Regarding the Mumbai bombings, a great deal of time and huffing and puffing is going into examining, as happened on NPR's "On Point" recently, whether or not Al Qaeda is involved, or Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Pakistan's ISI, or the man in the moon. The correct answer is: they all wish India ill. All could have had a hand in it, all share the same aim, all but that proverbial man in the moon -- unless he is a Muslim Believer, in which case he too is adding his mite to the Jihad.
The same program was a classic study in wasting the valuable time of listeners on trivia and carefully tiptoing around the subject of Islam. Why is it that there is no conception of having a duty to discuss, straight on, the contents of Islam, the Qur'an and Sunnah? Why is there no felt need, by the NPR muck-a-mucks, to force such people as Tom Ashbrook to learn about the contents of Islam, and then the history of Jihad-conquest, and give evidence of such? Do they not, does Ashbrook not, have a duty to instruct -- but first to learn a bare minimum themselves?
Annoyingly rapid-talking, keeping up a mountebank's bright patter, Ashbrook has recently grown more cocky than hitherto. According to reports from inside, he was apparently bucked up a few months ago by a puff-piece, and by the fact that while another, quite similar talk-show host was fired, he, Ashbrook, remained in place. Ashbrook, of course, left the Boston Globe some time ago for a fast-buck dot-com scheme that came to naught (so much for his commitment to the profession). Then he came crawling back, desperate for a job that WBUR's then-czarette, Jane Christo, gave him.
And here he is, inviting on as his only local "guest" one Adil Najam, whose sole claim to expertise about Islam, about Jihad and dhimmitude and terrorist groups and the history of Islam in India, is that he happens to be a Muslim. By training he is an engineer; by association with the Fletcher School at Tufts, he teaches courses on economic thisandthat. By inclination he is an apologist, falling all over himself reminding people that there has been all sorts of "communal" violence -- what with that Sikh terror attack, and Hindu terror attacks, and -- he adds quietly -- some problem with Muslims as well.
A few years ago this Adil Najam began his speech at a "Muslim-Jewish Dialogue," according to someone who attended, by saying, dolefully, "I have a theory, a theory that Muslims are the new Jews." There's much more about Adil Najam to know, but the main thing to ask is: why does an NPR news program have him on to discuss Muslim terrorism in Mumbai? Can they find no one else in the whole wide world who can put that attack not only in context -- the context of all the other attacks in India by Muslim terrorists, of which we hear about only the biggest?
Ask yourself this question. Were you fully aware of the previous attacks in Mumbai, in 2003 and 1993? Have you already forgotten, or did you never know, about the attack on the Indian Parliament in Delhi in 2001? Do you know about the dozens of attacks that take place every year in Kashmir? Do you know about the expulsion of 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits? For that matter, do you know about the history of Muslim massacres of Hindus (the Brahmins were wiped out) hundreds of years ago? Do you know what the historian K. S. Lal is referring to when he says that 60-70 million Hindus were killed by Muslims during the period of their rule? Does the name "Aurangzeb" mean anything to you? Do you know why Hindus revere the memory of the Mughal emperor Akbar, but Muslims don't?
If some of these matters are entirely new to you, or you can't quite figure out why they are relevant today, you have an excuse. You are not running a talk-show on NPR, and hosting program after program where some latest Islam-prompted atrocity, in India, or Thailand (no, that isn't on Ashbrook's, nor NPR's radar -- not a peep about that), or Bangladesh (no, nothing about the attacks on Hindus there, in NPR), or Indonesia (ditto about the steady attacks on churches and Christians, and so on) is supposed to be discussed intelligently, with an informed host carefully asking the right questions.
You have an excuse.
What is Tom Ashbrook's excuse? What is NPR's?
I believe that NPR can find somebody else more knowledgeable about terrorism, however, to me, it does not want them on the air because I have the sickening feeling that it sympathizes with terrorism.
They should change their name to NPCR.
Here in the US especially we have a weird fixation on Al Qaeda. In the wake of any terrorist attack, pundits want to know if it was carried out by Al Qaeda or an affiliated group. I understand how this matters to those tracking down the perpetrators or trying to prevent further attacks, but for the most part it doesn't matter if the plots were hatched by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezzbollah, followers of this or that Imam, or "home-grown" terrorists.
I guess that things seem a little more intelligible if all the violence is caused by one monolithic organization. In much the same way, there is endless debate about Osama Bin Laden--of course, he is an extremely evil figure, and was responsible for the horrendous attacks of 9/11. But many people, including so-called experts, seem to think the violence would stop if he were apprehended. I would love to see him taken out, but clearly the idea that all Jihad flows from him is absurd.
What conservatives can't or won't get their hands around is the fact that it is Dubya who used the
"It's Al Qaeda" excuse (for everything), he led us to believe (in part to justify the invasion of Iraq) that Terrorism = Osama bin Laden = Al Qaeda..(remember the subsequently discredited excuse that Saddam's people had met with an Al Qaeda operative in Praque.
A major part of the problem is that Dubya and the Bush Family are friendsn and business partners with the Saudis (and yes Michael Moore was absolutely correct their.. his information came from Craig Unger, whose book House of Bush House of Saud was not printed in his native UK because of a suit by the Saudis (but was printed in the US because we have real libel laws, not the phoney laws the Brits enacted to protect their royals).
It's not a war on Terror (a war on nouns is ridiculous since a noun can't surrender and has no headquarters or organization), and the problem is not Islamofascism or Islamic extremists or radicals as Bush/Rice would have it, but Islam..pure and simple.
But to admit that the problem is Islam puts our military industrial chemical petroleum complex (and the Bush Cheney Dynasty) at odds with the Saudis and Arabs (recall Dubai Ports World), and that means the Arabs and Muslims might not be so willing to keep Boeing, Raytheon, Haliburton, Bechtel, etc in business by keeping the production lines open..and what about all of those Mackie D and Starbucks franchises all of the Muslim world.
Face it friends.. the battle is lost, and Lenin was correct.. Capitalists will sell the rope use to hang them, and fight each other for the rights to sell and manufacture that rope.
Democrats and Lefty Fellow Travellers concentrate the debate on al Queda* because they can claim that the invasion of Iraq was a distraction (wrong war wrong place). Some (a lot) Dhimmicrats seem to think that if Usama* (Osama) were killed, the War on Terror would be over. NPR and its fellow travellers want the India bombings to be the work of al Qeda so that they can continue to point to "failures" in Bush's war effort.
*Just how he hell does one spell these aggravating Arab names and words?
" things seem a little more intelligible if all the violence is caused by one monolithic organization."
It's not that vague. The Al Qaeda Syndrome, of wanting to fit all terrorism into the Al Qaeda slot, is a way of avoiding the implications of Islamic terrorism pullulating and emanating out of Islam itself. Al Qaeda as the master source, the James Bond arch-villain of terrorism, spares the West of having to do any further dot-connecting that would lead straight out onto the broad highway to Islam itself.
I wouldn't be surprised not only that Ashbrook doesn't know about the 100,000s of Hindus who were driven out of Kashmir in the past 16 years but that the university expert, John Esposito, does not know that fact either, since it is most assuredly a politically incorrect fact. Even knowing such a fact is politically incorrect and indicates reactionary and retrograde racist and Islamophobic tendencies on the part of the knower. By the way, why can't we blame the Mumbai bombings and the Kashmiri terrorism on Israel? At least that's how one of the BBC's experts on Middle Eastern politics, one Abdul-Bari Atwan, explained everything happening in the Middle East. How does he explain the Sunni slaughter of Shi`ites in Iraq? Was Shi`ism really a Jewish conspiracy at its inception?