WHAT GIANT OCTOPUS? Even After Mumbai, the Western World Ignores the Islamist Threat

Dry Bones' Yaakov Kirschen is not imagining things. It really happened. As reported by MEMRI:

Following the Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistani security expert Zaid Hamid was interviewed by Pakistan's News One television channel; in it, he accused "Western Zionists and Hindu Zionists" of planning the 11/26 Mumbai attacks. He also warned that if the Indians attack Pakistan, the war will be fought within India, not on Pakistani soil. The interview was telecast 24 hours after the Mumbai terror attacks began.

Mark Steyn at National Review Online feels that the Western press has only been marginally more accurate in its description of the perpetrators than Mr. Hamid. He notes the general reluctance to mention certain salient facts concerning the identity or motives of the attackers:

In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

Steyn also notes, courtesy of Tom Gross at National Review, this sterling contribution to journalism by the U.S. newspaper of record:

The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”

Steyn observes that far from being an accident, the massacre at the Mumbai Chabad House reveals everything about the essential pathology of the murderers:

In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If they were just “teenage gunmen” or “militants” in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: “Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous.”

And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani “militants” in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Muslim” or “terrorist,” we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.

What Mark Steyn brilliantly exposed in prose, Dry Bones summarizes in pictures:


Instead of identifying the problem, the Western world continues to be preoccupied with the feelings of the co-religionists of the terrorists. Steyn recalls the near-perfect parody of a Western newspaper headline sent by a reader to Tim Blair of the Sydney Daily Telegraph: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

Yes, we continue to ignore the giant octopus at our peril.
[HT: Jewish Current Issues]