Why Terrorists Hate Mumbai
There was a moving op-ed in The New York Times by Suketu Mehta, an NYU journalism prof and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
MY bleeding city. My poor great bleeding heart of a city. Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. "Mumbai is a golden songbird," he said. It flies quick and sly, and you'll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird.
Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn't you know it, the keeping of songbirds.
Bollywood dream-makers are shaken. "I am ashamed to say this," Amitabh Bachchan, superstar of a hundred action movies, wrote on his blog. "As the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me, I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do. Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow."
Mumbai is a "soft target," the terrorism analysts say. Anybody can walk into the hotels, the hospitals, the train stations, and start spraying with a machine gun. Where are the metal detectors, the random bag checks? In Mumbai, it's impossible to control the crowd. In other cities, if there's an explosion, people run away from it. In Mumbai, people run toward it -- to help. Greater Mumbai takes in a million new residents a year. This is the problem, say the nativists. The city is just too hospitable. You let them in, and they break your heart.
In the Bombay I grew up in, your religion was a personal eccentricity, like a hairstyle. In my school, you were denominated by which cricketer or Bollywood star you worshiped, not which prophet. In today's Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.
He feels the answer is to go to Mumbai. I don't know what the answer is. To any of it.
As for Muslims, is it really hard for them to say: we unequivocally condemn the murders in Mumbai? Yep. Turns out it is. At least for a bunch of them whose thoughts are collected here.
And then there was this, by Paul Sheehan, in the Sydney Morning Herald:
The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel was built on a slight, when Jamsetji Tata was turned away from Watson's Hotel because he was not a white man. Last Wednesday the four Pakistani murderers who entered the hotel's ornate lobby were also motivated by a slight, but theirs was a burning, murderous sense of grievance. Their motives were pathetic - envy and resentment - masquerading as religious fire.They murdered indiscriminately. They killed staff members and guests, Indians and foreigners, men and women, young and old, Muslim and Hindu. They killed at least 200 people at last count. Two of the gunmen started the killing at the nearby Leopold Cafe (where my wife and I dined last year, on the advice of our Qantas crew, while staying at the magnificent Taj Mahal Palace) before jogging the short distance to the hotel to join two other gunmen inside the hotel.
...This was a stateless crime by a stateless enemy that draws its inspiration from the numerous exhortations in the Koran to wage war on infidels and expand Islam by conquest. It was no accident that the date was November 26, the American national holiday of Thanksgiving, and that the terrorists were looking to capture and kill Americans. Jihad's goal is to defeat or cower the great satan, America, thus removing the main obstacle to the march of Islam.
It was no accident that one of last week's targets was a Jewish centre, the local headquarters of an ultra-Orthodox movement, even though Jews have only a tiny presence in Mumbai. Anti-Semitism has a conspicuous place in the Koran and is a central element of the new jihadist movement.
It was no accident that all or most of the murderers were Pakistani, not Indian Muslims. Ever since India and Pakistan were partitioned by the British government in 1947, Pakistan has fallen further behind its great rival.
While India has maintained 60 years of relatively stable, pluralist democracy and has recently emerged as an economic powerhouse, Pakistan's per capita wealth ranks a dismal 166th among the world's nations. Pakistan's politics has gone through 20 national emergencies in the past 60 years. Members of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain were responsible for the co-ordinated mass murders on the London Underground on July 7, 2005, and have been involved in numerous terrorist plots in Britain.
Pakistan has become a central battlefield of global jihad. Should the military government fall, a small nuclear arsenal would fall with it. Yet the centre has refused to fold in Pakistan, with militant Islam repeatedly rebuffed in national elections.
This latest massacre was an attempt to break the uneasy detente between India and Pakistan, and between Hindus and Muslims inside India. As of today, it has been a failure, and must continue to be treated as one.
I read somewhere, that the manager of the hotel, whose family was murdered in the attacks, insists on staying on to rebuild the hotel.
The thing I noticed about this was how the networks all settled on this like vultures: "blood everywhere", "the gunman smiled", and the ever-popular "terror". Terror, terror, terror.
The only thing you can do is squeal helplessly. Oh, and give government more power to do what it is not legally bound to do (see Warren v. DC).
NONSENSE.
Radwaste at November 30, 2008 6:55 AM
Barbarians tend to hate everything they don't understand and everyone who succeed without coercion. I just hope the proud Indian people will see it as such.
Toubrouk at November 30, 2008 8:29 AM
Favorite passage:
> Their motives were pathetic - envy
> and resentment - masquerading as
> religious fire.
That happens a lot.
Crid [cridcridatgmail] at November 30, 2008 9:45 AM
Amy,
I really wish you would stop referring to them with the generic "terrorists" label. I would recommend calling them "Islamic terrorists" or jihadists.
When you label them as terrorists, you lump them in with Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Sinn Féin, and God knows how many others from the "I will kill you to fulfill my psychosis and/or my political agenda" club; ... and, yeah, I guess these guys who carried out the Mumbai attacks could fit into that club of diverse "terrorists".
But aren’t they more accurately portrayed as a member of the “I will convert you to Islam, or subjugate you, or (if you don’t like those selections) kill you” club?
The evidence is very damning that this is the work of jihadists:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Arrested_terrorist_says_gang_hoped_to_get_away/articleshow/msid-3771598,curpg-1.cms
“Arrested terrorist says gang hoped to get away”
… In a sensational disclosure made by Ajmal, the jihadi nabbed alive by Mumbai cops, the group had planned to sail out on Thursday. Their recruiters had even charted out the return route for them and stored it on the GPS device which they had used to navigate their way to the Mumbai shoreline.
… Ajmal made another important disclosure: that all terrorists were trained in marine warfare along with the special course Daura-e-Shifa conducted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in what at once transforms the nature of the planning from a routine terror strike and into a specialized raid by commandos.
*****************************************************************
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is an Islamist militant group.
The second journalist you quoted, Paul Sheehan, has it right, “This was a stateless crime by a stateless enemy that draws its inspiration from the numerous exhortations in the Koran to wage war on infidels and expand Islam by conquest.”
The first journalist you quoted, Suketu Mehta, (from the NT Times, gee why doesn’t that surprise me?) has stupidly conflated this with religious extremism, “They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.”
Suketa Mehta, has let Islam off the hook by piling this all under the general rubric of religious extremism.
When you refer to these assholes as simply “terrorists” you are also letting Islam off the hook.
The worst offender of this misidentifying of the enemy is, of course, our beloved President Bush, who thinks Islam is a “Religion of Peace”. Bush is also responsible for calling this a “War on Terror”.
No, George, terror is a tactic, not an entity or a philosophy. By this reasoning, our response to Pearl Harbor should have been a “War on Sneak Attacks”.
Of course, George has allowed this pollution of the definition of our enemy (jihadists) to escalate, by virtue of political correctness, so that terms like jihad, and Islamic terrorists are no longer to be used by those charged with protecting us.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020756.php
New State Department lexicon forbids use of the words "jihad" or "jihadist"
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This is a blatant violation of the "know thine enemy" rule.
So Amy, I implore you to try to refrain from using the generic “terrorist” rubric when you are reporting on Islamic terror effected by jihadists.
Don’t let Islam off the hook for one minute.
Ken at November 30, 2008 1:32 PM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/11/30/why_terrorists.html#comment-1608800">comment from KenIt was unclear from the news reports who the perpetrators were. When it's clear there's a Muslim versus infidels bent, as there is with most of the terrorists attacks on the planet these days, I identify the terrorists as Islamic. But, I appreciate and agree with what you're getting at.
Amy Alkon
at November 30, 2008 2:07 PM
Mumbai has moved much, much higher up on the ranked list of places I want to visit in the not-too-distant future. Because I'm ornery that way. In the meantime, I'm just doing the guilty First World thing and donating. I gave a bit here (which I think is safe despite the lack of "https" in the address):
http://www.chabad.org/templates/relief/donate.htm
Any other suggestions?
marion at November 30, 2008 4:42 PM
Ken -
I would respectfully disagree with you, though I understand where you are coming from. But naming them jahadists, just gives them more power, makes them something special. And they aren't.
That they kill in the name of their god is irrelevant. These people are no less psychopaths, than the other terrorists you listed and deserve no special recognition, beyond the recognition that their terror is cloaked in the politics of genocide, masquerading as a religion. They are muslim terrorists and recognizing that is important. But they aren't fucking special and should never be treated as such.
Ted, Tim and even the IRA are just as evil, their acts just as evil, they just didn't have nearly the following. They were all criminals and criminals is what the men who perpetrated this attack are. Criminals is what those who strap bombs to their chests and kill innocent people are. Petty, vile, murderous scum - that is what terrorists are. And none of them deserve to be recognized as anything more than that.
DuWayne at November 30, 2008 8:22 PM
Terrorists hate Mumbai for its FREEDOM and LIBERTY, and it's the part of the best nation on the face of the entire earth!
That is, to paraphrase idiotic conservative commentators.
Interestingly enough, the terrorist's intended effect will have the exact opposite result. Greater security, more dialogue with the West; sadly this came at the expense of many innocent lives.
farker at November 30, 2008 8:23 PM
Way to miss the forest for the trees, farker.
The Islamic imperialists behind the Mumbai attack, 9/11, and pretty much every other Islamist terror attack in the past 40 years really DO hate freedom and liberty. But that's not why they hate US.
They hate us because we are not them. Because we do not acknowledge the superiority of their worldview. Because we embrace individual liberty over the collective worship of a hateful god that demands human sacrifice in his name.
So, while the appeal to jingoism hurts your highly sophisticated mind, trying to explain to 300 million non-Islamists that what animates the movement is not who we are, but WHAT we are, is best served with simple buzzwords.
Your average person has far more interesting and important things (from their perspective) to deal with than a 30 minute explanation of the origins of Islamist imperialism.
brian at November 30, 2008 8:29 PM
Another thing I guess you have missed, brian.
They hate us because we are winning.
For the last two decades, the West (with the United-States on the first row) became the ideological forefront of Humanity as a whole. The democratic and capitalistic ideals so cherished by the U.S. citizen are now exported to other countries.
20 years ago, India was a country marred by mysticism. Now they are producing cars and engineers. Two decades ago, China was a hardcore Communist country. Now they are trying to navigate towards reforms while the rest of the country is emerging as an industrial powerhouse. Both those countries are now Space-Capable nations with a growing Middle-Class.
I might be called a dreamer but this is for me Humanity as a whole is just walking away. This is the wind of freedom blowing minds away from witch doctors and state-sponsored goons. The current Pax Americana is now acting just like the two previous "Pax" (Britannia and Romana) and is pushing the world towards a shiny 21 century.
This is the big problem for Islam who is, by itself, a faith-system and a repressive form of government. I remember the video of a brunch of Arab teens dancing on the hip-hop music of Eminem in Qatar a couple of years ago. This is what they are really afraid of.
They are losing their power-base they put in place a millennia ago. If it will not be by reform, it will be by simple erosion. In their twisted beliefs, acting like thugs will be enough to get by. They forgot that we are not in middle-age and what's worked a millennia ago don't work in a world where the productive man is bound by voluntary contract and good will instead of force.
The West is a steam-roller and the Islamists are trying to stop it with rocks and their bare hands. It will not work.
Toubrouk at November 30, 2008 9:19 PM
DuWayne,
The jihadists don't give a rats ass whether we call them jihadists or not. They are not "empowered" by us. To them we are infidel or "kuffar" and as such, we are to be converted to Islam, or subjugated, or killed, whether we understand them or not. This isn't a distinction in semantics; this is about whether we understand who and what the enemy is
"That they kill in the name of their god is irrelevant."
Oh but this has all the relevance. We are at war with them. We must understand them in order to defeat them.
"They were all criminals and criminals is what the men who perpetrated this attack are. Criminals is what those who strap bombs to their chests and kill innocent people are."
We must recognize them for what they are. We must know the enemy in order to defeat them, and blurring the picture by just calling them all criminals is exactly the mindset that will get the West defeated by Islam.
I doubt that I can persuade you from the fatal flaws in your thinking, but I will quote from Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald from Jihad Watch (you really should visit that site), as they can make the case much more eloquently than I.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020756.php
Robert Spencer:
A reliable source has informed me that Condoleeza Rice has approved a new lexicon for State Department usage, absolutely forbidding the use of the terms "jihad" and "jihadist" by any State Department official.
The argument, of course, is the old Streusand/Guirard claim that by using the word jihad, we're validating the jihadist claim to be waging jihad. Of course, it's ridiculous to think that the U.S. State Department carries any validating authority within the Islamic world to determine what is Islam and what isn't. This would be the first time that unbelievers have set the meaning of Islamic theology for Muslims.
Also, the claim is that by using the word "jihad," we are insulting the peaceful Muslims who are waging the daily jihad of the struggle against sin, the struggle against the dirty dishes, etc. And that's great, if that's what any Muslim actually believes is the sum and substance of jihad, but it is an understanding of jihad that is at odds with the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Will Muslims be insulted by a reference to other Muslims using the traditional primary meaning of jihad? Answer: probably. But that doesn't negate the traditional status of that meaning, or the influence of that traditional view in the Islamic world.
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/020763.php
Hugh Fitzgerald:
Without intelligent use of the word "Jihad," a word both accurate and useful (these qualities do not always coincide), a word that demands to be explained, and in that explanation -- the same kind of explanation that the word "dhimmi" calls for, Infidels will be forced to learn certain home truths about the meaning, and menace, of Islam.
By banning use of the word "Jihad," Rice makes much more difficult the intelligent dissemination of information about Islam. She makes more difficult the task of seeing the war of self-defense in all of its dimensions, and furthermore, far from encouraging peace, defined as the absence of open warfare through military means, makes such open warfare through such means more likely, by preventing the United States and other Infidel lands, from working to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam and Jihad. That can only take place, it is clear, once the conflict is understood, and once the most effective instruments of Jihad are grasped, and the monomaniacal emphasis on "terrorism" has come, as it must, to an end. For that emphasis has served to divert attention from the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and most important of all, demographic conquest that, in Western Europe, proceed without Infidel governments taking the kind of minimal measures that, at any other time in history, would long ago have been sensibly undertaken.
Whatever the peoples of the West may have lacked in the past -- cars and computers, say -- they did at least forthrightly, uninhibitedly, recognize the nature of Islam, its meaning, its menace. Rice wishes to prevent this, in order to curry favor with Arab states, and possibly in order to prevent having to begin the difficult work (but hardly too difficult) of figuring out the kinds of things that might best work to weaken the Camp of Islamic Jihad. Those ways have all been set out here, over the past few years -- often in great detail. But Rice hasn't time in her datebook. She hasn't space in her brain, to consider how best, how most effectively, how at the least cost, without all the squandering (of men, money, materiel, morale both civilian and military) that the Iraq folly continues to cause, to undo or hold in check the forces of Jihad.
Ken at November 30, 2008 10:26 PM
Did you read the Breitbart article with this unbelievable quote.
"When will these politicians realize and admit that terrorists have no religion. Terrorists are not Hindu or Muslim or Christian. They are not people of religion or God. They are people who have gone totally sick in their head and have to be dealt with in that manner."
Nope...they just couldn't be Muslim....
belle at December 1, 2008 7:49 AM
belle,
Yes, pretty unbelievable. This is typical of the mindset "Any religion is better than no religion." and "There are no bad religions, only people that do bad things." I think George Bush is a charter member of both clubs.
I am not promoting any concept of "My religion is better than your religion." There are plenty of historical black marks against Christianity, Hinduism, and (fill-in-the blank) religions.
I am just not aware of any current religion, other than Islam, which has lots of believers running around killing lots of people, with the killers making a valid link to religious text (see Koran, et al) as justification.
You didn't provide a link to the Breitbart article, but if they have a comments section, you might consider sending the author this link,
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
and then asking if he/she really thinks there is no religious component to all these acts of terror.
Ken at December 1, 2008 11:02 AM
belle,
Yes, pretty unbelievable. This is typical of the mindset "Any religion is better than no religion." and "There are no bad religions, only people that do bad things." I think George Bush is a charter member of both clubs.
I am not promoting any concept of "My religion is better than your religion."
There are plenty of historical black marks against Christianity, Hinduism, and (fill-in-the blank) religions.
I am just not aware of any current religion, other than Islam, which has lots of believers running around killing lots of people, with the killers making a valid link to religious text (see Koran, et al) as justification.
You didn't provide a link to the Breitbart article, but if they have a comments section, you might consider sending them this link,
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
and then asking the author if he/she still thinks there is no religious component to all these acts of terror.
Ken at December 1, 2008 11:13 AM
Ken -
I would really like to continue this discussion at a later date, but due to some magnificently fucked up circumstances that have arisen today, I really can't do it right this minute. I sincerely hope that you will email me, so that when I can, we can continue this discussion. To that end; duwayne.brayton at gmail dot com
Thank you for understanding and I apologize for not responding right now.
DuWayne at December 1, 2008 4:25 PM
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