In “West alone is not threatened,” Kanchan Gupta in The Pioneer reminds us that the jihad is not only against the West:
It’s difficult to fault US President George Bush for being obnoxiously upfront and brutally honest while describing the jihadis and their cohorts who planned “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” by blowing up 10, probably more, trans-Atlantic passenger jets taking off from Heathrow as “Islamic fascists”. British Conservative politician and writer Michael Gove, in his book, Celsius 7/7, in which he analyses the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, is equally, if not more, scathing in his description of “the totalitarian nature of the ideology that drives jihad’s warriors” who “are driven by a divine mission to ensure that the whole earth, in due course, learns to submit to Islamist rule”.
If there’s anything objectionable about Mr Bush’s comments following the unravelling of the plot last Thursday, it’s his insistence that the US is the main target of “Islamic fascists”. Even the most cursory survey of jihad’s global assault on free societies and democracies will make it abundantly clear that the threat posed by radical Islamism and its remorseless practitioners to the rest of the world is no less than that posed to the US and Americans.
This simple fact, however, is lost on those who believe that 9/11 marked the launch of the crusade against non-believers and, therefore, place the US and its allies in the centre of the unremitting assault by jihadis looking for spectacular hits with heart-wrenching consequences. Hence the Western media’s astonishing refusal to list the July 11 Mumbai bombings, which left 187 commuters dead and hundreds of others physically and mentally scarred for the rest of their lives, as a terrorist strike of any consequence even while recalling other “mass murders” committed by those who repose their faith in radical Islam. Thus, in the wake of the unmasking of the London plot, people were asked to recall the Madrid bombings, the Bali bombings, even bombings in Turkey and, of course, the 7/7 terror attacks of last year.
There is also this amazing reluctance to acknowledge and accept that Pakistan continues to remain a hub for global jihad, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by Gen Pervez Musharraf and the West’s description of him as a “valuable and reliable ally” in the war against terror. Ever since last October’s earthquake which devastated large tracts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, based in Lahore, has been using human misery to collect enormous sums of money from “Islamic charities” for relief work. That money has been used for recruiting fresh cadre for Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s armed wing, the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, in acquiring arms and explosives and plotting attacks, like the plan to blow up passenger aircraft over the Atlantic or while they were landing in American cities, across the world, including India.
Read it all.