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AHMADINEJAD TO ADDRESS UK ON CHRISTMAS

Ahmadinejad to address UK on Christmas
By Haviv Rettig Gur
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Dec. 24, 2008

A leading British television channel’s plan to broadcast a seven-minute “Christmas message” by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has generated angry protest from Israel and critics of the Iranian regime.

According to transcripts of the speech to be delivered Thursday, the recorded message will be more political than religious: “If Christ was on earth today undoubtedly he would stand with the people in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers. If Christ was on earth today undoubtedly he would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.”

The transcript continues: “If Christ was on earth today undoubtedly he would fight against the tyrannical policies of prevailing global economic and political systems, as he did in his lifetime. The solution to today’s problems can be found in a return to the call of the divine prophets.”

“It is an unprecedented scandal for a prestigious British channel to give the president of Iran such a respectable platform at prime time on Christmas Day,” said Israel’s ambassador to London Ron Prosor on Wednesday.

“Everyone knows Ahmadinejad is an existential threat to Israel and world peace, but absurdly, Channel 4 is permitting him to bamboozle public opinion with unsubstantiated talk of Iran’s efforts for peace and reconciliation,” said Prosor.

The ambassador wondered “if by the same philosophy, where competition for ratings trumps all other considerations, Channel 4 would have hosted Hitler as well.”

In past years, Channel 4’s “alternative Christmas message,” delivered each year alongside the traditional message of Queen Elizabeth II, went relatively unnoticed, with speeches by the likes of Rev. Jesse Jackson, a wounded Afghanistan veteran and a cartoon Marge Simpson.

But the setting is nevertheless a dramatic one, according to media analyst and former Sunday Telegraph reporter Tom Gross. “The Queen’s Christmas message is one of the most significant symbols in British society, and Channel 4 News is one of Britain’s most prestigious broadcasters. It is equivalent to CNN in America broadcasting an alternative Fourth of July address by Saddam Hussein,” he said.

A Channel 4 spokesman would not respond directly to the embassy’s complaint, but told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday that the channel wished “to allow viewers to hear directly from people of worldwide importance, together with sufficient context to enable them to make up their own minds.”

He promised the Christmas message would be preceded by “a little film” which would discuss the Iranian president’s “record.”

“Viewers are intelligent enough to judge for themselves. We’re offering [Ahmadinejad] the chance to speak for himself, which people in the West don’t often get the chance to see,” the spokesman said.

An Israeli official, however, disagreed with the claim that Channel 4 was providing an objective platform. “It’s a seven-minute prepared speech without questions. Is that how you enable people to make up their own minds, with a seven-minute unchallenged speech?”

Unlike in previous years, the alternative Christmas message will not be aired at the same hour as the Queen’s - 3 p.m. - but at 7:15 p.m.

“We do not wish to imply an equivalence between the two,” the Channel 4 spokesman said. “The message is about providing viewers with an insight into an alternative worldview, not an alternative to the Queen,” he said.

But critics of the move said the connection between Ahmadinejad and the Christmas message was inappropriate.

“This is a very dubious decision on the part of Channel 4, particularly at a time when we join together to celebrate goodwill and unity,” said Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust. “This is a man who has openly and consistently denied the Holocaust and the murder of millions of innocent victims. This should be an opportunity to educate about respect and tolerance instead of offering a platform to someone who represents the antithesis of these principles.”

“It is disgraceful. Ahmadinejad is a bigoted dictator,” said Gross, noting the regime’s human rights record, which includes the killing of homosexuals, the persecution of minorities such as Kurds, Bahai’i and Zoroastrians, and the recent sentencing of a woman to be stoned to death for adultery. “Even by the standards of the British media, this marks a new low,” he said.

In the past, the alternative message “has tended to be innocuous,” added Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in London. “All I can assume is that as its viewing figures plummet, Channel 4 has decided they would try to attract controversy. But this is the first time [the guest] is a Holocaust denier who would like to create another [Holocaust] and is destabilizing a region of the world,” he said.

 

TAKING LEAVE OF ITS SENSES

Editorial
Spectator website
By our media correspondent
December 24, 2008

Channel 4, the so-called public-service station that brings you Big Brother and other culturally uplifting events, has really scrapped the barrel. It has a record of bringing controversial alternatives to the screen to match the Queen’s annual Christmas message on the BBC and ITV but this year it has taken leave of its senses.

On the day Christians commemorate as the birth of their Saviour -- a Jew called Jesus -- Channel 4 has chosen to broadcast an “alternative” Christmas message from an anti-Semite who thinks Israel and the Jews should be swept into the sea and who sponsors conferences designed to “prove” the Holocaust is a Jewish myth.

Yes, though it beggars belief, Channel 4 asked Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to give this year’s alternative Christmas message. Sorry, this is not an early, bad taste April fool: a man who hates Jews, persecutes Christians in his own land and who denies the greatest crime against humanity ever happened has seven uninterrupted and unchallenged minutes on prime-time British network TV on Christmas Day to himself. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad -- then put them in charge of Channel 4. No doubt if Hitler was still around they’d have him broadcast a Happy Hanukah message.

Channel 4 prides itself on being an upmarket public-service broadcaster. It is financed by advertising but is wholly owned by the British government and pays nothing for the valuable broadcasting spectrum it uses (or pollutes). The metropolitan, secular, left-wing tossers who run it probably think it’s all a jolly jape -- one in the eye for the Christians and the Jews on an important religious holiday.

Well here’s a way to take the smile off their faces: any advertiser worth his or her salt should immediately withdraw their advertising from Channel 4 and boycott the station -- and it should be privatised forthwith. Ordinary shareholders would never put up with such an outrage.

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THE WEST TOLERATES EGYPT’S ANTI-SEMITISM

Egypt’s Jew haters deserve ostracism in the West
More proof the prejudice has nothing to do with Israel
By Amr Bargisi
The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 1, 2008

Cairo, Egypt – “But we are Semites ourselves!” That is what an urbane Egyptian journalist will likely reply to the charge that the Egyptian media is rife with anti-Semitism. But there are few places where Jews are blamed for so many of the world’s ills, from carcinogenic pesticides to the war in Iraq. More distressing is that much of the pointing is being done by Egypt’s self-described liberals – the pro-democratic and anti-Islamist crowd on which the country’s hopes for a more tolerant future supposedly rest.

The most recent episode began on Oct. 2, when the Anti-Defamation League issued a press release reporting “Surge in Anti-Semitic Messages on Online Finance Sites.” An Egyptian journalist read about it in the Israeli daily “Ma’ariv,” and here is how the new, “liberal” Egyptian weekly Al-Youm As-Sabi headlined its report the next day: “Jews are the principal suspect in the financial crisis.” The article ran alongside a photo of stock market readouts, captioned “why are cries against Jews growing louder in the U.S.?” This was not the only instance in which Egypt’s “liberal” intelligentsia found ways to blame Jews for the financial crisis.

On Oct. 11, Abbas at-Tarabili, the editor in chief of the Al-Wafd daily – the house organ of Egypt’s leading “liberal” political party of the same name – wrote a column purporting to show that Jews were merely manipulating the stock market as they had the price of gold in the late 1970s. “The Jews played a filthy game,” he wrote. “It is true that the Western countries – the United States on top – have a lot to lose, but all pours into the pockets of Jewish businessmen who control the stock markets of the world.”

Two weeks later, Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt’s largest independent newspaper and widely regarded as the country’s only serious tribune for liberalism, ran a column baldly titled “The Jewish Conspiracy.” The columnist, Khairi Ramadan, who also co-hosts one of the country’s most successful talk shows, asked his readers not to ignore what is being said on the Internet “about a Jewish conspiracy in the end of Bush’s term, in preparation for controlling the next president.” “The available information,” wrote Mr. Ramadan, shows that “the Jews withdrew 400 billion dollars from Lehman Brothers a couple of weeks before it collapsed,” adding that the collapse of the brokerage house was of a piece with the events of September 11, “when thousands of Jews did not go to the WTC.”

These examples are especially notable because they have nothing to do with Israel or Zionism. They expose the falsehood – popular with prominent scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of last year’s best-selling book “The Israel Lobby” – that hatred of Jews is not one of the great motivating factors in the Arab world’s overall objections to Israel. But these examples also raise a serious question about what passes for liberalism in the Arab world. Why bother listening to these voices on matters of economics – much less politics, democracy or human rights – if they also propagate hateful conspiracy theories?

There’s another question: Over the past eight years, the United States has invested huge resources in attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East. But it’s not clear whether that project will succeed as long as America’s natural allies in the region remain themselves so profoundly irrational and illiberal.

What can be done? Here’s a modest suggestion. The Egyptian state and the country’s newspapers go out of their way to make a leper of any author who expresses even remote sympathy with Israel. Perhaps Western institutions could adopt a similar practice, refusing to invite to their various functions any editors who allow their pages to become Jew-hatred platforms. The cold shoulder alone might get these lunch-eaters to change their tune.

 

“ISLAMOPHOBIA” OR “TRUTHOPHOBIA”?

“Islamophobia” or “Truthophobia”?
Berlin’s anti-Semitism center is going astray
By Matthias Küntzel
Wall Street Journal Europe
December 8, 2008

(Translated from German by Belinda Cooper)

At a time when Jew haters in the Islamic world have become more assertive than ever, Berlin’s Center for Research on Anti-Semitism is concentrating on a different group: the “new enemies of Islam.”

Who exactly belongs to this category is not clear from the center’s latest publication, the “Yearbook for Research on Anti-Semitism.” But the potential danger is supposedly known: “The fury of the new enemies of Islam is similar to the older rage of anti-Semites against the Jews,” writes Prof. Wolfgang Benz, the institute’s director. The center will present its new findings today at a conference in Berlin titled “Concepts of the Muslim Enemy – Concepts of the Jewish Enemy.”

It is certainly necessary to oppose the demonization of Muslims and discrimination against them, which often have racist motivations. The Berlin center, whose research covers prejudices in general, is right to address this issue. The problem lies in the way it is being done.

The Berlin center adopts the neologism “Islamophobia” without any reservation. This term is misleading because it mixes two different phenomena – unjust hatred against Muslims and necessary criticism of political Islam – and condemns both equally.

By accepting this vocabulary, the Berlin center reinforces an unfortunate trend. In May 2005, the Council of Europe – at the urging of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – used the term for the first time, condemning “all forms of intolerance ... including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”

Yet this statement did not go far enough for the Muslim Council of Britain. “The fact is that Islamophobia has replaced anti-Semitism,” explained Abduljalil Sajid, an imam and leading member of the Muslim Council, a month later at a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Cordoba, Spain. He described as Islamophobic such statements as “Long live Israel!” and “Muslim fundamentalism is dangerous.” Meanwhile, various documents by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the United Nations have condemned Islamophobia as today’s most important and worst form of prejudice.

The Center for Research on Anti-Semitism does not go this far. It is, though, surprising how naturally this institution of all places puts anti-Muslim sentiments and anti-Semitism in the same category. While both forms of prejudice should be fought, the differences between the “concept of the Muslim enemy” and the “concept of the Jewish enemy” are evident.

First, while racism usually makes people “small” in order to enslave, exploit or expel them, anti-Semitism makes the Jews delusionally “big.” The most important characteristic of anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory that holds the Jews responsible for both capitalism and communism, for AIDS, revolutions and financial crises – in short, for every “inexplicable” catastrophe of modernity.

The concept of “redemptive anti-Semitism,” coined by Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer, describes this phenomenon: If one assumes the Jews are responsible for all the world’s misery, only their extermination can “redeem” the world. This paradigm of Jew hatred does not apply to racism. Muslims are not accused of pulling the strings behind all revolutions and wars.

Second, while we must reject any general suspicion of Muslims, it is impossible to ignore the fact that reservations about Muslims are based on real mass murder committed by some Muslims in the name of Islam. Events such as 9/11 or the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh have no counterpart in Jewish tradition.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often used to explain Muslim hatred of Jews. But Israel’s policies are not causing anti-Semitism. Rather, the way those policies are distorted and demonized in the Muslim world, and increasingly in Europe, is a new expression of this old hatred.

Third, one need not play down the extent of discrimination against Muslims in Europe to recognize that the effects of the “concept of the Muslim enemy” and the “concept of the Jewish enemy” are qualitatively different. No one wants to erase a Muslim country from the map the way some people threaten to do with the Jewish state. Islamic centers and houses of prayer need no permanent police protection in Europe, unlike Jewish sites. No satellite stations call for the extermination of Muslims, whereas Hizbullah and Hamas TV, for example, broadcast via Arab satellites into European living rooms, regularly call for the destruction of the Jews – even on children’s programs.

In taking up the fashionable vocabulary of Islamophobia and equating hostility to Muslims with hostility to Jews, the center also risks undermining the most important current task in dealing with anti-Semitism: studying and fighting hostility to Jews in the Islamic world, where anti-Semitism has reached an unprecedented level.

For example, one of the authors in the latest Yearbook, Jochen Müller, proposes a “revision of politics and history teaching” in German schools. Because the Holocaust has no “central meaning for migrants from the Arabic-Muslim world,” one should consider whether “the colonial period and its consequences” would not be a better subject for “appropriate ‘Holocaust education’” among Muslim students in Germany. This is a remarkable idea given the degree of Holocaust denial among many young Muslims.

Another article in the Yearbook, “Hostility to Islam on the World Wide Web,” goes even further. Instead of criticizing anti-Semitism among Muslims, the author criticizes those who accuse Muslims of anti-Semitism. That’s because such accusations provide “an apparently rationally based argument for rejecting an entire collective,” writes Yasemin Shooman, a staff member at the center. Here, attempts to fight “hostility to Islam” threaten to turn into tolerance of anti-Semitic attitudes.

While the Berlin center concentrates on world-wide “anti-Islamic resentments,” its Yearbook says not a word about the anti-Semitism of the Iranian mullahs. Thus, it hardly does justice to the demands for contemporary research on anti-Semitism. Never before has the elimination of the Jewish state been so loudly propagated. Never before has an influential power made Holocaust denial the center of its foreign policy, as Iran has today. Never before has a U.N. forum been misused for an anti-Semitic speech, as it was on Sept. 23 by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier criticized the speech as “blatantly anti-Semitic.”

The Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, whose reports influence the work of the Bundestag, the federal government and the international community, should be expected to make anti-Semitism in the Middle East a focus of its work.

It is right that the past obligates us to combat all racism. But the experience of the Holocaust contains a second lesson: It obligates us to combat the temptation of “truthophobia” – fear of the truth – and to take literally the proclamations of anti-Semites, however crazy they may sound.

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THE UN DISHONORS REAL HEROES OF THE WAR ON PREJUDICE

The UN’s racist conference on racism
By Claudia Rosett
Forbes magazine
December 4, 2008

When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism –The Rev. Martin Luther King, 1968

The remarks above, which the Rev. King reportedly made at a Harvard University dinner, shortly before his assassination, are quoted in a U.S. State Department report released this past March in response to “rising anti-Semitism worldwide.”

I came across them while seeking background on a notoriously anti-Semitic United Nations conference held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. Billed as an effort to fight racism, that Durban conclave focused instead on vilifying Israel – whipping up hatred to such an extreme that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered the U.S. delegation to walk out.

I wonder what the Rev. King would make of the UN’s current drive to reprise that festival of prejudice, in the form of a “Durban Review Conference,” scheduled for April 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland. Even more to the point, because Durban II looms as an early foreign-policy test of the next U.S. administration, what will President-elect Obama do about it?

As in 2001, the UN pretext is to end racism. Or, in UN lingo – take a deep breath – the aim is “the total elimination of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Sounds great, right? Except the UN’s Orwellian twist, once again, is that this conference is configured not to end racism, but to stir up hatred. In a series of preparatory meetings over the past 16 months, the organizers have already taken aim at Israel as their prime target. Increasingly, the organizers are also priming the conference for a broader attack on other democratic nations, especially the U.S. Some are pushing for a UN-backed gag order that would enlist Islamic anti-blasphemy laws to stifle free speech worldwide.

Who are these organizers? The 20-member preparatory committee, operating out of Geneva, is chaired by a Libyan ambassador, Najat Al-Hajjaji. Back in 2003, she chaired the UN’s former Human Rights Commission, which discredited itself not only by picking Al-Hajjaji, envoy of Libya’s despotic regime, to run the show, but also by slamming Israel 27 times from 2001 to 2006. As the State Department anti-Semitism report notes, this was more than twice the number of UNHRC criticisms leveled during that same period at North Korea, Burma and Sudan combined.

In 2006, as part of a package of UN “reforms,” that farce of a Human Rights Commission was dissolved. It was replaced by the current sham of a Human Rights Council, which in its first 16 months spent most of its time issuing 15 criticisms of Israel, and then singled out Israel to become a permanent item on its agenda.

This same Human Rights Council is now providing the official umbrella and support staff for the Durban Review Conference. Among the vice-chairs of the preparatory committee are emissaries of such unfree countries as Iran, Russia, Pakistan and Cameroon (which, according to New York-based Freedom House, still tolerates slavery in its northern reaches). Cuba – where wholesale repression includes the additional frill of job discrimination against Afro-Cubans – fills two seats at this Durban II table, which features both a Cuban vice-chair and Cuba as Rapporteur.

Epitomizing the hypocrisy of this exercise is a statement submitted to the UN earlier this year by Iran, which also helped organize the original, 2001 Durban conference. Tehran proclaims that “The Islamic Republic of Iran, according to its formal and practical policies, is opposed to any policy based on racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has fought against this phenomenon at national, regional and international levels.” This comes from the Iranian regime, which along with supporting terrorists, threatening to wipe Israel off the map and violating five UN Security Council resolutions meant to stop its nuclear bomb program, pursues domestic policies of forcing women to wear the veil and executes homosexuals.

Or consider another one of the organizers: vice-chair Pakistan. The Pakistani government is right now denying any involvement in last week’s terrorist assault on Mumbai – in which hundreds were murdered, but where the targets most deliberately hunted down were Americans, Britons and Jews. As the Durban II preparations take aim at those same groups, vice-chair Pakistan has been doubling on the preparatory committee as the mouthpiece for the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The OIC is the Saudi-headquartered 57-member-state outfit that forms the core of the dominant lobbying bloc in the UN General Assembly, which authorized this Durban repeat.

As for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, he was quick to express horror over the hate that fueled the terrorist assault on Mumbai. But he has done nothing to defuse the ticking bomb of Durban II. Instead, Ban’s office has been dutifully processing the multi-million dollar funding requests of the Durban organizers. The U.S., which contributes an out-sized 22% to Ban’s budget, is planning to withhold a small portion of that money in hope of pressuring the UN into better behavior. Good luck. The UN dodge has been to re-frame the total conference tab, now estimated at about $5.1 million, as coming mainly from resources already available, plus donations. China has committed $20,000, Russia $600,000 and a number of as-yet-unnamed member states are expected to pony up.

All of which begs the larger point, that U.S. taxpayers are the chief sugar daddies for the entire UN system, which – with its logo, premises and diplomatic perquisites – will give this conference a world stage and stamp of authority it would not otherwise enjoy.

Durban II is not solely a mob move against Israel. It is a dishonor to real heroes of the war on prejudice, such as Martin Luther King. It is an assault on the genuine tolerance of free societies. It is an attempt to commandeer the UN – yet again – as a vehicle for the kind of hate that leads to such horrors as the slaughter in Mumbai, or for that matter, Sept. 11. Among the UN’s 192 member states, only two have had the backbone to announce that they will boycott the Durban Review: Canada, and for obvious reasons, Israel. In the U.S., President Bush has deferred any final decision to the next administration. President-elect Obama, what will you do about Durban II?

 

GIVING A FREE PASS TO THE REAL ISLAMOPHOBES

Fighting Racism, U.N.-Style
Durban II mixes the same old Israel-bashing with new attacks on free speech.
The Wall Street Journal (Editorial)
December 3, 2008

One of Colin Powell’s best moves as Secretary of State was to pull out of the 2001 United Nations Durban confab against racism once it became an anti-Semitic rant. One of the best moves the new U.S. administration and Europe could make is to stay away from the follow-up meeting altogether.

“Durban II,” planned for April in Geneva, promises to be an encore of the same old Israel-bashing. The draft declaration says Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians amounts to no less than “a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity, a form of genocide and a serious threat to international peace and security.” We’ll spare you the rest of the diatribe.

Israel will be the conference’s main object of obsession, but it’s not the only target. The draft declaration also goes after the West’s freedom of speech and antiterror laws under the guise of protecting religion – read: Islam – from “defamation.”

The entire West will be in the dock for allegedly persecuting Muslims. “The most serious manifestations of defamation of religions are the increase in Islamophobia and the worsening of the situation of Muslim minorities around the world,” the draft reads.

“Islamophobia” is a vague term used to brand any criticism of Islam as a hate crime. The real Islamophobes, though, Islamic terrorists who have killed hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists, get a free pass.

Instead, the draft calls for a media code of conduct and “internationally binding normative standards... that can provide adequate guarantees against defamation of religions.” If this sounds like censorship, that’s because it is.

The conference is being organized by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, like its discredited predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, has been taken over by several of the world’s main abusers of human rights. The Organization of Islamic Countries, the most powerful voting bloc at the U.N., managed to put Libya in charge of preparing Durban II. Tripoli is being assisted by such other pillars of the international community as Iran and Cuba. Last week a key U.N. General Assembly committee passed a draft resolution, sponsored by Islamic states, that calls for national laws against the “defamation of religions.”

If the Durban II drafters have their way, any challenge of Islamic teachings, including teachings used to justify violence, would be taboo. Reprinting the Danish Muhammad cartoons, exploited by Muslim agitators in 2006 to incite riots around the world, would be a criminal offense. Even gross human-rights violations in Islamic countries – such as the stoning of adulterers in Iran – could be immune from criticism as these practices are rooted in religion.

Although couched in the language of religious rights, the draft isn’t concerned with the right to practice one’s religion. If so, it would have focused on the plight of religious minorities in many Muslim states. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the public worship of any religion other than Islam is forbidden.

The drafters further demand that the fight against terrorism must not “discriminate” against any religion. They specifically complain about the “monitoring and surveillance of places of worship, culture and teaching of Islam.” Since these are exactly the places where Islamic terrorists tend to recruit new followers, stopping such common-sense policing would render the West defenseless.

Israel said last month it will stay away from Geneva. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper deserves kudos for having made that call already back in January. “We will not be party to an anti-Semitic and anti-Western hate fest dressed up as antiracism,” he said.

The decision about whether to send a delegation to Durban II will be an early test of Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton and the new Obama Administration. Western states would best serve the antiracism cause by joining Ottawa and Jerusalem in a boycott of this hate fest.

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WOULD THE BASQUE SEPARATISTS TAKE TIME OUT TO MURDER ALL THOSE IN THE MADRID CHABAD HOUSE?

Silence=Acceptance
By Mark Steyn
December 6, 2008
National Review Online (and other papers)

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnist 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.

We are enjoined to be “understanding,” and we’re doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there’s a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what’s the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that’s not “too big to fail,” what is?

Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel “vulnerable.” Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They’re the world’s fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he’s feeling “vulnerable,” he’s doing a terrific job of covering it up.

We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.

 

THE UNITED ISLAMIST NATIONS

The United Islamist Nations
By Supna Zaidi
American Spectator
December 4, 2008

Last week, the attacks in India and the threat to New York City’s subway system provided another stark reminder of the need for a united front against global terrorism. Yet instead of figuring out how to combat Islamic extremists, the United Nations is worried about offending them.

On November 24, 2008, the U.N. passed a draft resolution against the defamation of religion sponsored by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), where all U.N. members are being asked to pass domestic legislation against blasphemy. The resolution was originally introduced in 1999 by the OIC, asserting that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

In reality, terrorism happens in Islam’s name, or more accurately, in Islamism’s name. Islamism is a 20th century product arising from the writings of sincere Muslims such as Hasan al-Banna and Syed Qutb. Frustrated by the fallen status of Muslims vis-à-vis the West, they offered a new version of Islam as a totalitarian socio-political alternative to democracy and Western license. Disparate followers from Osama bin Laden, Hizbullah and Hamas to the Jihadis that waged war on Mumbai last week are not deranged or crazy. Rather, they subscribe to a worldview that is antithetical to most Muslims and the West.

The OIC nations charge critics of Islamic extremism with “racism” and “Islamophobia” to deflect attention from the fact that such violence originates at the hand of Muslim clerics born and bred in their lands. This is because they realize they can’t control Islamism, or they tacitly agree with its message.

These Muslim clerics also export this ideology to the West to radicalize Muslim immigrants abroad, and reform-minded Muslims are usually the first victims.

Kadra Noor was beat up in 2007 for speaking out against “Islamic” female genital mutilation in Norway. In Sweden, cabinet minister Nyamko Sabuni proposed that honor killings be labeled a separate crime in the Swedish penal code and girls get mandatory gynecological exams to discourage female circumcision. She also told the Sunday Times that arranged marriages are not a part of Islam.

As a result, she was called an “Islamophobe” and instead of supporting her, 50 Islamic Swedish organizations petitioned against her appointment to the cabinet in an effort to suppress her growing influence in Swedish politics.

Pakistan, spokesman for the OIC, recently promoted a politician to minister of education after he defended the live burial of five girls in Balochistan as “tribal custom.” It is not a stretch to argue that Pakistan is not an OIC member interested in reform.

The 2005 Danish cartoon controversy kick-started the OIC campaign to pass last month’s resolution when it was cited as another example of increased discrimination against Muslims after 9/11. The “cartoon intifada” arose 5 months after the original printing of the images of Muhammad, but only weeks before the UNHCR was due to consider the OIC’s resolution on “Combating Defamation of Religion.”

Such a coincidence caused the National Secular Society to state in its Memorandum to the United Kingdom Parliament that “the Danish cartoon crisis was manufactured…to exploit sensitivities around racial discrimination and to promote (or even exaggerate) the notion of ‘Islamophobia’ in order to restrict possibilities for open discussion or criticism of Islam….[M]easures calling for legislation banning ‘defamation of religion’ …. aim[] to remove religion, especially Islam, from public scrutiny and public debate.”

The OIC forgets that Muslims are already protected in the West. The U.S., for example, increases sentences on crimes ranging from assault and battery to murder if they are deemed “hate crimes,” which includes crimes against a victim based on his or her religious identity.

So what is this 57-nation organization really pushing with this “anti-blasphemy” resolution at the U.N.?

In the Muslim world, anti-blasphemy laws are regularly used to suppress free speech by attacking fellow Muslims and non-Muslims who criticize the government or protest human rights violations. Such laws are also used as pretext against individuals in personal and business disputes. The mere allegation puts mobs before the accused before the police can arrive to investigate.

At the U.N., the OIC has manipulated the language of racism to make its anti-democratic agenda more attractive to “third world” nations recovering from their own genuine post-colonial struggles. Nations that voted in favor of the resolution or abstained were predominantly from Latin America or developing African nations.

A final version of the resolution is up for a vote this month. It would be a mistake for these U.N. members to fall for anti-colonial rhetoric once again. By aligning with Islamists, the U.N. would be supporting the stifling of free speech and the suppression of human rights, and crushing the goal of building tolerant democratic societies.

 

HA’ARETZ COLUMNIST: FINALLY I’M BEGINNING TO GET IT

The Jihadi as Nazi, from 9/11 to Mumbai
By Bradley Burston
Ha’aretz
December 3, 2008

“... Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, [one doctor] said: ‘It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood.’... The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: ‘Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks... 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,’ he said.”

Krishnakumar P. and Vicky Nanjappa, reporting from Mumbai, cited by Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic Online.

***

For the whole of my adult life, it irked me when my fellow Jews accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic, and conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with the Nazis. I felt that the latter eroded the memory and the magnitude of the Holocaust, and that the former was a slightly more elegant way of telling people with whom one took issue, to shut the hell up.

Only this week did I realize my error. It turns out, that when Jews suspected that the Jihadi hated the Jew the way the Nazi hated the Jew, they were right. After all this time, I am embarrassed to admit that only when the monsters entered Chabad House in Mumbai, did I understand.

Monsters, not solely for what they did there, but, if the reports are to be believed, for the fact that they were able to do what they did after having actually gotten to know the young couple who founded the center, after asking them for shelter in Chabad House, after telling them that they were Malaysian students eager to learn about Judaism.

Monsters, for having befriended these sweet people in order to better learn how to execute them.

Monsters, for having targeted a young couple who had devoted their lives to helping others better live theirs, despite having had a baby who died of a genetic disease and a second child ill and under treatment far away in Israel.

The hatred of the Jihadi for the Jew is such that – as in the case of the Nazis – the killing of Jews – anywhere they may be found – is an obligation on par with whatever other enemy, target, cause, mission, goal or creed they may be pursuing at the moment. Their hatred of the Jew is such that – as in the case of the Nazis – all tragedy that befalls the Jews was brought on by the Jews themselves. Their hatred of the Jew is such that even if a Jew rejects the concept of a state of Israel and is wholeheartedly opposed to Zionism, if he wears the clothing of a believing Jew – as in the case of victim Aryeh Leibish Teitelboim – he will be bound and tortured and put to death.

“The Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers,” Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said in a sermon broadcast on Palestinian Authority television shortly before Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. “You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. It was the Jews who provoked Nazism to wage war against the entire world, when the Jews, using the Zionist movement, got other countries to wage an economic war on Germany and to boycott German merchandise.”

While waiting, hours and then days, for word of the fate of Gabi and Rivki Holtzberg, I happened onto the memoirs of the handful of survivors of a now-extinct Jewish community near Bialystok, Poland, where my father’s uncle, Herschel Cinowitz, had been born. In 1941, when he was a young man, he escaped the Nazis by making his way to refuge in Bombay, later Mumbai.

This is the first thing that I learned: You don’t have to be German to be a Nazi. The SS ruled Yedwabne, Herschel Cinowitz’ little town, but the locals were only too pleased to do their work for them. Forty of the Jews of Yedwabne were forced to dig graves, then were buried alive. The remainder, 1,440 in all, were taken to a large barn, where they were burned alive.

The world has seen that the Jihadi, in hating the Jew, the Christian, the Hindu, the Muslim of another denomination, has become – like the Nazi – the enemy of all peoples everywhere. The Jihadi shows his love of death in brutality, sadistic executions, the self-righteous calm of the premeditated mass murderer, the blaming of the victim for the crime. One lesson of the Holocaust is that one can’t afford to miss the signs and the intentions. My father’s uncle saw them in time. At the time, Mumbai was his salvation. I’m only seeing it now.

 

“WE MUST STOP THE PROLIFERATION OF MIND-POISONING IDEAS”

Heed the security lessons of deadly siege
By Frida Ghitis
Miami Herald
December 4, 2008

(Frida Ghitis is a former CNN correspondent, producer and unit manager who has worked in more than 50 countries.)

While Indian officials counted their dead and relatives of the Mumbai massacre victims came face to face with their life-changing sorrow, I headed for the airport in Israel at the end of a Middle East trip. Already, political and military strategists were discussing options in the wake of the killings.

Several miles before I reached the airport I came to the first security check. While I spoke with an officer, a man holding a machine gun stood nearby. I then drove about 10 minutes to the terminal where security officers watched everyone entering the building (as they do in restaurants, malls and other public buildings in Israel). That came before the main airport security procedures. On an earlier leg of the trip, in Jordan, every time I entered a hotel I underwent security checks.

Israel and Jordan learned prevention the hard way. In the 1970s, terrorists slaughtered 26 people in Israel’s main airport. Thousands of Israelis died in other ‘‘soft target’’ attacks. In Jordan, terrorists blew themselves up in three upscale hotels, killing 60 in 2005. Terrorists teach us costly lessons, and we need to learn fast, because the recent bloodshed in Mumbai presages a dangerous future.

The Mumbai operation was sophisticated and enormously successful by the twisted standards of terror. The truth, however, is that terrorism does not look particularly difficult, especially in open societies, where individuals are free to move around, congregate with whom they please and travel without restrictions. Let’s not get overly impressed: Killing people, especially when you don’t mind getting killed in the process, does not require great genius.

MORE BRUTAL METHODS

That makes stopping the killers more challenging – and more urgent than ever. Not long ago, terrorists sought mostly publicity. Now they exert enormous influence on the behavior of nations. Their methods have become far deadlier and much costlier for the entire world.

As we knew they would, terrorists are going after the easiest of targets. While we clumsily and obediently remove our shoes at security lines, nobody checks entrances to crowded shopping malls, movie theaters or even airport check-in areas, where anyone can bring suitcases filled with anything. That’s true almost everywhere in the world except Israel. The cost of securing every place on Earth is prohibitive, so governments must teach us all to identify suspicious objects and people.

That’s the front line. For longer-term protection, we must look at how to stop the proliferation of mind-poisoning ideas that fuel inhuman behavior horrifying vast majorities in all religions. We all know that most terrorist attacks are committed by Muslim extremists. Most attacks kill Muslim civilians. Muslims have started speaking out, saying that killing innocent civilians with the intention of sowing terror in the population is an affront to all religions, including Islam. Some, though, are afraid of fueling anti-Muslim sentiment; others go off track, charging that the actions of the West are just as reprehensible as those of Jihadist extremists. You can argue against Western actions without excusing terrorism.

Honest, rather than defensive, introspection about why terrorism has found a home in Islam might help find the answer. After all, terrorism is the world’s problem, but it is also a Muslim problem.

FEAR OF OFFENDING

Fear of seeming anti-Muslim crippled security in India, as it does in other places. As Ed Husain wrote in London’s Telegraph under the headline Tip-toeing round terrorists, that in Britain’s main mosque, “There are meetings every weekend of a group dedicated to creating an Islamist dictatorship, destroying Israel and which advocates Muslim supremacist views.” Authorities “and wider society,” he complains, “will not ‘interfere,’ lest we cause ‘offence.’”

This attitude hurts everyone.

Terrorism once seemed a distant problem. No more. It has become everyone’s problem. From a trendy restaurant in Mumbai to an airport near you, people who view murdering the innocent as glorious success already have changed our way of life. The lesson of Mumbai is that we must change much more if we stand a chance of denying terrorists ever more catastrophic victories.

 

PREPARING FOR THE WORST

U.S. Jewish groups training for Mumbai-style attack
By Eric Fingerhut
Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
December 3, 2008

WASHINGTON -- American Jewish groups have been preparing for terrorist attacks similar to the one that struck Mumbai last week.

The leaders of more than 30 Jewish organizations gathered early last month in New York for a “tabletop exercise” that simulated coordinated attacks on Jewish community institutions in multiple locations throughout the United States.

“It was amazingly prescient for what occurred” in Mumbai, said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and co-chairman of the Jewish group that sponsored the meeting, the Secure Community Network.

Established in 2005, the Secure Community Network coordinates security within the organized Jewish community, disseminating and sharing information among organizations and with law enforcement officials.

Doron Horowitz, the director of community security for the Jewish Federation of Toronto, said last week’s attacks in India confirmed and corroborated the importance of being prepared for such attacks.

The three-hour simulation last month provided community leaders with some key tips on how to respond to such an attack. The group watched as mock newscasts reported on multiple attacks: a firebombing at one synagogue, a machine-gun attack at another and a bomb at a New York Jewish institution. Participants had to formulate a response plan, and the exercise facilitator pointed out vulnerabilities.

“OK, they’ve just entered your institution and they’re on the first floor,” the moderator said, according to one participant. “What do you have in your facility to stop this attack? What don’t you have?”

Among the guidelines for action were drawing up contingency plans, having key phone numbers available and ensuring that staff members are aware of what to do in an emergency in case the person responsible for security is not on the premises.

“We’re challenging them to react to real-time situations,” said Paul Goldenberg, the national director of the Secure Community Network.

The idea is to take that knowledge back to their institutions, along with the procedures recommended by the security experts.

Security experts say simulations are critical to maintain preparedness.

“Anybody can read a manual,” said Rabbi Gary Moskowitz, a former New York City police officer whose Tzedek Task Force on Counterterrorism offers a 50-hour course for religious organizations that includes security drills. “You have to have a performance drill. If you don’t practice it, it’s worthless.”

Allan Finkelstein, the president of the Jewish Community Centers Association, said he will share what he learned in the exercise with his 360 member institutions.

“The key thing is how to help our local agencies go though that kind of training experience,” Finkelstein said. “They need to look at this locally.”

In August 1999, a gunman burst into the Los Angeles JCC and opened fire, wounding five people before fleeing. The man, a white supremacist, later murdered a mail carrier before surrendering to the authorities.

More recently, in July 2006, a Pakistani Muslim gunman opened fire at the Jewish federation building in Seattle, killing one woman and wounding five.

Goldenberg said the American Jewish community isn’t facing any specific threat now, but there is a “heightened state of concern” owing to the targeting of Jews in the Mumbai attacks. He also suggested that the economic crisis may fuel white supremacists and hate groups to target Jews.

In the meantime, the Mumbai attacks have spurred community leaders to action.

Since Nov. 28, when the siege of the Chabad House in Mumbai ended and the hostages were found dead, more than 170 people have downloaded a 200-page manual on emergency preparedness from the Web site of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, according to David Pollock, the associate executive director of the JCRC.

Secure Community Network sent out a notification on the afternoon of Nov. 28 to its member organizations confirming the facts of the attack at the Mumbai Chabad House and issuing several security recommendations. It included implementing a surveillance detection or awareness program to identify and report suspicious activity, and reviewing and testing response plans for lockdowns, evacuations and active shooter scenarios.

The group’s Web site, www.scnus.org, has more information.

North American Jewish institutions have become more prepared and vigilant about security since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Since 2005, hundreds of Jewish organizations, synagogues and schools have received federal aid totaling tens of millions of dollars to pay for security improvements. The money, doled out in increments of less than $100,000, comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s nonprofit grant program.

Goldenberg said the Jewish community could be much more vigilant about security and that there is a proper balance between security and “overload.”

“We’re better than we used to be,” said Stephen Hoffman, the president of the Jewish federation of Cleveland and co-chairman of the security network. But he said security is significantly below where it should be.

In the coming months, the Secure Community Network will partner with the Department of Homeland Security in a new program to train Jewish community professionals throughout the country on understanding and mitigating threats.

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.