India Names Lashkar-e-Taiba as Mumbai Mastermind

The Wall Street Journal reports that New Delhi has identified Pakistan's militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba as the central terrorist organization behind last week's attacks in Mumbai:

India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week's terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.

Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India's financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.

Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and Mumbai's main railway station, both prime targets of last week's attack, the police official said.

Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of locations in southern Mumbai that weren't attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week's attack, an official said.

U.S. officials agreed that Mr. Muzammil was a focus of their attention in the attacks, though they stopped short of calling him the mastermind. "That is a name that is definitely on the radar screen," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Information gathered in the probe also continues to point to a connection to Lashkar-e-Taiba, that official said. Along with a confession from the one gunman captured in the attacks, officials cited phone calls intercepted by satellite during the attacks that connected the assailants to members of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, and the recovered satellite phone from the boat ....

The Mumbai attacks have ratcheted up tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who have been exchanging verbal fire for the past several days and sparking fears of a conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in India Wednesday, as is Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Indian authorities say evidence highlights how Lashkar has broadened its operations to include recruitment of both Indian and Pakistani Muslim extremists.

Lashkar-e-Taiba - literally Army of the Good - has been implicated by Indian officials in several recent terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The group initially focused on fighting the Indian army in the disputed state of Kashmir. Over the years, it has expanded its cause into the rest of India and aims to establish Islamic rule.

India has told Pakistan that the latest attacks in Mumbai were masterminded by Mr. Muzammil, aided by others in Lashkar's senior ranks including an operative named Asrar Shah, according to a senior Pakistani official. Mr. Muzammil, a Pakistani in his mid-30s, became head of Lashkar-e-Taiba's anti-Indian planning cell some three months ago, according to Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, an independent think tank in New Delhi. Indian authorities believe he is in Pakistan but officials there haven't acknowledged that.

India also claims the attacks were approved by Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the Pakistani official said. Mr. Saeed is the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organization of the Lashkar group. Mr. Saeed, who is free in Pakistan, denied the accusations. "India has always accused me without any evidence," he told Pakistan's GEO News television channel.

Indian investigators - helped in part by the testimony of the one terrorist they captured alive, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab - say they now possess solid proof. "We have made substantial progress in the investigation," said A.N. Roy, director general of the State Police of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located.

Be sure to read the whole article, which features an excellent map and chronology of the suspected terrorist plotting inside Pakistan.

The quesion now is how India, Pakistan, and the United States respond to the latest developments. See my earler essay for more on that, "An Indian Incursion into Pakistan?"

The UN's Obsession with the Death of Israel

Recall that Dennis Prager noted how the Holtzberg murders last week at the Jewish Chabad house in Mumbai came at precisely the same time that "the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions."

At my post on this, Here's LFC comments in response:

I take some issue ... with the second to last paragraph of the column, where he says it's "exquisitely fitting" that the UNGenAssembly passed 6 "anti-Israel resolutions" the week of the Mumbai attacks. It's not "exquisitely fitting" b/c the 2 things actually have rather little to do w/ each other.

LFC took issue with me as well, saying that:

Speaking of fitting, it might be fitting for you to express some outrage at the killing of the other 170-some people who died in the attacks ...

Well, regular readers know that I've condemned the attacks on Mumbai as attacks against Western civilization, and I've specifically hightlighted how the attackers killed citizens from all over the world.

No matter.

LFC's got a larger design, and that's to delegitimize any blogging that privileges Western values against the advocacy of nihilist destruction seen in defenders of evil, including the leading dictators who compose the membership the U.N. General Assembly.

Jeff Jacoby actually wrote about this last weekend:

THE PRESIDENT of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, last week denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are "so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era," he said, "that the world must unite against them, demanding an "end to this massive abuse of human rights" and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing "campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions."

Of which country was he speaking?

Was it Saudi Arabia, where public facilities are segregated by sex, and where a pervasive system of gender apartheid denies women the right to drive, to dress as they choose, to freely marry or divorce, to vote, to appear in public without a male "guardian," or to give testimony on an equal basis with men?

Was it Jordan, where the law explicitly bars Jews from citizenship and where the sale of land to a Jew was for decades not only illegal, but punishable by death?

Was it Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime - at least 200 Iranian gays were executed last year - and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran?

Was it Sudan, where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum?

It was none of these. The General Assembly president, a radical Maryknoll priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s, was not referring to any of the Middle East's Muslim autocracies and dictatorships, virtually all of which discriminate against ethnic and religious minorities. He was speaking of the Jewish state of Israel, the region's lone democracy, and the only one that guarantees the legal equality of all its citizens - one-fifth of whom are Muslim and Christian Arabs.

D'Escoto's call for Israel to be shunned as a pariah and strangled economically came on the UN's Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an annual occasion devoted to lamenting the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the 20th century, denouncing the national liberation movement - Zionism - that made that rebirth possible, and championing the cause of the Palestinian Arabs. The event occurs on or about Nov. 29, the anniversary of the UN vote in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are impassioned speeches, in which Israel's sins are enumerated and condemned, and the statelessness of the Palestinians is bewailed. Unmentioned is the fact that Palestine's Arabs would have had their state 60 years ago had they and the Arab League not rejected the UN's decision and chosen instead to declare war on the new Jewish state.

Like so much of what takes place at the UN, the obsession with demonizing Israel and extolling the Palestinians is grotesque and Orwellian. More than 1 million Israeli Arabs enjoy civil and political rights unmatched in the Arab world - yet Israel is accused of repression and human-rights abuse. Successive Israeli governments have endorsed a "two-state solution" - yet Israel is blasted as the obstacle to peace. The Palestinian Authority oversees the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich, and wants all Jews expelled from the land it claims for itself - yet Israel is labeled an "apartheid state" and singled out for condemnation and ostracism.

Make no mistake: In likening Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, the UN is engaged not in anti-racism but in anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, the world's foremost anti-Semites demanded a boycott of Jewish businesses. Today they demand a boycott of the Jewish state.

"No good German is still buying from a Jew," announced Hitler's Nazi Party in March 1933. "The boycott must be a universal one . . . and must hit Jewry where it is most vulnerable." Seventy-five years later, the president of the General Assembly urges the world to throttle Israel's 6 million Jews with "boycott, divestment, and sanctions." There is no significant difference between the two cases -- or the animus underlying them.

When the UN adopted its odious "Zionism is racism resolution" in 1975, US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan minced no words. "The United States," he declared, "does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act." Where is such a voice of moral outrage today?

Echoes From WWII: Islamists and the Jews

Dennis Prager has published one of the most profound essays I've read so far in my coverage of the Mumbai massacre.

The enormity of the terrorists' evil is now clear, as we haved learned more and more about the killings of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

Here's Prager:

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India's major city devote so much of its efforts - 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?

The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? Why did Hitler - as documented by the late historian Lucy Dawidowicz in her aptly named book "The War against the Jews" -- weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?

From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity.

For the Islamists, as for the Nazis, the destruction of the Jews -- and since 1948, the Jewish state -- is central to their worldview.

If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.

With all the Pakistani Islamists' hatred of Hindus, they did not attack one Hindu temple in India's major city.

With all their hatred of Christian infidels, the terrorists did not seek out one of the 700,000 Christians in Mumbai.

To reinforce my point, imagine a Basque separatist terrorist organization attacking Madrid. Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous. But no one seems to find it odd that that Pakistani Muslim terrorists who hate India and want it to give up control of Indian Kashmir would send two of its 10 terrorists to kill perhaps the only rabbi in Mumbai. As Newsweek reported during the siege, "Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors." Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.

They are right.

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.

It's always a serious thing to invoke the memory of the Holocaust to explain contemporary threats to international security and Western civilization.

But because of the ineluctable conclusion that of all the deaths last week, the killings of the Holtzbergs was the result of singularly unspeakable design and diabolical guile, the reference to the Nazi program of anti-Semitic eliminationism is completely appropriate.

Rivka Holtzberg Six-Months Pregnant at Time of Attack

Rivka Holtzberg, the wife of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, was six-months pregnant at the time she was slain by terrorists last week in the Mumbai massacre:

Mumbai, Chabad, Holtzberg, pregnant, Rivka, Moshe ...

Her father broke the news during an emotional funeral service in Israel attended by thousands.

Rivka Holtzberg's pregnancy added to the intense sense of anguish felt across Israel at her death along with five other Jewish victims.

They died when the Chabad community house in Mumbai was targeted by armed gunmen.

It also emerged today that her husband, Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg, had been reading a book about how to deal with terrorists when he was killed.

The rabbi’s colleague found his body slumped on the floor of his living quarters. By the side of his bed he found copies of Jewish holy texts along with a book entitled “How to protect yourself when terrorists come to your house”.

Mourners wailed as eulogies were delivered over the bodies of Mrs Holtzberg, 28, and her 29-year-old husband in the small village of Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv.

The two bodies, wrapped in blue and white prayer shawls, were laid out on benches set on a podium while members of the orthodox Chabad community prayed and listened to eulogies.

Keep in mind that the Holtzberg's knew their killers, having eaten a meal hosted by Rivka Holtzberg on an earlier reconnaissance mission to the Chabad house.

As more and more facts emerge on the enormity of this incomprehensible evil, there is simply no way that people of light can turn their backs on the gathering existential struggle that now confronts us.

Mumbai Terrorists Jacked-Up for Murder Rampage

After seeing some of the pictures of the Mumbai killers, it seemed entirely likely that the murderers were pumped up for killing with death-cult stimulants, if not the fire of the devil himself.

So it's no surprise, then, that Azam Amir Kasav, the bloodthirsty killer seen storming through Mumbai's train station last week, is now said to have been jacked-up on coke and acid while raining death down on the innocent:

The Mumbai terrorists may have pumped themselves full of drugs to keep going during their murderous three-day rampage.

Indian police sources say tests on the bodies of dead Islamic fanatics revealed traces of stimulant drugs.

One said: “We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists and later found drugs in their blood.

“There was also evidence of steroids, which isn’t uncommon in terrorists. These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks.

“This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep.”

The source said one gunman is thought to have injected himself with large doses of stimulant so he could keep on fighting after he was seriously wounded.

Indian newspapers yesterday carried a dramatic picture of the sole surviving terrorist hooked up to a life support machine.

Azam Amir Kasav, 21, is shown lying on his back with his eyes open, seemingly dazed. It is not known when or where the picture was taken. Kasav was yesterday thought to be in a secure location.

Check the tags below for more news and analysis on the attacks.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Chambliss Wins Senate Runoff

Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss was reelected to a second term tonight, winning a decisive 59 percent majority of the vote. The results in Georgia dash Democratic hopes for a filibuster-proof majority (albeit not by much), but it's the implications of the state's voter turnout that is especially striking:

With 81 percent of the state’s precincts reporting in Tuesday’s runoff election, Mr. Chambliss had 59 percent of the vote, and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin, had 41 percent. The margin was far greater than the three percentage points that separated the two men in the Nov. 4 election, when neither got the required 50 percent. Many of the Democrats who turned out last month in enthusiastic support of Barack Obama apparently did not show up at the polls on Tuesday.

“For a lot of African-American voters, the real election was last month,” said Merle Black, an expert in Southern politics at Emory University. “The importance of electing the first African-American president in history generated enormous enthusiasm. Everything else was anticlimactic.”

Polling stations across Georgia reported low-to-moderate voter turnout. At the Atlanta Public Library on Ponce de Leon Avenue, where more than 1,600 people voted in the general election, only 400 people had voted by noon. Only 9.2 percent of registered Georgians cast early votes in the runoff, compared with 36 percent in the general election.

Georgia is a solid Republican state in a more routine electoral environment, so it'll be interesting to see if historic trends for losses for the president's party in congressional elections hold up for 2010. That possibility is more important than the razor-thin minority that may be able to sustain a filibuster in the 211th Congress.

Abortion Gift Certificates

Nothing like the convenience of an abortion gift card for today's sexually-active postmodern women on the go!

Planned Parenthood of Indiana is offering holiday gift certificates in $25, $50, $75, and $100 denominations. Andrew Malcolm has the details:

Here's an original holiday gift idea to help the person who may have everything, including a little something they don't really want. A new way to mark the festive yearend celebration of life -- a gift certificate for an abortion.

This year, for the first time, Planned Parenthood of Indiana is offering holiday gift certificates for that certain someone in your life who may want a breast exam, a pap smear or perhaps not want another life in their life.

Calling them an "unusual yet practical gift this holiday season," the organization is selling gift certificates in $25 denominations, redeemable at any of the group's 35 statewide locations for their services, including health screenings, birth control and abortion services.

A Planned Parenthood website page notes that a standard women's health exam costs $58 while abortions in the first trimester can run from $350 to $900.

There's even an online page to order the certificates if you know someone in Indiana who desires such services.

According to Ms. magazine, an official of the Hoosier Planned Parenthood group explained:

"People are making really tough decisions about putting gas in their car and food on their table, so we know that many women especially put healthcare at their bottom of their list to do."

The official explained the group offers a range of services that can be purchased with the gift cards including pap smears, breast exams, birth control prescriptions and abortions. The organization performs about 5,000 abortions a year, according to one published figure, out of 92,000 patients treated.

There's more at the link, but this passage says it all:

"Christmas," said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, "perhaps more than any other time of the year, is dedicated to the miracle of life and divine love." He said the gift cards "would be more accurately described as death certificates."

Moshe Holtzberg: Child of All Israel

This is Moshe Holtzberg, with his attendant, at a commemoration ceremony for his parents, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, Mumbai December 1, 2008.

Sheera Frenkel, at the Times of London, writes of Moshe and the life of his parents, "You Are a Child of Israel, Orphaned Two-Year-Old Moshe Holtzberg is Told":

Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg was dressed for prayer the moment he was shot, next to a book on terrorism on his bedside table. As Israel mourned the murdered rabbi, his pregnant wife and four other Jews yesterday, a family friend described how he found the bodies amid the carnage of Mumbai.

“I think he was sending us a message. He showed his tremendous dedication to faith, even in his final moments,” Rabbi Dov Goldberg, who was the first civilian to enter the Chabad centre in Mumbai after its two-day siege, told The Times.

Thousands of Orthodox mourners prayed and wept before the shrouded bodies of Mumbai’s six Jewish victims at a ceremony broadcast live on television and attended by Israeli leaders, including President Peres.

Moshe, the Holtzbergs’ two-year-old son, was not at the procession held at Kfar Chabad, the movement’s headquarters in Israel. Rabbi Goldberg said that the boy was “not in good shape” and had not slept for four days. The child escaped from the gunmen with his Indian nanny when the terrorists burst into Mumbai’s Chabad compound ....

Rabbi Goldberg revealed that the couple knew their killers. Some of the terrorists had visited the centre on a reconnaissance mission before the attack, and had been given a meal by Rivka Holtzberg, the murdered Rabbi’s 28-year old wife.

Rabbi Goldberg, a friend of the Holtzbergs from school, said that he had no doubt the items left behind by the rabbi were a message to his survivors. “I was called in to identify his body,” he said. “I looked at him and understood that I was the one who would need to make sure that the Chabad lives on; that I would be called on to do this.”

The murdered rabbi’s body was wrapped in tefillin, a prayer aid containing Hebrew scrolls. “I recognised the tefillin on him as his own. I know it was him who must have put the tefillin on himself, even while there were terrorists in his home.”

There's more here, but the conclusion shows the power of life and faith in this family:

The parents of Rivka Holtzberg have suggested that they will return to Mumbai to complete their daughter’s work and raise Moshe in his parents’ former home. Giving a eulogy at the ceremony, Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad Rabbi from New York, aimed his message at Moshe, saying: “You don’t have a mother who will hug you. You are the child of all of Israel.”

We Are All Mormons

The debate over California's Proposition 8 has has tapered off somewhat.

The state's Supreme Court will decide the issue next year. In the meantime there remains scattered commentary on the issue here and there, and the Yes on 8 campaign sent me Rabbi Nachum Shifren's recent commentary, "We Are All Mormons":

We are living in an era of insanity! Witness the latest attempt to remake the nature of our country, founded and established on certain principles that have been the envy of the entire world. The latest assault on our country and its values comes in the form of vicious and criminal violence against the Mormon church in Westwood, California

Interesting how the selective self-righteous indignation on the part of the radical Gay activists is played out here: they bewail the blow to freedom and justice! But I thought we just had elections, where the majority of Californians expressed their views in a free and open manner. Are we not a nation of laws? Dare we relive the McCarthy era, where Americans were harassed and threatened with the loss of their jobs for believing in a certain way? If the Gay radicals should have their way, untold numbers of Americans would live under the threat of the Gay-Lesbian "thought police," where individuals that reject the Gay lifestyle would be sought out and have sanctions brought against them.

It's bad enough for those working in the entertainment industry here in Los Angeles, where a fog of political correctness and a bending over backwards to accommodate, even promote Gay lifestyle is in full gear. Let none dare say that this type of activity is anathema to our country, our morality, and the debauchery of our young people.

Let it be stated unequivocally: The radical Gay attack on the Mormons is the shot over the bow against the United States of America. There was a time when what a man did in his bedroom was sanctified between himself and G-d. Now we are being served an "in-your-face" smorgasbord of smut and licentiousness as being between people who only "want their civil rights."

Hogwash! We are dealing with the equivalent of a moral takeover of the country that has as its bedrock a belief in G-d and His promise for humanity. They don't want civil rights! What they desire is quasi Gay/Lesbian hegemony, where a huge "bookburning," reminiscent of the Nazis, will purge any remnants of the "Christian, White, mainstream America" that has given ALL AMERICANS the most profound scope of freedom, liberty, and justice that Mankind has yet to experience.

People have perhaps wondered: why the Mormons? Answer: they are a small, yet vocal Christian minority. They have been selected by the mobs as vulnerable, a group that might not have such massive support among America's Christians.

We who are friends of the Mormons, their patriotism, their family values, will not falter in our continued support of these dear Americans. Let us recall the Christian minister Niemoller, whose admonition during those dark years of Nazi Germany moved us to our core:

"When they came for the gypsies, I said nothing, because I wasn't a gypsy. When they came for the homosexuals, I said nothing, because I wasn't a homosexual. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I said nothing, because I wasn't a Catholic......then they came for me, and there was no one left to defend me."

My fellow Americans, in the coming battle for the heart and soul of America and everything we cherish, may this call to arms be the mantra of every concerned patriot:

"WE ALL ARE MORMONS!"

Check the tags below for additional commentary on the topic, and thank you Rabbi Shifren!

An Indian Incursion into Pakistan?

There's a debate this morning over the international response to Mumbai. Robert Kagan suggests the military option is called for, but given the controversy this might cause among populations around the world, the effort should be "internationalized."

Abe Greenwald takes Kagan's logic further, examining what "internationalization" means for the incoming Democratic administration:

If ever there is a real-world test of the utility of Barack Obama’s global popularity, this is it. If this is really to be a new age of international cooperation, and if Obama wields such vital soft power, then let’s make things happen. So far, Obama’s Pakistan policy encompasses little more than a humanitarian aid boost. This is uninspired and historically ineffective. It should be junked in favor of a bold policy aimed at reversing the dangerous deterioration inside Pakistan.

The hitch here is Pakistan’s sovereignty. But as Kagan notes, sovereignty has to be earned. And after decades of exorbitant American aid being repaid with expansive state-supported jihad, it can be said that Pakistan has failed to make the grade. After the invasion of Iraq, the Left seemed to make a fetish of sovereignty for autocrats and tyrants. Let’s hope this is another area in which Barack Obama is poised to flip-flop. And let’s hope that he doesn’t believe popularity is its own reward.

I won't be surprised if the U.S. stands on the sidelines, calling for "restraint" over these next few weeks. With no international action, the political pressure on the Indian government could be too much for the government of Manmohan Singh, and New Delhi could very well decide to root out the terror sanctuaries in Pakistan's hinterlands on its own (see also, "Mumbai and Obama").

That would be something.

Media Equivalence in Mumbai Reporting

Betsy Newmark reports on Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman's piece at the New York Post, "Mumbai: Deadly Media Euphemisms."

Betsy notes:

... Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman write in the New York Post note how several media outlets have been downplaying the attack on Jews in the Chabad House in Mumbai to minimize the fact that these terrorists specifically targeted that small group of Jews for torture and death.

The New York Times theorized that Chabad House may have been an "accidental hostage scene." The BBC initially chose to hide the Jewish character of the target by describing it as just "an office building." Al Jazeera refused to show Chabad House as the site of the carnage. Some Western media outlets unsympathetically labeled victims there as "ultra-Orthodox" or "missionaries."

We expect nothing better from Al Jazeera, but why would writers from the NYT and the BBC seek to downplay the murder of Jews in India? We can't begin to fight back in this terror war if we refuse to acknowledge the motives of our enemies.

This story actually makes me sick to my stomach.

Some of the most chilling pieces of news from the terror are the first-person accounts of the attacks. Witnesses described how the terrorists knew the precise location of the Chabad house. The killers proceeded deliberately to the site of the Jewish mission with a diabolical determination to kill, not just the Holtzbergs and their friends and colleagues, but anyone who happened to be on the scene.

I thank the Wall Street Journal for its integrity in reporting, for example, in its report yesterday on the scene at Chabad:

With its small, faded sign, the five-story Chabad House - which served as a guesthouse and source of kosher food for the many Israeli backpackers who travel through India - is so hard to find that most visitors ask for directions at the gas station. But the militants knew their way, a station attendant says: Without stopping, they threw a hand grenade into the gas station, and walked into the alley.

Alarmed by the explosion, Chabad House's rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, called the Israeli consulate. The two gunmen burst into his building, taking a number of Israelis, a young Mexican Jewish woman, and the rabbi and his family hostage. It appears that they quickly shot dead one of the guests, an Israeli kosher ritual inspector, whose body would be found badly decomposed at the end of the siege.

The explosion and gunfire attracted the attention of neighbors. Some young men started throwing stones toward the building. Manush Goheil, a 25-year-old tailor, stepped outside the family's shop to get a better view. His brother Harish watched from the shop as a gunman shot him dead with a well-aimed bullet fired from the Chabad House's top floor.

Pamela Gellar has photographs of Chabad in the aftermath of the killing. The walls of the house are splattered in blood.

The media need to report honestly on what is happening in our world.

Worst Terror Attacks Since September 11

RealClearWorld features an important compilation of the worst terrorist attacks since 9/11:

Last week's tragic and deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, serve, sadly, as just the most recent reminder of the impact global terrorism has had on every continent and nation around the world. While the face of terror often carries a different banner and agenda, the symbolic, emotional and fatal impact it can have on a civilian population is undeniable.

Over seven years removed from the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the incident in Mumbai increasingly resembles a bookend of sorts in the chronology of global terrorism. Much like the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai, New York City represented not only a logistically ideal, civilian-dense target right on America's coastline, but a symbolic strike against American capitalism and finance. Much like New York City, Mumbai stands as a symbol of diversity and freedom in a country often plagued by sectarian divisions and strife. Crown jewels in two of the world's largest and most prosperous democracies.

There have been far too many terrorist attacks since 9/11, and to limit such a list to only five was no easy task. Many lives have been lost; relics, buildings and temples of worship left in rubble. Our goal at RealClearWorld was to avoid a list exclusively based on casualties, and instead accounted for other important factors in these attacks: Symbolism, strategic significance and domestic political impact were also considered alongside the carnage and bloodshed produced by these attacks.

Those selected:

No. 5 Mumbai 2006 (previous attack on India's financial capital), No. 4 Bali 2002, No. 3 Moscow 2002, No. 2 London 2005, No. 1 Madrid 2004.

Video Above: "7/7 London Bomb Terrorist Attack on Bus."

Root Out the Terrorists

Arthur Herman makes the case that the terrorists won't be stopped until governments go after them, root them out, and defeat them:

It’s been fascinating, but also disheartening, to watch the mainstream media completely miss the real story about the 60-hour terrorist rampage in Mumbai, India — which may have killed as many as 300 people, and has certainly injured hundreds more. What died in Mumbai — besides scores of innocent people in their hotel rooms and at the Mumbai Jewish Cultural Center and on the blood-drenched platform at Chatrapathi Sivaji railway terminal — were certain illusions about the war on terror, and how to deal with terrorists.

One of those illusions is about who is fighting whom in the war on terror.

Many put the blame for the attack on years of Indian-Pakistani hostility and tension. In fact, relations between the two countries have never been warmer. This past month, Pakistan’s new president stunned and delighted Indians by publicly renouncing any first use of nuclear weapons. Violence in Kashmir, the principal bone of contention between India and Pakistan since 1947, is on the decline. Before the Mumbai attacks, politicians were scheduled to start talks on permitting trade across the region’s Line of Control, so that Hindu farmers in Indian Kashmir can sell their wheat or a used tractor to Muslim farmers in Pakistani Kashmir.

This is precisely what the terrorists don’t want, of course. It’s the fact that tensions over Kashmir are diminishing that prompted them to attack on the November 28 — just as al-Qaeda blew up Samarra’s Golden Mosque in Iraq back in 2006 in order to keep Shias and Sunnis hating and killing each other. The illusion that formal agreements between peoples and governments — whether between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Palestinian Authority — can somehow defuse the terrorist problem was the among the first casualties in Mumbai. Terrorists see it the other way around: the relaxation of tensions is a problem requiring bloodshed.

Islamic terrorists don’t want justice or respect for their beliefs, or restoration of some imaginary homeland. They want violence and death. The duty of every government is to make sure that terrorists get them before they can deal them out. Pakistanis will never know peace, or peace with their neighbors in Afghanistan and India, until they finally and ruthlessly root out the terrorists in their midst.

There's more at the link.

I made a similar argument, with reference to the incoming presidential administration, in "Obama's New Global Architecture?"

Muslim Graveyard in Mumbai Rejects Terrorist Burials

This is good: Muslims standing up to evil in their midst:

A Muslim graveyard in the heart of Mumbai has broken with Islamic tradition and refused to bury the bodies of nine terrorists who were killed during the attack on India's financial capital.

The influential Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the 7.5-acre Badakabrastan graveyard, said it would not bury the gunmen because they were not true followers of Islam.

Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, said: "People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim. Islam does not permit this sort of barbaric crime."

This gesture is well short of Geert Wilders' demand that Muslims repudiate the Koran itself.

But it's a start in the right direction, although don't forget Mark Steyn's words earlier:

The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

See also, "Religion of Victory: Understanding Islam."

America's Enemies Within

Please enjoy this passage from Mark Harvey, aka Snooper, and his essay, "America: The Enemies Within and Without":

I have been preaching this on my Soap Box for nearly 30 years now as those that know me will attest; many in recent years. Make no mistake, people. The Marxists of this world would love nothing better than to slaughter the Eagle. And, to those that created the environment that enabled a Marxist to get "elected" - via voter and campaign fraud unchallenged - I have many things to say but primarily, may you rot in hell and I hope I have the pleasure of sending you to your final destination. There is no forgiving you...not in my lifetime.

America used to know who she was at one time. In recent times, we knew for nearly a whole month. Then, the anti-Americanists of Code Whore Pink Sluts and Pigs and other such Marxist shits oozed from under their spider holes and began their usual nonsense ... as their mommies and daddies did while toking on a number and digging on the radio. It would behoove all to go here and find out what it really is the government does for you...and to you. And, everyone should count their blessings for having the honor of living in the still greatest Nation on Earth, the America bashing sycophants of the new world order aside and not withstanding.

This post is inspired by two angry anti-American commenters at this blog, commenters who have called me a "hater" and "terrorist" because of their inability to rebut the opinions I have expressed: Ben Sutherland and James Casper.

When I first read Snooper's piece, Ben and James came immediately to mind.

Moral Paralysis on Mumbai

Dorothy Rabinowitz raises ultimate questions of moral responsibility in the West's reponse to terror in Mumbai. Why are these diabolical killings treated with such equanimity at the major news outlets? Rabinowitz discusses how some networks turned to Deepak Chopra for "expert" analysis on the attacks, and he responded by blaming the United States:

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

It's not just the pundit class, but our top elected officials as well, including the president-elect, who have been underwhelming in their condemnation of the atrocities.

Across the blogosphere, of course, there's been a predictable split between moral outrage and moral indifference and equivalence. Quaker Dave, for example - who seems to use his religious identification as a mask for revolutionary anti-Americanism - basically threw up his hands in refusing to denounce the violence:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to comment on the slaughter that took place this week in Mumbai, India.

I’ve been following it as we all have.

I can make no sense of it. There’s no logic or reason for it.

All of it is senseless.

It’s terribly tragic. It serves no purpose. It will advance no cause.

All that will happen, after the clean up and the funerals and the investigations and the grandstanding, is that there will probably be international recriminations and repercussions.

And reprisals.

So more people will die.

And nothing will change.

And all that will have been accomplished is that so many innocent people will have died.

For nothing.

As usual.

Notice something here: There's no statement of moral outrage. Indeed, there's a brain-bursting unwillingness to condemn the attackers. You see, basically, no one is to blame. This kind of thing just happens, you know ...

Innocents have been stalked, tied up, tortured, and murdered, and Quaker Dave refuses to point fingers and name names. It's so characteristic of "progressive" activists.

It's all "terribly tragic," and unfortunately we wouldn't want to alienate "peaceful" Muslims by calling out Islamic leaders to repudiate their own faith.

Islam kills. It's a religion of victory, and those in the West don't do well for themselves by inviting the Deepak Chopra's of the celebrity world as commentators on such an unbelievable evil.

Credit George W. Bush for America's Safety

The New Hampshire Union Leader credits President Bush for the safety of the nation over the Thanksgiving weekend:

While Americans sat through football games, planned their "Black Friday'' morning shopping, and all in all enjoyed a quiet and peaceful Thanksgiving, terrorists in India were slaughtering more than 200 innocent people. Westerners, particularly U.S. and British citizens, were primary targets.

The fact that it was a peaceful American Thanksgiving went unnoticed by most. The fact that this has been the case since the Al Qaida attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001, also went little noticed. That all of this coincides with and is a result of President Bush's prosecution of the war on Islamist extremism is never highlighted.

Our final editorial today notes general news media bias in favor of Barack Obama. Imagine what that media would have had to say, and where all the blame would have gone, had America been attacked at home again on Bush's watch.

We aren't suggesting that President Bush's strategy is the sole reason for our relative safety here at home. But it has certainly contributed in great measure. And before the new President and his eager Congress get to work dismantling what Bush has built, they better think very carefully.

Bush's much-maligned Patriot Act, with its access to international communications traffic; his seizure and confinement of enemy combatants at Guantanamo, and his buildup of security forces at home and abroad, all of these things have helped to keep America safer.

America is not safe from attacks such as just occurred in Mumbai, India. Indeed, a credible threat to the New York subway system was being watched this weekend.

But we are safer than we were seven years ago and President Bush's administration deserves much of the credit for that this Thanksgiving weekend.

That tone strikes me as just about right, and the message is especially interesting, as it's exactly the opposite of the collectivist-left's meme that America's security has been weakened under the current administration.

Keep all of this in mind as the President-Elect announces his national security team today.

Obama's New Global Architecture?

Fareed Zakaria, as has been noted of late, is perhaps the world's best known foreign policy intellectual and pundit.

Zakaria, expanding on his recent theory of America's relative decline ("the rise of the rest"), has a new cover story at Newsweek: "Wanted: A New Grand Strategy."

After reading through this I was left pretty much blank ... where is this "new grand strategy" that Americans should expect?

Actually, Zakaria's piece is mostly boiled over multilateral institutionalism (which at the U.N. is a poorly disguised shield for anti-Semitic demonizations of Israel). Also included is a few obligatory reminders of the coming multipolar world - and Americas' need to accommodate itself to "the new realities" - topped off with a paean to aligning American "interests and ideals with those of most of the world's major powers"

The payoff, really, in Zakaria's essay, is the conclusion, where he just comes out as a top Obama cultist of Washington's foreign policy elite:

In a world characterized by change, more and more countries—especially great powers like Russia and China and India—will begin to chart their own course. That in turn will produce greater instability. America cannot forever protect every sea lane, broker every deal and fight every terrorist group. Without some mechanisms to solve common problems, the world as we have come to know it, with an open economy and all the social and political benefits of this openness, will flounder and perhaps reverse ....

The United States retains a unique role in the emerging world order. It remains the single global power. It has enormous convening, agenda-setting and leadership powers, although they must be properly managed and shared with all the world's major players, old and new, in order to be effective.

President-elect Obama has powers of his own, too. I will not exaggerate the importance of a single personality, but Obama has become a global symbol like none I can recall in my lifetime. Were he to go to Tehran, for example, he would probably draw a crowd of millions, far larger than any mullah could dream of. Were his administration to demonstrate in its day-to-day conduct a genuine understanding of other countries' perspectives and an empathy for the aspirations of people around the world, it could change America's reputation in lasting ways.

This is a rare moment in history. A more responsive America, better attuned to the rest of the world, could help create a new set of ideas and institutions—an architecture of peace for the 21st century that would bring stability, prosperity and dignity to the lives of billions of people. Ten years from now, the world will have moved on; the rising powers will have become unwilling to accept an agenda conceived in Washington or London or Brussels. But at this time and for this man, there is a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world. This is his moment. He should seize it.

This article was apparently written before the Mumbai attacks (as there's no reference to the barbaric killings), so there's no discussion of where America's future counterterrorism policy fits into this "new" grand strategy.

But we do, actually, know what Obama's grand strategy is going to be, as he announced it in his own essay in Foreign Affairs in 2007: "Renewing American Leadership."

Like Zakaria, Obama is all about feel-good rejuvenation for America's standing in the world. By "renewing American leadership" those of a multilateralist persuasion primarily propose policies that are anti-Bush: close Guantanamo, repudiate torture, drawdown ongoing military deployments, "repair" our alliances, and abandon liberalism in international trade. It's all about restoring America's "image," and is thus an implicit repudiation of force and moral statecraft.

Unfortunatetly, then, renewing America's leadership looks so far like a grand strategy of retreat.

The fact is - as the full ramifications of the Mumbai attacks sink in - the Obama administration will have Afghanistan - with the corollary of Indo-Pakistan relations - as its Iraq war. That is, in foreign policy, as Iraq was the defining challenge for the Bush administration for most of this decade, Afghanistan will be the Obama's key challenge as this decade gives way to the 2010s.

It will not be an easy or inexpensive transition. Pakistan and India are mortal enemies, and the South Asian continent is the world's contemporary nuclear flash point. Pakistan is a seething hotbed of violence and religious extremism, and to the extent that the Bush administration has accommodated Karachi's foreign policy independence, it has enabled a subterranean and largely unknown role for the regime's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which is said to have fostered militants who are waging an under-the-radar campaign against Indian control of the Kashmir, not to mention the likely support of pro-Taliban elements and al-Qaeda functionaries in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands.

How will Obama proceed? It's not unlikely that the Mumbai terror cohorts maintained planning and logistical operations at the border. Will Obama bomb Pakistani camps suspected of launching terror attacks? Will he send in U.S. ground troops to sweep out terror sanctuaries?

What about India? The Indian goverment may be under intense pressure to launch military operations inside Pakistan, reigniting armed hostilities between the two nations. How will the U.S. respond? How will the U.S. restrain New Delhi.

The policy dilemmas for the new administration won't be solved by attracting hordes of Obama cultists to Nuremberg-style tours of Third World regimes (like we saw at Berlin last summer). The U.S. will need to act decisively. Yet, at present there is no "multilateral" framework to make progress on the region's intractable and volatile hostilities.

The U.S. cannot simply throw up its hands and refuse a major buildup of troops to Afghanistan in fear alienating the Democratic Party's clueless antiwar base or the international community's appeasement bureaucracies in Brussels and Turtle Bay - not to mention top U.S. military officials who so far are working the President-Elect like a blob of silly putty.

There will be demands for real action, at some point, even a reckoning, if U.S. and allied intelligence services pin down the perpetrators of the current wave of senseless killings.

In the end, America's "unique role" in a changing world may be a lot like its unique role in the old, unchanging international system of states where a preponderance of power - and the willingness to use it - is the sine qua non of effective international leadership.

Mumbai Victims Were Tortured

I've already blogged much on the Mumbai attacks, but I feel an anger and revulsion in confronting, emotionally and intellectually, the scale of evil we are seeing.

This story on the likelihood that the Mumbai hostages were tortured only deepens my dread at all that has happened:

Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives ....

Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: "It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim's body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words," he said.

Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he 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," one doctor said.

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 clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. 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.

Corroborating the doctors' claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. "During his interrogation, Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis," an IB source said.

I expect we'll see some policy-wonkish debates next week in Washington over how a "law-enforcement" approach is the best response to the latest round of terror (blah, blah ...).

Meanwhile Pam at Atlas Shrugs is outraged (and proposes not taking it any more):

I am angry. I am sick in my soul. The West refuses to engage this enemy that has declared all out war on our civilization. The media, the UN, the political elites bow to Islam. They refuse to speak its name. They refuse to stop immigration. They are afraid.

The McCarthy Gene and Today's GOP?

I remember in 2003, when I debated the Iraq war with many people on campus, I kept hearing the line, "oh, that's just McCarthyism."

This was the response from leftists who refused to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein's regime had played cat and mouse with international weapons inspectors for a decade, a regime that the Clinton administration pledged to topple in the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, and a regime with an opaque nuclear development program that would not have been been made fully transparent without the U.S. invasion of 2003.

No, it was all McCarthyism, that is, an evil GOP program of demonizing enemies and "supressing" dissent.

Well, with the Democrats returing to power in Washington, Republicans may as well brace themselves for a return of the McCarthy smears. We've already seen it the work of people like Blue Texan and Dave Neiwert. Now, though, Neal Gabler lays out a model of alleged neo-McCarthyism in today's GOP:

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs - Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.

Notice how the end of the McCarthy line ends with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (never mind that Palin's husband is one-quarter Yup'ik Native American), or that the real racism we've seen all year has been on the Democratic Party side (Jesse Jackson wanted to cut off Obama's ball in a modern day lynching).

That's right: We saw the real fear-mongering and race-baiting throughout the electoral season and beyond on the left (in John Aravosis, Digby, Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Gerry Vázquez ... the list goes on).

As Webloggin' notes from some time back:

It appears that the left can’t really hide behind the rhetoric because they now have popular websites to remind everyone who the DEMOCRAT PARTY BASE really is.

Daily Kos Blames U.S. for Mumbai Terror

At this point, there's no evidence that global "poverty" caused the attacks in Mumbai. Investigations are ongoing, but the meme that poverty and economic repression is at root of the current attack is picking up steam, for example at the commentary from Fareed Zakaria.

Analysts have long noted that the attacks of this decade have been committed by educated, middle-class terrorists. Mohammed Atta hailed from an educated family of Egyptian professionals. London's 7/7 bombers had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars, most likely through a network of well-funded financial-terror cells. Some research has suggested that "the stereotype of a terrorist as poor, angry and fanatically religious is a myth."

But note the commentary at Daily Kos, on the suspected links from the Mumbai attack to Pakistan:

Poverty in Pakistan has aided and emboldened the extremists, so decreasing the poverty must be seen as a key stepping stone to international security and heading off more terrorist attacks. In that respect, the IMF loans to Pakistan must be restructured. Or else when Pakistan is blamed for the Mumbai attacks, it's only fair that we share that blame, too. And don't know about you, but personally, I feel ashamed.

The United States, of course, is the creator and main benefactor of the IMF. So, for the leftists, the causes of terrorism are found in the structure of the international system, with U.S. power and policies held as the causes of the global Islamic jihad. That explains why this writer is "ashamed."

But, again, this is all bull. The leftists blame the IMF and the "causes of poverty" because of their hatred of West. They refuse to place the blame for terror where it belongs: on the evil of the forces of destruction arrayed before us.

Melanie Phillips pins down the true essence of Islamic jihad's war against the West:

The atrocities demonstrated with crystal clarity what the Islamist war is all about – and the western commentariat didn’t understand because it simply refuses to acknowledge, even now, what that war actually is. It does not arise from particular grievances. It is not rooted in ‘despair’ over Palestine. It is not a reaction to the war in Iraq. It is a war waged in the name of Islam against America, Britain, Hindus, Jews and all who refuse to submit to Islamic conquest.

As I noted in my previous post, the left's refusal to espouse a patriotic love of country (and thus to the West) serves only to embolden our enemies. The fight for civilization, unfortunately, isn't just abroad, but is confronting us head on right here at home as well.

Pledging Allegiance

Comments From Left Field beautifully illustrates the postmodern transnationalism that is the foundation for left-wing anti-Americanism:

As far as I am concerned, the Pledge of Allegiance is a loyalty oath, and loyalty oaths are un-American, if not unconstitutional (the latter being a subject for another post). Adding the words “under God” just makes it worse, because now you’re requiring children (in this instance, but it applies to adults as well) to assert a religious belief they may not feel or even understand. That’s a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Obviously, the ideal solution would be to stop declaring fealty to the nation-state every morning. Next best would be removing the phrase “under God.” But if we’re going to insist that American schoolchildren from kindergarten through high school recite “I pledge allegiance to the flag and the United States of America…” each day, the least we can do is include an opt-out provision to accommodate the consciences of students or parents (or both) who believe that this practice is inherently coercive, disrespectful to Americans’ individual religious beliefs (or lack thereof), and offensive to the spirit of individualism and personal liberty that lies at the heart of the American experience.

Read the whole post, here.

All the blather about religion and conscience is mostly bull.

This essay is about hating your country. A statement of refusal to pledge loyalty to the "nation-state" is a statement in solidarity with some kind of ethereal transnational consciousness - "imagine there's no countries..."

When there's no commitment to nation among the people, there's also a rejection of national values, cultures, and traditions. With this comes a refusal to condemn evil, because one's nation-state is no better than any other. It's just one step from refusal to pledge loyalty to nation to endorsing the horror and terror in places like Mumbai, because logically if the nation-states didn't exist, we'd all be one - no competition, no hatred, no violence. But in refusing to condemn evil, societies surrender to totalitarianism, and in that regime there will be no possibility of conscience, only death.

Gavriel Holtzberg Covered Wife With Prayer Shawl at Death

Gavriel Holtzberg managed to cover is wife Rivka with a tallit - a Jewish prayer shawl - moments before he was killed.

The initial report brought water to my eyes:

The bodies of Chabad-Lubavitch emissary, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, and kashrus inspector Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum, were found in the Mumbai Chabad House library, with holy books in front of them. According to ZAKA emergency service, the body of the Rabbi's wife Rivka was found covered with a tallit, which her husband had managed to cover her with.

The bodies of the two other women who were killed along with Rivka Holtzberg were found tied with telephone cables. The women had apparently been bound before they were killed.

I recorded my thoughts on the deaths of the Holtzbergs earlier.

However, readers should not miss Tim Rutten's comments, especially this part:

Mumbai was selected not simply because it was a so-called soft target but because it is a symbol of modernity in the world's most populous democracy ....

The places the killers struck - luxury hotels, a railway station, a hospital for women and children, the Chabad Jewish center - are all powerfully linked in the popular mind with the modern world ....

Like all the totalitarian movements that have come before it, hatred of liberty and Jews is the real foundation of contemporary jihadism, and not the traditions of Islam or its canonical prescriptions.

Finally, there's the particular tragedy incorporated in the murder of the young American rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, his Israeli wife, Rivka, and four others, including a rabbinical colleague. Because we are a people of both faith - peacefully expressed in many creeds - and the future, there is something in the American conscience that recoils with a special horror when violence is done to clergy and the young.

The brittle, fanatic minds that could countenance something like the Mumbai massacre are well armored against real-world complexities, like irony and paradox. If they were not, they might have realized that they could not have found a more confounding target for their hatred of Jews than one of the thousands of houses around the world operated by the Chabad Lubavitch movement for which Holtzberg and his wife served as emissaries. The facility they ran is really an observant Jewish version of the old-fashioned settlement houses, a place that simply was there to educate and to help.

Adherents of the jihadi ideology share a common presumption that the modern world in all its manifestations is the implacable enemy of a traditional religiosity. Modernism, in their minds, is built on concepts that pollute: reason, individual liberty, democracy, pluralism. Like all totalitarians, they demand submission to a single pure idea. Difference equals contamination; reason leads to sacrilege.

Check my tags below for my earlier essays, dear readers, and please say a prayer with me for our future.

Our World is Under Attack...

Here's Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's comments on the Mumbai attacks:

There is no doubt, we know, that the targets the terrorists singled out were Jewish, Israeli targets and targets identified with the West, Americans and Britons ...

Our world is under attack, it doesn't matter whether it happens in India or somewhere else ...

There are Islamic extremists who don't accept our existence or Western values.

There's some debate over at Contentions as to the absence of similar statements from American leaders. Jennifer Rubin notes:

The lack of similar moral clarity from the U.S. is troubling and deeply disappointing. One hopes that Livni’s words will not go unnoticed, and will jar both our current President and our President-elect into specific and meaningful statements evidencing a grasp of the event’s significance.

To which Abe Greenwald responds:

Jen, the problem is that the proper post-9/11 stance has been labeled the “politics of fear,” and the U.S. has elected a President who’s promised to deliver the country from all that divisive scare-mongering. But the “politics of fear” accurately reflects a world of terrorism, and is in fact not “politics” at all – but just plain old fear. Like the fear that must have coursed through 150-plus innocent victims in Mumbai, or the fear that must have paralyzed European, Israeli and American relatives waiting to hear from traveling loved ones.

The politics of fear? That's the antiwar left's language of excoriation against conservatives, of course.

But it's even worse than this, as I noted today. Not only have we seen the Democratic-left refuse to condemn the terror in India, the meme on the left has it that it's the "religionists" of all stripes who would pull the world down into a maelstrom of violence and "regression."

Barack Obama of course condemned the attacks, but then deferred to the Bush administration, indicating that there's "only one president at at time."

We do know, however, how Obama responds to terrorism. We have, for example, his comments in response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington:

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

– Barack Obama, Hyde Park Herald, Sept. 19, 2001.

There's little evidence so far that the attacks in Mumbai were driven by "a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

Indeed, I can't help but notice how the targeting of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, whose ultra-Orthodox Chabad house was in fact unknown to many of the Holtzberg's own neighbors (but was a target of the killers) is one the best indicator of the legitimate fear that very well ought to haunt Westerners.

A Reminder of World War IV

Dont' miss this essay at Powerline, "Thinking About Mumbai: India's Test":

If Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies wanted to serve a reminder that they declared World War IV on the civilized world (to borrow Norman Podhoretz's formulation), they did so this week when they brazenly attacked the epicenter of the world's fastest-growing economy, targeting Westerners and assassinating key enforcers of the anti-terror law enforcement network in Mumbai, India.

The terrorist attacks on India's commercial center, the bustling 19 million person city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), must serve as a wake-up call to a lethargic and infighting Indian government that has thus far failed to respond aggressively to a series of deadly attacks on Indian soil. Indeed, in over a dozen attacks on India over the past four years, no nation except Iraq has lost more of its people to terrorist attacks. And no less than the battle for Iraq, the battle for India must be won if civilized, democratic, free market economies are to triumph over terrorists.

Sadly, the Indian government has failed its own people in this battle because of infighting, political corruption, and a failure of courageous leadership. But given India's exploding economy -- with an astonishing average growth rate of 8% over the past four years -- in a nation that is soon to be the most populous country in the world, Indian leaders can no longer underestimate the threat terrorists pose to India's security and prosperity. The Indian government must take aggressive action to ensure security on the ground, develop a legal framework to prevent future attacks, and create regional alliances to be a true global partner in the long-term war on terror.

There's more at the link.

Sebastian D'Souza, Mumbai Photographer

This picture of one of the Mumbai terrorists, walking purposively through the city's railway station, illustrates the cold-blooded determination of the killers:

The photographer, Sebastian D'Souza, is interviewed at the Belfast Telegraph, and shares his experience:

Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but theydidn't seem to care."

The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D'Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. "I first saw the gunmen outside the station," Mr D'Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

D'Souza wished he had a gun rather than a camera.

More commmentary, here.