnt from the one surviving attacker, the baby-faced and variously pre-named Mr Kasab, his group came largely from the rural southern Punjab in Pakistan. It is therefore unlikely that any of them had even encountered a Jew, or knew anyone else who had.

Yet last week, Nariman House was chosen for special murderous attention, alongside the Oberoi and Taj hotels, the railway station and the Leopold café. It reminded me of the 2003 Istanbul bombings when – post Iraq war – specifically British and American targets were augmented, for some reason, by the blowing up of the synagogues belonging to the much diminished Jewish population of that great city.

There is nothing more important about the life of a member of one race or religion than that of another. If the murders of the rabbi, his wife and the other Jewish people in Nariman House are horrific, they are no more horrific than the shooting, bombing and knifing of all the other victims, from the skipper of a hijacked Indian ship to the woman waiting for the night train to Patna. Two years ago, at round about the same time, late in the evening, I was one of two or three white faces in a tired sea of people at that same station. It is not a place to go to shoot Westerners, but there are rich rewards for a serial murderer of ordinary Indians, like the ones whose blood we saw in the photographs.

So the Chabad hostages in Nariman House aren’t any more dead than the others. But they do give the lie to explanetics. The only possible reason for going to such lengths to seek out a few Jews (as opposed to having a grand Columbine-type shoot-up in the big city) is ideology. Is because someone has told you, and you have accepted, that these people are your particular enemies.

I was struck by a report at the weekend from the area that the murderers are reported to have come from near the towns of Multan and Bahawalpur. Two of the main terror-insurgent groups in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, recruit heavily in this area. It is also a place where religious schools adhering to the puritanical Deobandi stream of Islam predominate. Jason Burke, reporting last weekend for The Observer, recounted conversations with religious teachers from the local madrassas, one of whom was the brother-in-law of the British jihadi, Rashid Rauf, killed last week by an American drone near the Afghan border.

One such teacher, who, according to Burke, oversaw the education of 40,000 students, told him: “To fight in Afghanistan or Kashmir and to struggle against the forces who are against Islam is our religious duty.” Note how the two specific arenas of struggle are complemented by the third, far more general one, to struggle (ie, take up arms) “against the forces who are against Islam”. Just over a year ago The Times carried an article on the Deobandi influence in Britain’s mosques. This highlighted the work of teachers such as Riyadh ul-Haq, a graduate of the Deobandi religious school near Bury. This school, according to our reporter, banned TV, art, chess, music and football. One of its graduates claimed in a sermon that music was part of a “satanic web” erected by Jews to pervert Muslim youth. Ul-Haq cautioned that Muslims were in danger of picking up the habits of unbelievers, who were an “evil influence”.

I’m sure there are plenty of Deobandi followers who are in no way violent or dangerous, but one sees here an ideology, a psychosis in search of a grievance, not an expression of an existing grievance. And it will always find a grievance.

It may seem unfashionably neoconservative to say it, but surely the underlying problem in southern Punjab is a failed society, within a failing state, in which a particular ideology begins to dominate. It is highly suggestive, I think, that the same area that gave birth to some of the Mumbai murderers has one of the highest levels of acid attacks on women anywhere in the world. In 2003 there were at least 74 of these disfiguring assaults in a southern Punjab – surely one of the most appalling manifestations of misogyny to be found anywhere on Earth.

“Sometimes,” according to Human Rights Watch, “the attacked women are seeking a divorce or the husband is seeking a second wife over the first’s objections. Sometimes the triggering event can be as trivial as an argument over grocery money.” If readers get a chance I’d recommend the report by Nicholas Kristof, of the The New York Times, last weekend from Pakistan. Just don’t look at the pictures.

That would be a real cause for terrorism, wouldn’t it? But what arises instead is a political-religious movement of men espousing violent self-righteousness, impossible purity and hatred of human complexity. No wonder the target was cosmopolitan Mumbai, with its foreigners, minorities, its maddening mix of people and moralities, all of them diluting the one, true, narrow way.

The rabbi, in death, tells us this. There isn’t anything – whatever the explanatists say – we can concede to the zealots of Faridkot that will persuade such people, once radicalised, not to try to kill us.

 

THE MULTICULTURAL APOLOGISTS WHO ABET EVIL

Our World: The jihadist-multicultural alliance
By Caroline Glick
The Jerusalem Post
December 2, 2008

Doctors at the Mumbai hospital who treated the victims of the past week’s jihadist attacks were rendered nearly speechless by the carnage. As two doctors explained to the Indian news Web site rediff.com, violent gang wars and previous terror attacks didn’t hold a candle to what happened.

The bodies of the victims showed clear signs of preexecution torture. The worst tortured, they said, were the Jewish victims. As one doctor put it, “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the [first day of the assault]. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again.” India’s Intelligence Bureau revealed that a captured jihadist explained that they were instructed to seek out foreign and especially Israeli victims.

In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacres, it is hard to imagine that there is anything as pernicious as the jihadists who sought out and murdered non-Muslims with such cruelty. But there is. Their multicultural apologists, who enable them to continue to kill by preventing their victims from fighting back, are just as evil.

... The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West – particularly of the U.S. and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners – or, in the case of India, Hindus – are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners.

In the case of the Mumbai massacres, the jihadists’ multicultural defenders began justifying their actions while they were still in the midst of their torture and murder spree. In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria hinted that Indian Hindus had it coming.

“One of the untold stories of India,” he explained, “is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last 10 years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted.”

Then too, the multicultural media suppressed the fact that the jihadists were targeting Jews. Outside of Israel, it took the media nearly two days to report that the Chabad House had even been taken over by the jihadists. And once they did finally report that Jews were being targeted, they made every effort to downplay the strategic significance of the jihadists’ decision to send a team off the beaten path simply to butcher Jews.

Emblematic of the Western media’s attempts to play down the story was The New York Times. Two days into the hostage drama, the Times opined, “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

JEWS WERE not the only ones who had their identity obscured. The jihadists did too. For almost an entire day, major news networks in the West suppressed the fact that the murderers were Muslim jihadists, claiming oddly, that they could also be Hindu terrorists. This was odd not because there are no Hindu terrorists, but because the perpetrators referred to themselves from the outset as “mujahideen,” or Islamic warriors.

Once the jig was up on their attempts to hide the identities of the perpetrators and their victims alike, the jihadists’ multicultural enablers started blaming the victims. For instance, on Sunday, The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum attacking Indian Hindus. After blithely dismissing the atrocities that were still under way while she wrote as “probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir,” Nussbaum focused her ire against India’s Hindus. Recalling the gruesome and apparently state-sanctioned violence against Muslims in India’s Gujarat state in 2002, Nussbaum cast the jihadists as nothing more than victims of a Hindu terror state which has been victimizing Muslims for no reason since the 1930s.

Nussbaum’s essay was a patent example of selective multicultural memory. She apparently forgot about the Islamic conquests of India from the seventh through the 16th centuries in which India’s Buddhists were wiped out and 70 million-80 million Hindus were slaughtered by Muslim overlords. She also forgot about the thousands of Indian Hindus who have been murdered by jihadists since the 1990s.

After ignoring India’s long and recent history of jihad, Nussbaum condemned an imaginary double standard which she claimed labels all Muslims as terrorists and gives Hindus a free ride in subjugating them. Of course, thanks to multiculturalists like Nussbaum, the double standard we suffer from is the exact opposite of what she described: Muslim terrorists, we are told, are victims of persecution and represent a teensy-tiny fraction of Muslims. On the other hand, all non-Muslims involved in even marginally violent activities against Muslims are murderers, fanatics, extremists. Moreover, they are representative of their non-Muslim societies.

The attacks in Mumbai and the multiculturalists’ rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger.

The attacks in Mumbai were exceedingly sophisticated in design and execution. There were echoes of previous attacks, including the al-Qaeda bombing of Mike’s Place café in Tel Aviv in 2003, and its execution of Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001. But there was also a clear implementation of the lessons learned from those and other attacks carried out by al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

By making clear their ability to improve their skills by drawing on lessons from past operations, the jihadists in Mumbai were similar to their counterparts in Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and every other place where jihadists have safe operational bases. Their obvious knowledge of their enemies’ weaknesses also calls to mind the sophisticated modes of operation of Islamic terrorists in the West and in Israel.

In all places where jihadist forces operate in secure bases, they are becoming more sophisticated in their tactics, training and doctrine. Their weapons are increasingly advanced.

Jihadist regimes, like their terror proxies and allies, are not only increasing their direct support for jihadist terrorists. Regimes, and particularly Iran, are matching their increased support for terror groups with their own nonconventional weapons programs. So, in the case of Iran, its takeover of Lebanon and Gaza through Hizbullah and Hamas is being made even more dangerous by its progress in its nuclear weapons program. So too, nuclear-armed Pakistan’s military and ISI are expanding their support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the same time they are facilitating jihadist attacks in Pakistan’s large cities as well as in India.

This progressive improvement in the capabilities and tightened coordination between jihadist regimes and jihadist groups lends credence to the view that the probability increases with each passing day that a jihadist regime will arm jihadist groups with nuclear weapons.

The second truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. And there is nothing effective that democratic governments can do to defend against the jihadists that multiculturalists will deem acceptable. This is the case because multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists. In line with this basic fact, it is worth returning for a moment to Nussbaum.

The only advice she offered the Indian government that had just absorbed a coordinated attack, launched and planned by domestic as well as foreign operatives on sea and on land, was to treat terrorists like regular criminals. As she put it, “Let’s go after criminals with determination, good evidence and fair trials, and let’s stop targeting people based on their religious affiliation.”

And of course, Nussbaum herself is little different in her refusal to acknowledge the fact of the global jihad than many of the governments principally targeted by jihadist regimes and terror armies. Take the incoming Obama administration for example.

Iran daily threatens to destroy the U.S., annihilate Israel, close the Straits of Hormuz, use nuclear weapons and proliferate nuclear weapons to other states. It controls Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and, with Pakistan, the major sponsor of the insurgency in Afghanistan. It has cultivated strategic ties with U.S. foes in the Western Hemisphere like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Yet one of the first foreign policy initiatives promised by the incoming Obama administration is to attempt to diplomatically engage Iran with the aim of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs.

Or take Israel. The outgoing Olmert government may well lead the Western world in its attempts to deny the existence of the global jihad which has marked Israel as its central battlefield. During his visit to the White House last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was confronted by an incredulous U.S. President George W. Bush who simply couldn’t understand his strange enthusiasm for the prospect of giving Syria the Golan Heights. Bush couldn’t fathom Olmert’s fervent, if rationally unsupportable belief that if Israel gives Syria the Golan Heights, Syria will happily abandon its best friend and overlord in Teheran.

What Bush apparently didn’t realize is that Olmert’s championing of an Israeli surrender to Syria stems from his devout adherence to multiculturalism. If Syria can’t be peeled away from Iran, that means that Israel can’t be blamed for Syrian aggression. And that is a prospect that Olmert simply cannot abide by.

Some commentators dismiss the danger emanating from the global jihad by noting that its global designs are not matched by global capabilities. They argue that when the West finally decides to defeat the jihadists, they will be utterly vanquished.

Unfortunately, this view ignores two things. It ignores the fact that the jihadists are devoting all of their energies to improving and expanding their capacity to fight their war. And it ignores the fact that the multiculturalists’ influence is growing steadily and has repeatedly stymied Western attempts to confront the jihadist threat head-on. Unless something changes soon, the consequences of the jihadist-multicultural alliance will be suffered by millions and millions of people.