Cyclic Tragedy and Farce

Perhaps we need to update Marx’s idea of history that it “repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” to suit the history of terrorism in India where each cyclic repetition consists of a brutal tragedy immediately followed by a hopeless farce.

The script is tiresomely familiar. Islamic terrorists attack and kill by the scores, if not hundreds, in acts of mindless mayhem and destruction. Even as the short tragedy is unfolding, the farce begins with the prime minister and other government officials declaring that they will punish the perpetrators. That gives way to so-called “secular intellectuals” quickly justifying the horror by pointing out that we need to understand the conditions that motivated the Islamic terrorists to go on a killing-spree of infidels – namely, poverty and discrimination against the followers of the celebrated Religion of Peace.

The farce continues with furious calls of “we should not let the terrorists win by allowing them to divide us.” Candle-light vigils and moving articles of ordinary people rallying to help others sprout up like mushrooms in a dank pile of manure. Things get back to normal in a few days and the spirit of “resilience” is much celebrated in the news media. Life goes on for a few weeks or months, and then once again the tragedy of Islamic terrorism strikes and the farce is enacted once again.

Like the instructions on a shampoo bottle says, “lather, rinse, repeat.”

A Bit of Farce

The most important element of the subsequent farce involves obtuseness. The usual bunch of pseudo-secular intellectuals write what they consider to be penetrating analysis such as “What They Hate About Mumbai.” They appear to be deaf and dumb to the persistently professed goal of the terrorists of claiming India — the Land of the Impure — for Islam. The terrorists cry themselves hoarse with blood-curdling yells of “allah hu akbar” while slaughtering without compunction and yet these worthy commentators write lengthy pieces with convoluted arguments on why the killing goes on.

There are too many examples of obtuseness for me to list them all. But allow me one illustrative example. Today I received an email from a very socially active gentleman with the subject line, “Let’s reduce corruption to reduce terrorist attacks.” How about wiping our bottoms more diligently after taking a crap? Perhaps that too will in some mysterious way reduce the incentives that Islamic terrorists have in their avowed goal of killing infidels.

They — the commentators and gurus — come crawling out of the woodwork. It appears that Deepak Chopra did. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz on Deepak Blames America:

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

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.

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on — matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir — which had caused so much terror and so much violence. “That’s not Washington’s fault,” he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington’s fault, it was everybody’s fault. Which didn’t prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme — the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States’ war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world’s fastest growing population — 25% of the globe’s inhabitants — and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra’s moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It’s tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world’s inhabitants — not so offensive, perhaps?

Two subsequent interviews with Larry King brought much of the same — a litany of suggestions about the role the U.S. had played in fueling assaults by Muslim terrorists, reminders of the numbers of Muslims in the world and their grievances. A faithful adherent of the root-causes theory of crime — mass murder, in the case at hand — Dr. Chopra pointed out, quite unnecessarily, that most of the terrorism in the world came from Muslims. It was mandatory, then, to address their grievances — “humiliation,” “poverty,” “lack of education.” The U.S., he recommended, should undertake a Marshall Plan for Muslims.

Nowhere in this citation of the root causes of Muslim terrorism was there any mention of Islamic fundamentalism — the religious fanaticism that has sent fevered mobs rioting, burning and killing over alleged slights to the Quran or the prophet. Not to mention the countless others enlisted to blow themselves and others up in the name of God.

Nor did we hear, in these media meditations, any particular expression of sorrow from the New Delhi-born Dr. Chopra for the anguish of Mumbai’s victims: a striking lack, no doubt unintentional, but not surprising, either. For advocates of the root-causes theory of crime, the central story is, ever, the sorrows and grievances of the perpetrators. For those prone to the belief that most eruptions of evil in the world can be traced to American influence and power there is only one subject of consequence.”

Deepak Chopra is probably not an idiot. But he sure does make it very hard to believe that he is not one.

In a farce, the only people you take seriously are the jokers. Here’s John Oliver, correspondent for The Daily Show, explaining who the terrorists are and what they hope to achieve.

A greater tragedy

It is tragic that global jihadi terror has become a fact of life. Hundreds of websites are devoted entirely to cataloging the hundreds of acts of Islamic terrorism every year around the world. TheReligionofPeace.com has a counter which reads “12,352 Deadly Terror Attacks since 9/11″ and for the week Nov 22-28, reports 63 jihadi attacks with 372 killed and over 600 injured. Another site Jihadwatch.org carries hundreds of articles every month bringing gruesome details of death and destruction by jihad.

It is tragic that humanity has to suffer so much for no apparent reason. But jihadi terror is not news. Contrary to popular American belief, jihadi terror was not invented on Sept 11th, 2001. It started some 14 centuries ago. The motives and the methodology of jihad is spelled out in all its horrifying detail in the Quran (or Koran), the Islamic holy book. India has been the target for jihadi terror for a thousand years. Tens of millions of Indians have paid with their lives, slaughtered by the Sword of Islam.

The greater tragedy is that India has not yet collectively learned that it is the prime target and the ace victim of jihadi terror. It still brings a lathi — a bamboo cane — to a fight against an AK47-armed opponent. That is not just figuratively but literally true.

The policemen in the train station in Mumbai were armed with lathis and World War I vintage guns. They did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of confronting the AK-47 armed Islamic terrorists. The chief cop of the Anti-Terrorist Squad was struggling to find a suitable bulletproof vest before he went to meet his death at the hands of a 20-something jihadi. And he died together with his officers without firing a single shot at the Islamic terrorists. Essentially the man committed suicide.

The greater tragedy is that India does not understand the force that it has faced and continues to face. It is not facing a half-naked unarmed ascetic. It is facing an army that is insane with its desire to kill the infidels in a clash that would guarantee the triumph of Islam over all of humanity, an army of men and women who are convinced that if they were to meet their death in this terrible clash, they would win their eternal reward in a paradise that is so magnificent that it is worth slaughtering every single infidel man, woman and child.

{Continued in Part 2.}