"For many European municipalities and a few American ones accommodating Islam is a big dilemma—but not an insoluble one."
A typical tagline from our erudite multi-culturalist friends at The Economist.Not suprising the article lists examples of the “xenophobic and intolerant” host cultures from numerous European cities but fails to mention even one of the so-called “American ones”.Perhaps it’s because the American version of “Assimilation” can be clearly defined as to being the responsibility of the guest culture not the host country.Maybe it’s due to the fact that “accomodation” is inherant in “American Culture”.One example is how a traditional Catholic observance usherd in Fish-Stick Friday in every public school in America.That is completely different then requiring schools to constantly serve a completly separate halal menu because of complaints of a “dietary apartheid”.
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:
"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round Mumbai it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".
Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.
Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place."
Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.
In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If they were just "teenage gunmen" or "militants" in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Mumbai? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: "Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous."
And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani "militants" in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying "Islamic" or "Muslim" or "terrorist," we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.
We are enjoined to be "understanding," and we're doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there's a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what's the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that's not "too big to fail," what is?
Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel "vulnerable." Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They're the world's fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he's feeling "vulnerable," he's doing a terrific job of covering it up.
We are told that the "vast majority" of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra's estimate) are "moderate." Maybe so, but they're also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, "Silence=Acceptance." It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam "Allahu Akbar."
I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that "reforming" Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there'll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there'll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that's just business as usual. And, if it is somehow "understandable" that for the first time in history it's no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, "worry about image." Not enough.
Mulsims, time to stand up and declare which side you TRULY are on. Are you opposing terrorism in the name of you god, or are you the sea in which the filth swims?
If its the latter, then its time for your religion to be erased, for it is no longer a religion worthy of the moniker, but a mere ideology of hate and terror, like Nazism, and deserving of the same fate.
Whoever planned the Mumbai massacre - and it was planned, funded and executed by some group in Pakistan - the murders of at least 188 people and paralysis of India's largest city were intended to change geopolitics.
Topping the shortlist of suspects are al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Pakistan Government and intelligence and security services, or rogue elements within those services working with Islamist extremists. But what would anyone in Pakistan stand to gain from a terrorist plot so easily traced to that country? And why has Pakistani culpability met with such a muted response from India and the West?
Pakistan is one of those countries - Israel another - for which a benign foreign policy environment is seen as essential to national survival. The stunted offspring of the Partition of the British Raj, Pakistan is doomed to live in India's shadow.
During the Cold War - in which Pakistan sided unreservedly with the United States, while India played footsie with the Soviets - Islamabad's existential fear of its neighbour was balanced by the confidence that only a friendly White House can give. But since the red menace evaporated and the West became a target of South Asia-based terrorists, Pakistan is less secure. The West's embrace of India as an economic and strategic balance to China has exacerbated Pakistan's insecurity.
The American alliance provided Pakistan with some immunity against India. Islamabad's politically-dominant army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) used or worked closely with a variety of extremists bent on fuelling secessionist violence in parts of India, including Punjab and Kashmir. America even turned a blind eye to Pakistan's covert nuclear program from the 1970s until the early 1990s, when America's victory in Afghanistan led powerful figures in Washington to believe they did not need Pakistan any more, and economic and military aid was cut off.
Fast forward to September 2001 when al-Qaeda and the Taliban attacked the US. Having backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and worked hand in glove with armed Islamists in the 1999 Kargil invasion of Indian-controlled Kashmir, Pakistan was caught hand in cookie jar. Only when General Pervez Musharraf agreed to join the so-called War On Terror did America forgive its sins.
But controllers of Pakistan's security services always regarded that as a mere tactical retreat. Since the time of an earlier military ruler, the late General Zia ul-Haq, the country's ruling elite retained a barely concealed contempt for an American superpower that spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying their friendship. They were confident the West would eventually see the wisdom of subcontracting to Pakistan the messy business of South Asia security. The lavish and misplaced lauding of Musharraf as a hero in the War on Terror illustrated the tendency. But this year, Pakistan's confidence in its ability to set the terms of engagement was badly shaken. American strikes went ahead on al-Qaeda and Taliban forces based in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas despite Islamabad's vociferous protests. Meanwhile, India revived its diplomatic influence in an Afghanistan long regarded by Islamabad as an unofficial province of Pakistan. Adding to hardline alarm has been the vocal adventurism of Pakistan's new president - Asif Ali Zadari, widower of former leader Benazir Bhutto.
He recently pledged to shake up the ISI and uttered the ultimate apostasy by declaring Pakistan had nothing to fear from India and should have warm relations with New Delhi.
The Mumbai attack was designed to wreck rapprochement with India and replace it with military crisis. The same strategy underpinned the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament - an attempt to murder the entire Indian government.
The key suspects for Mumbai all want the US to halt military strikes on Pakistani soil. They want to undermine Western resolve to stay in Afghanistan, thereby facilitating Pakistani suzerainty there. The strike on Mumbai was meticulously planned and expensive, with the foot soldiers getting the sort of specialist training usually restricted to commandos. Above all, it was exquisitely timed to tame two new presidents.
Pakistan's Zardari will find it difficult to pursue his peace and domestic reform agenda in the face of rising tensions with India. And Barack Obama finds his country plunged into another looming crisis in South Asia, one tailor-made to circumscribe his options so that his policy ultimately serves a Pakistan wedded to a chaotic and bloody status quo.
No sooner had India blamed Pakistan than Pakistan threatened to shift to the Indian border military forces fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda - a threat guaranteed to send shivers down the Washington spine.
Panic, of course, is the wrong reaction, as is naivety. Nothing moves in Pakistan without ISI knowledge. The Mumbai massacre could not have been set in train in Pakistan without assistance of the security and intelligence establishment, past or present.
It has taken Pakistan decades to become the sovereign equivalent of a suicide bomber: "Do what we say or we'll blow ourselves up - and take everyone else with us!" Who would call the bluff? Nobody wants to see self-immolation of a country of 170 million people with nuclear weapons.
As always, India will be expected to swallow pain and turn a blind eye to the escape of the back room perpetrators. The more strident New Delhi's reaction, the more it suits the planners of this outrage. But the bitter pill of restraint will be made more palatable for India if it results in closer diplomatic, military and intelligence co-operation aimed at containing the Pakistan problem.
Events like Mumbai are rarely the work of wounded idealists. They are cynical acts of mass murder designed to achieve specific political outcomes. There is method in this madness, but also desperation.
Pakistani extremists - in and out of uniform - want to scare us out of the region and hold hostage to Pakistan indulgence our improving relations with India.
By staying the course, by building a stronger, better targeted international military presence in Afghanistan, by deepening our economic and security ties with India, and by working patiently and methodically to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism in South Asia, we deny the massacre architects their most heartfelt desire, and best serve the security of millions of decent people everywhere, including our own.
Christopher Kremmer, author of four books on modern Asia, is a scholar with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.
Posted by: john frum ||
12/06/2008 08:58 ||
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The Americans and Canadians share an overlapping and common cultural history. After the last spat in 1812-1814, we've maintained a civility that usually doesn't include our governments engaging in overt or covert acts to spill the other's blood other than on the hockey rink.
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<em>Nothing moves in Pakistan without ISI knowledge. The Mumbai massacre could not have been set in train in Pakistan without assistance of the security and intelligence establishment, past or present.</em>
We need to get more peopel involved in A-stan, and get India fully allied.
And we need to issue hunting permits on the ISI no matter where they are. ISI=DEAD shoudl be our policy. Start with the vidible leadership - sniper, car bombs, etc, in Pakistan, 500lb bombs or hellfires in the tribal areas, and Afghani firing squads in A-stan. Support India in doing the same in Kashmir.
We need to make the ISI pay a high price for its terrorist activity. It is a cancer and must be killed.
Back in 2005 I came to Pakistan in a time when moderate enlightenment was much being taught and talked about, I was surprised to see how India was marvelled for her advancement in the IT field and not to say a couple of box office hits Bollywood had produced. It was mostly people who were associated with the fashion industry and the entertainment industry in Pakistan who spoke too highly of the Indian achievements. And why not, they were getting envious receptions and rewards for speaking of no cultural differences between India and Pakistan. No cultural differences? That means the Two Nation Theory upon which the creation of Pakistan was based, was false. No wonder such people got red carpet receptions and warm welcomes, not to speak of the contracts given to them by the film industry in Mumbai.
These people who spoke their language and insisted that music could help melt the geographical boundaries. I mean, frankly speaking, singers who probably never made well up to their high schools were making such statements. And overwhelmingly, they got applause from their Indian hosts for the nice and humanistic approach they demonstrated. So, should I listen to these singers and comedians performing in India or should I listen to what Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Allama Iqbal, Maulana Altaf Husein Hali, Maulana Shibli Naumani, Sir Agha Khan and Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah said on the cultural identity of the Indian Muslims?
Here I am only taking an opportunity in the wake of the current scenario to talk about the Indian mindset that has surfaced in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks and that supports my long standing argument on the way we need to approach our relationship with India. And I believe that needs to be done with this in mind that they are not us and we must keep a check on over excitement in terms of our relations with a country that has aimed to demolish our identity in peace times.
This was Kuldip Nayyar (a veteran Indian journalist), meeting some friends at a private gathering in Lahore this summer where he pleaded the case of friendship through linguistic ties. Again, that we speak one language and that language is a binding force; hence geographical boundaries matter less when it comes to a shared language and therefore a common culture, nicely leading to no cultural differences. I asked Mr. Nayyar whether language was all we needed to form a common culture. And if so, how come Arabic speaking Middle East was divided into so many countries/nations? How come Polish and Russians were different nations since they could understand each other or why did not British and Americans become just one nation since they spoke the same language or by that definition why did not the English and the Irish people become one nation? Or for that reason if the basic notes of the music played in India and Pakistan are the same we are the same nation? If that is so, by drinking tea in the morning instead of lassi (yogurt shake) we can become British according to this theory!
And where were the linguistic ties when the trains full of Muslims migrating from Indian to Pakistan in 1947 were looted and mass massacre was carried out? Where was this shared culture when Pakistani cricketers received empty bottles and abuses from the spectators in the Eden Garden Stadium in Kolkata? Or why did not it work when the same culture Indians sent their army in the East Pakistan? Sure, we need to look forward to a better future but must we forget all that? But how can I believe in all that, when recently Samjhota Express (the friendship train between India and Pakistan) was attacked in the Indian territory during the peace talks? And why cannot those Pakistani artists see the Indian films engaged in demonising Pakistans image or the hatred and prejudice shown by the Indian television media in the last few days and even before? The Indian character as displayed by their film industry and television media and the human rights record of the largest democracy of India in terms of handling of its minorities (both Christians and Muslims in India) is a bit too ugly to be treated as a model.
Friendship is a nice sounding notion but how does one progress in this area when one party is constantly busy in demolishing and challenging the others identity? Mr Nayyar insisted that friendship was important and he came up with the idea of a United South Asia on the pattern of the European Union. It was a time when there were reports of India nearing the inauguration of the Baghliar Dam on the River Chenab and I asked Mr. Nayyar if that was a good way of making advancement on the path of friendship by stopping our water? Or was that a right way of promoting friendship by giving a few bucks to the singers and other artists from Pakistan to make statements against the Two Nation Theory (that there are no cultural differences between India and Pakistan) in the programmes on Indian television channels? I was finally told by him that I had spoken much and now others should be given an opportunity. The rest of the evening I was a silent spectator.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz said, If we begin our history from Mohenjodaro, we will be compelled to own the succeeding periods of history which include the periods of Barhama culture, and the period of Greek culture, and in consequence we will have to accommodate Ashok, Chandra Gupt, Alexander the Great, Raja Porus and Raja Risaloo among our heroes. My point of view is that Pakistans history starts from August 14, 1947, with Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah stating that a new nation is born and later Faiz affirming this point of view by saying that With the partition of the Subcontinent a new country came into existence and a new nation was born Pakistani nation.
And I maintain that our culture must be defined in terms of the sense of separation upon which the division of the Subcontinent took place. The formation of a nation is based on a shared experience of history and a collective past, and the experience which the Muslims of the Subcontinent shared in terms of the prejudice of the Hindus against the Indian Muslims laid the foundations of Pakistan. One needs to refresh in mind the events that led to a distancing of the Muslims from the Indian National Congress in 1906. Events like the Hindu dominated Congress stand against the Persian language as the official language of India because it was written in the same script as the Holy Quran, or the opposition to any such developments that in anyway benefited the Muslims in India during the British Raj. Mr. Nayyar, I said, I understand your nostalgia for the past when you lived in Sialkot (now Pakistan), that is your reality. But I am born in Pakistan and that is my reality. And my reality does not allow me to be linked with the Indian culture in anyway by means as absurd as music or a common language.
The writer holds an M Phil degree in film and television and teaches at various universities
Posted by: john frum ||
12/06/2008 08:45 ||
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Philosophy degree? In film and television?
That's like drawing a vacuum. There's a lot of noise and commotion going on, but in the end all you have is nothing!
I guess all the basket weaving and laundromat economics classes were full of the of the football scholarship kings.
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