This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Gazalea have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where Sheikhs take a draconian view of Shariah law, that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats.

I’ve spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables.

I didn’t believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must’ve been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flyer directing groceries how to display their food.

Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.

I’ve seen a lot in Iraq that has surprised me. A family living in the guard shack of an abandoned nuclear plant, suffering from what local doctors described as radiation sickness; the bearded head of a bomber, 500 feet from his still flaming vehicle. Sick stuff. But I’ve also been inspired: by a soldier who agreed to an interview with a bullet in his leg; by American military surgeons who operated side by side on an Iraqi policeman and an Iraqi insurgent; and Iraqis who’ve returned to work with us, despite death threats, kidnappings, and slain relatives.

Yet over three years of visits, I’ve never been able to fully appreciate the violent justice there. I’ve heard of a boy in Najaf whose throat was slit for blinding a neighbor’s cow with a rock. I’ve learned a new oxymoron: religious assassins. And I’ve watched friends move repeatedly, to stay ahead of attacks by insurgents. And now, Iraqi’s are dying over goat panties and naughty veggies.

Sick stuff, as Hendren says. And you know what? Kapil Sibal, if he had his way, would drag India down that path. After all, some Muslims in India are sure to find the sight of some vegetables and undiapered goats to be offensive.

(Please do me a favor and not forward this post to Kapil Sibal — it may give him ideas. Thank you.)

Related Post: The Asinine Fatuity of Kapil Sibal.

“India is better than Pakistan where blasts take place every day, every week.”
- Digvijay Singh

How can a list of stupid things that politicians said not contain the King of them all?

We thought India was being run into the ground by saffron-clad boogeymen who haunt your every waking moment and can only be exorcised by bringing them up at every conceivable occasion.

So, are you sure, saffron groups are not involved in the blasts, Mr General Secretary? And yeah, did nobody call you the day before the blasts?

I am a pacifist by nature and philosophically I am inclined to compassion towards all sentient beings. But even I draw the line somewhere and I think evil incarnates like Digvijay Singh should be treated as the Religion of Peace dictates for infidels in the Koran — beheading and the pouring of boiling oil down the throat. That would be poetic justice, wouldn’t you say, considering that Digvijay’s targets are the infidels according to the Religion of Peace.

Here’s an extended quote from what I wrote a few days later on my UC Berkeley blog (now deceased): The Looking Glass War.

Sept 17th, 2001 Berkeley CA

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear at any rate–” exclaimed Alice after reading Jabberwocky in the Looking-Glass world. {Click on the image above to read the poem.}

It is a fair description of what the situation appears to be in the US after last week’s terrorist attacks.

Terrorism is nothing new to the US which has always prided itself as a self-styled global cop. What is different is the scale of the terrorism the US has experienced in its own backyard–indeed its living room. This seems to fill the US heads with ideas and like Alice it does not quite know what they are. What is clear at any rate is the symbolism of the chosen targets and the effectiveness of the blow that the terrorists struck.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center symbolized the technological and economic domination of the globe just as much as the Pentagon symbolizes the military domination of the US. Using the US civilian air transportation system to hit at these two towering symbols of American hegemony only added insult to injury.

Somebody killed something, as a confused Alice noted. And while it is still unclear who that somebody is, what was killed is amply clear.

Destroyed forever is the illusion that technological superiority gives immunity from the greater reality of the world beyond its well-guarded borders. Gone forever is the comforting dream that a nuclear missile defense shield would protect against the actions of rogue nations. The age of being able to move freely about this vast country in the most sophisticated civilian air transportation system is also over.

The symbolism of the attack on the Big Apple is unavoidable and the mind tries to make sense of the devastation and its aftermath by recalling myths and legends. The US is at war; but it is a looking glass war where the image of the villain is created by the real hero standing in front of a mirror. And like a mirror, the greater the hero, the larger the villain appears to be–only with the mirror inverting the right and wrong.

Faustian Bargain

At a certain level of analysis, the US is directly responsible for the power of Bin Laden and his followers. There is an unbroken causal chain that stretches from the US through the CIA to Pakistan to the Taliban to Bin Laden. The US armed the Mujahideen and now the other half of the unholy bargain is done with the destruction of the trade center towers and a token bombing of the Pentagon.

In his quest for magical power, Dr. Faustus makes a pact with the devil in which he barters away his soul. It is a powerful tale of the dangers of hubris that compels the powerful to seek even more power and are willing to make deals with devils. Dr. Faustus squanders away many opportunities where he could have redeemed himself but didn’t. It appears that the US is all set to make a larger faustian bargain with Pakistan. It is possible that the other half of the latest deal with the devil will be a nuclear bomb in the financial district of San Francisco a few years from now.

The Terrorism-Industrial-Complex

Why isn’t the US waking up? My conjecture is that it is good for the military-industrial complex. Thanks to bin Laden and the Religion of Peace, the military-industrial complex has been enlarged into the terrorism-industrial-complex. It is hugely profitable — for the people who work in it, of course. For the rest of us, in the US and abroad, it is immensely costly.

The other day Terry Gross was talking about this on her show “Fresh Air from WHYY.”

Thousands of government organizations and private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence. Last December, The Washington Post reported that this “top-secret world … has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

On today’s Fresh Air, Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest, the co-author of both the Post’s investigative series and the book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, joins Terry Gross for a discussion about how the “terrorism industrial complex” created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks grew to be so big.

“The government said, ‘We’re facing an enemy we don’t understand, we don’t have the tools to deal with it, here’s billions … of dollars and a blank check after that for anybody with a good idea to go and pursue it,’ ” she says. “Not only does the government find it difficult to get its arms around itself, [but now] it doesn’t know what’s inside, it doesn’t know what works, it doesn’t know what doesn’t work. And nobody still, 10 years later, is really in charge of those questions.”
. . .
More than 800,000 people now hold top-secret security clearances. And now an entire industry has sprung up to provide those clearances, says Priest.

Here’s an excerpt from “Top Secret America: The Rise Of The New American Security State”:

Having been given a steady diet of vague but terrifying information from national security officials about the possibility of dirty bombs, chemical weapons, biotoxins, exploding airliners, and suicide bombers, a nation of men and women like the Whitemans have shelled out hundreds of billions dollars to turn the machine of government over to defeating terrorism without ever really questioning what they were getting for their money. And even if they did want an answer to that question, they would not be given one, both because those same officials have decided it would gravely harm national security to share such classified information— and because the officials themselves don’t actually know.

In the panic-​filled chaos of late 2001 through 2002, this dragnet approach to terrorism was understandable, given how little the CIA, the FBI, and military intelligence agencies knew then about al-Qaeda. But in ten years, they have made vast strides in technical surveillance capabilities and intelligence analysis. They have killed so many al-Qaeda operatives that only hundreds are left in the world (in addition to the organization’s post-​9/11 affiliates). The dragnet approach no longer makes much sense.

One reason America is stuck at Yellow Alert — “Significant Risk” of terrorist attack accompanied by no specific information — and stuck with such an enormous complex of organizations and agencies trying to defend the country is that being wrong is too costly for politicians in Washington. “Who wants to be the guy that says we don’t need this anymore and then three weeks later something happens?” asked [ ] national security adviser James Jones, former commandant of the Marine Corps. “I don’t think you can ever get it back” to a smaller size.

We believe the primary reason for this is that the government has still not engaged the American people in an honest conversation about terrorism and the appropriate U.S. response to it. We hope our book will promote one. {Emphasis added.}

In a world of political correctness, it is not even possible to name the enemy, leave alone having an honest conversation about terrorism. Islam, as they insist, is the Religion of Peace. That about settles the matter.

Or as Diggyvijay Singh would put it, “The RSS hand cannot be ruled out.” Yeah, that’s it.

It is worth asking where this excessive and mind-numbing focus on Modi is headed. Whether one likes his politics or doesn’t, believes he is India’s best chief minister or isn’t, considers him a future prime minister or too much of a hot potato for BJP allies, the fact remains that he needs to be viewed through a conventional political prism and not one of a fevered imagination.

Consider examples. One, it has been clear for a long time that there is no legal case against Modi for the 2002 violence and he is not guilty of acts of deliberate commission. With even the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigative Team (SIT) said to have to come to the same conclusion, Modi haters — who range from Mumbai-based celebrities to a retired police officer still settling bureaucratic scores — have begun to denounce the SIT and are approaching the UN Human Rights Commission.

Two, the WikiLeaks cables reveal that western intelligence agencies believe the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba threat to Modi is clear and present and did not die out with the elimination of Ishrat Jehan and her accomplices. Jehan, a Mumbai student who fell into Lashkar’s grip, was killed in an encounter with the Gujarat police in 2004. Modi’s opponents insist she was innocent and the Laskhar plot a concoction. Perhaps now they will argue Modi wrote the WikiLeaks cables.

How long can this continue? If any other Indian politician was found to be mentioned as a Lashkar target in the cables, it would have had the media engrossed. Not with Modi; it’s almost as if he’s fair game. As for the Union government, it wants to fight terrorists — but not terrorists whom the Gujarat police have found. It’s so cynical; those 60 Indian Mujahideen men in Ahmedabad must be laughing.

Here’s something that shows how utterly idiotic the TSA can be.

Remember that the US has spent $45 billion on aviation security since 9/11/2001. That is not the total cost to society. The number of hours lost, the frustration, the having to throw away innocuous stuff at the airport, not being allowed to carry any liquids, etc — all add up to a lot more than just money. And how much do the Islamic terrorist spend on killing people? Pitiably little in comparison.

Hitchens wrote a piece in Slate: “Don’t be an Ass about Airport Security“. In there he gives an example of how little the Islamic terrorists spent — $4,200 — in the toner-cartridge incidents. It is anybody’s guess as to the millions of dollars that it will cost to take precaution against toner-cartridge bombs. (Thanks to Sudipta for the link.)

The Islamic terrorists will continue to figure out more imaginative ways of keeping a step ahead of the TSA. This is not going to end until the government realizes that it is not what you carry on board but who you are that matters. Your profile dictates whether you are a threat or not, not whether you have any weapon on you or not.

The public prosecution department on Friday afternoon stated that Geert Wilders is not guilty of discriminating against Muslims. Earlier on Friday it announced he should also be found not guilty of inciting hatred.

Prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman reached their conclusions after a careful reading of interviews with and articles by the anti-Islam politician and a viewing of his anti-Koran film Fitna.

They said comments about banning the Koran can be discriminatory, but because Wilders wants to pursue a ban on democratic lines, there is no question of incitement to discrimination ‘as laid down in law’.

On the comparison of the Koran with Mein Kampf, the prosecutors said the comparison was ‘crude but that did not make it punishable’.

Dealing earlier on Friday with incitement to hatred, Van Roessel and Velleman said some comments could incite hatred against Muslims if taken out of context, but if the complete text is considered, it can be seen that Wilders is against the growing influence of Islam and not against Muslims per sé. [Source.]

Mr Wilders, may your tribe increase. Perhaps there’s some hope for The Netherlands. But I fear not much hope for India.

That towering intellect, that defender of secularism, that holy man of the jhollawalas — Shahi Imam of the Delhi Jama Masjid, Maulana Syed Ahmed Bukhari — defended his faith, the Religion of Peace ^TM, by getting his supporters to peacefully give a public thrashing to a reporter who had the temerity to ask uncomfortable questions. The public stood and watched.

[The imam] lost his cool when a journalist questioned him regarding the Ayodhya verdict during a press conference, following which he was thrashed by supporters of the cleric.

Mohammed Abdul Waheed Chisti, a reporter with a local Urdu daily, raised a question relating to the ownership of the disputed site before the construction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

Chisti asked the Shahi Imam to spell out his stand on the mention of King Dashrath’s name in land records of 1528 before the Babri mosque was constructed.

Initially, Bukhari skirted the question but when the journalist insisted, he was threatened.

“Get him out of this conference, Bukhari shouted while accusing the journalist of working against the interests of the Muslims,” he said.

Bukhari’s supporters then thrashed the journalist in full public glare.

People like him will ‘not be tolerated by Muslims at any cost,’ the Shahi Imam said before leaving the press conference. [Source. HT Yoganand.]

Nice work, dear imam. A small sample of how it will all be when sharia is imposed all across India. Like they do in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is where they have true Freedom of Religion — unlike India where the Religion of Peace has to struggle against the intolerance of the kuffar Hindus.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Saudi police raided a secret Catholic mass in Riyadh last week and arrested a dozen Filipinos and a Catholic priest, charging them with prosyletising, a local daily reported on Wednesday.

The raid took place as some 150 Filipinos were attending the mass in a Riyadh rest house on Friday, the second day of the weekend in Saudi Arabia, Arab News said.
. . .
Saudi Arabia bans the practice of any religion aside from Islam. However, small, low-key prayer services inside expatriate compounds and in Filipino gatherings are tolerated by officials. [Source. HT Ziggy.]

One of the most enduring mysteries to me is the fascination that leftists have for repressive ideologies. Is it because they are control freaks and want to control people? Command and control. That could explain the JNU jhollawala’s love for oppressive ideologies such as Islam and Marxism. The US too has its own JNU jhollawala types. But the US is fortunate to have defenders of freedom who are not shy to tell it like it is.

Here’s Bill Benett, American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist.

It’s a 11-minute long video, and worth every second of it. You have to watch it if you want to know what is going on and what lies ahead.

It’s in part 2 of Warraq’s article — The Two Faces of Feisal Rauf — that I am astonished to learn that the US constitution is sharia compliant. The imam in question is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, now famous for being the champion of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” formerly known as the “Cordoba House,” and now generally referred to as “Park51.”

Many devout Muslims are aware of the abysmal lack of scientific achievements of the Islamic world in the last thousand years — but they commonly have recourse to the ingenious notion that the Koran anticipated all the Western scientific discoveries of the last thousand years; thus one can find electricity, quantum mechanics, relativity, and embryology in it. Rauf does something similar with the Islamic world’s lack of American values, claiming that “America is substantively an ‘Islamic’ country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.”

Wow! So I guess sharia is all about freedom of expression, the rights of individuals, the equality of sexes, the separation of church and state, and representative democracy. I guessed that maybe the framers of the US constitution were a lazy bunch and looked around for something to use as the basic template. Noting that the Islamic countries are the most successful, they must have figured that the answer lay in sharia. So they checked it out and found that it was perfect. Being practical men, and lazy on top of that, they figured that a cut-and-paste job was all that they needed to do. Change a word here, alter a line there, and voila — The Constitution of the United States of America. Basically the US Constitution (c. 1780CE) is Sharia 2.0 (c. 700CE). Who could blame them. Sharia 1.0 was in the public domain, considering that 1,000 years had passed since it’s publication. The US constitution is a derivative work created under the creative commons license, I figured.

On the next page of that article, I realized that I guessed wrong. Here’s how Warraq explains it:

Rauf’s claim is complete nonsense. Sharia is totally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Women are inferior under Islamic law — their testimony in a court of law is worth half that of a man; their movement is strictly restricted; they cannot marry non-Muslims. Non-Muslims living in Muslim countries also have inferior status under Islamic law; they may not testify against a Muslim. In Saudi Arabia, following a tradition of Muhammad, who said that “two religions cannot exist in the country of Arabia,” non-Muslims are forbidden to practice their religion, build houses of worship, possess religious texts, etc. Non-believers or atheists in Muslim countries do not have “the right to life”; all the major law schools, whether Sunni or Shia, agree that they are to be killed. (Muslim doctors of law generally divide sins into great sins and little sins. Of the 17 great sins, unbelief is the greatest, more heinous than murder, theft, adultery, etc.) Slavery is recognized as legitimate in the Koran. Muslim men are allowed to cohabit with any of their female slaves, and they are allowed to take possession even of married female slaves. One does not have the right to change one’s religion if one is born into a Muslim family; here is how the great commentator Baydawi sees the matter: “Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever you find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard.” And here are the punishments in store for transgressors against the Holy Law: amputation, flogging, crucifixion, and stoning to death.

Here I will pause to note that non-Muslims are generally ignorant of what Islam is. Some have an idiotic fanciful notion that all religions are about love and goodwill, and live and let live, and every now and then will give a plaintive cry, “Oh why can’t we all just get along!” Never having bothered to read the Koran (Qur’an), they cannot imagine that a religious ideology can be viciously and murderously hateful of all non-Muslims. Jews and Christians, as “people of the book,” at least are allowed to live as “dhimmis” under their Muslim overlords. But Islam mandates its followers to outright kill people like me — an idolater.

Well, you’d say, it’s just the ideology. No true Muslim actually goes about killing idolaters. Tell that to the Kashimiri pundits languishing in the refugee camps in India for decades. Tell that to the Hindus of Deganga in West Bengal who have been the victims of on-going Muslim rioting. Refer to the injunction in the Koran (sura 9, ayah 5) “when the holy months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you may find them. Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” The holy month of ramadan got over.

Just by the way, when I read that I thought, “Shouldn’t the order be first ambush, then besiege, then arrest, and finally slay?” Anyway, god moves in mysterious ways, as the monotheists say, and who am I to question his word since I am a disbelieving atheist idolatrous kaffir?

Getting back to the matter at hand, here’s more from Warraq about some books by imam Rauf:

While, in his later work, Rauf gushes about “our common Abrahamic faith,” and about the U.S. Constitution’s being “Sharia compliant,” in the earlier work, he states (rather than argues) that Islam and sharia are far superior to Judaism and Christianity, and also to any man-made laws such as those in the U.S. Constitution. He accuses both Judaism and Christianity of having “eviscerated the spiritual dimension from Sacred Law.” Islam is, says Rauf, repeating Sura 3 verse 110, “the best religion on earth.”

You should read Ibn Warraq’s 2-part article. Go now and read part 1 (“One Imam, Multiple Messages“) and part 2 (“The Two Faces of Feisal Rauf“).

The recent spate of Islamic terrorist attacks in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan provides additional weight to the words of that great American political scientist Samuel Huntington, “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

The news channels have been clogged with reports of scores of dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists in Pakistan. It is hard not to recall that Pakistan has not only been talking the language of jihad against infidel India but has been following up its rhetoric of jihad with vigorously promoting dozens of acts of naked terrorism in India, the most famous of which was less than a year ago in Mumbai.

The latest in this unending series of Islamic terrorism happens to be in the home country of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Around 90 have been killed and over 200 injured in a car bomb terrorist attack in Peshawar in Pakistan. It is unlikely that there were any infidels there — all the killed and wounded must have been people of the faith.

These bombs should wake up the civilized world. But then observing the denial that people find so comforting, it is my guess that it still isn’t time for the world to wake up. Many observers have been warning of the dangers of Islam but without any perceptible effect. The usual response is the incredible “Islam is a religion of peace.” Which makes one wonder if there are indeed religions that are not “of peace.”

The fake excuse that Islamic terrorism is not due to Islam but due to poverty and ignorance should have been laid to rest long ago. But it somehow persists. As Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith,” and “A Letter to a Christian Nation” puts it:

Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for Muslim terrorism must answer questions of the following sort: Why are there no Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal, and far more cynical, than any that Britain, the United States, or Israel have ever imposed upon the Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam. This is not to say that Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has (Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as a Muslim. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.

Sam Harris wants the West to acknowledge that it “is at war with Islam, which preaches a doctrine of religious and political subjugation, not a message of peace.” I say not just the West but the rest as well. It is time that Indians woke up to that fact also. For India, it’s been a civilizational struggle. India has been continually losing ground to the onslaught of Islam for over a millennium and it is high time that Indians woke up.

But here’s the problem. Indians take their cue from what the Americans do. If an American does moonwalk dancing, Indian movies will suddenly be full of moonwalks and synchronized dancing. If Americans have a show about people wanting to be millionaires, Indian TV will ape it with ‘Who wants to be a crorepati’. If Americans have Big Brother (which itself is an imitation of the British show), then Indians would dutifully ape the Americans with Bigg Boss.

Unfortunately, the Americans and the British are asleep. It is widely reported that Pakistan is jihad central. Americans don’t acknowledge it — because if they did, they would have to own up to their own complicity in funding the jihad. They have the means to catch those Pakistan-trained terrorists, but they cannot afford to for fear that it would bring the conflict to an end. So they continue to pretend that it is not a civilizational struggle. And India has to ape the Americans and pretend it is not the biggest victim of Islamic terrorism.

Anyway, c’est la vie. I think the Americans will wake up one day when the Islamic terrorists actually explode a nuclear device on American soil. Then they will go ape-s**t. But by then it may be too late for India.

C’est la guerre.

Sam Harris argues that science informs our understanding of what we call moral behavior. He talks about science and human values. He claims — contrary to popular opinion — that science can help us (to some extent, in my opinion) tell use what we ought to value. In other words, I hear in his TED talk the claim that science can help us out with the normative as well, not just the objective or positive.

He uses a few telling examples such as the status of women in Islamic societies to show that different cultures have different values and all of them are not objectively valuable. He is not for moral relativism. Nor am I. I think cultures, much like many other human attributes, occur along a continuum ranging from the dysfunctional to the good. Not all of them in all their aspects are good.

Now on to Hitchens. Writing in Newsweek in Dec 2009, “The Death of Theocracy“, he makes a related point —

My colleague and friend Fareed Zakaria wrote not long ago in these pages that there was a significant difference between, say, the Taliban takeover of the Swat Valley and the launching of suicide attacks on the non-Muslim world. I said to him then and I say once more that in the long run this is a distinction without very much difference. A country that attempts to govern itself from a holy book will immediately find itself in decline: the talents of its females repressed and squandered, its children stultified by rote learning in madrassas, and its qualified and educated people in exile or in prison. There are no exceptions to this rule: Afghanistan under the Taliban was the worst single example of beggary-cum-terrorism, and even the Iranians were forced to denounce it—because of its massacre of the Shia—without seeing the irony.

But when the crops fail and the cities rot and the children’s teeth decay and nothing works except the ever-enthusiastic and illiterate young lads of the morality police, who will the clerics blame? They are not allowed to blame themselves, except for being insufficiently zealous. Obviously it must be because the Jews, the Crusaders, the Freemasons have been at their customary insidious work. Thus, holy war must be waged on happier and more prosperous lands.

India is likely to prosper relative to Pakistan and Bangladesh. I am afraid that India’s rising prosperity will provoke increasing Islamic terror. It will arise out of a mixture of envy of the material wealth of and the hatred for an infidel India.

And lastly, a news item from Indian Express: To attract youth, Gadkari seeks new Hindutva idiom

“Our credo has always been ‘justice for all; appeasement of none’. A true Hindu can never attack a Muslim, and a true Muslim can never attack a Hindu. A terrorist, on the other hand, has no religion, caste, or creed. It’s the pseudo-secular brigade that has unduly highlighted the religion of terrorists who happened to be Muslims,” said Gadkari.

I am supposing the new Hindutva idiom is an attempt to be more pseudo-secular than the Congress. Mr Gadkari is a politician and has many reasons to — how shall I put this most delicately — be very sparing with the truth. He has elections to win and therefore cannot alienate the pseudo-secular voters. But I am afraid that this tactic is not going to work.

First of all, those who are opposed to the BJP on religious grounds are not going to vote for a party that is at best a “wannabe Congress B team” merely because Gadkari makes meaningless statements about terrorists not having a religion. I think it is pretty clear to all that an overwhelming majority of terrorists are Muslims and are motivated by Islam. I am not making this up. The terrorists themselves claim that they are doing it for their god and their religion. They shout Allahhuakbar as they slit the throats of the infidels. Don’t believe me. Go listen to the videos and voice recordings; go read the transcripts; do read their manifestos; go hear them make their statements in open court defending their actions.

How dare Mr Gadkari speak on behalf of the terrorists?

I disagree most vehemently with Gadkari’s claim that a true Hindu can never attack a Muslim. In the many wars, many Hindus and Muslims have been killed by the opposing side. Is it his claim that all the Muslim soldiers who killed Hindus were not true Muslims? Or that all the Hindus who killed Muslims were not true Hindus?

How did we come to this sorry state of affairs where leaders spit on the memory of people who gave their lives in defense of the motherland?

In earlier times, I would laugh at this sort of mealy mouthed nonsense and point out the “no true Scotsman fallacy”. In July 2008, I wrote in “No true Terrorists”

The Hindu reports that an official of the “Indian Union Muslim League has asked the media and public to not to brand the perpetrators of the deed as Muslims.”

“I appeal to the media and the public not to brand the perpetrators of the Bangalore blasts as Muslims,” State president of IUML K M Khader Mohideen told reporters here on Saturday night.

“These kind of people are neither Muslims, Hindus or Christians. The Centre and the state government should take steps to nab them quickly,” he said.

That’s an example of what is called the “No true Scotsman” fallacy, a fallacy of equivocation and question begging. Here it is, from Thinking about Thinking (1975), by Andrew Flew:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

As long as we are declaring that the self-proclaimed bombers who self-identify themselves as Muslims and their organizations as explicitly Islamic are not Muslims, why don’t we go the whole hog and declare that there were no terrorists bombings, that there were no deaths, that everything is peaceful and tranquil?

Let’s live in fairy-land as the reality is too painful and our so-called leaders are powerless to do sh!7.

Now I will not do so because it is no longer funny. We have to oppose this sort of nonsense without apology.

Here’s an excerpt.

Yet, there is no single pattern or explanation to what drives men and women into committing a horrific act of self-destruction aimed at killing innocent people. Reem Riyashi, a 22-year-old mother of two toddlers, blew herself up at a check-post on Israel’s border with Gaza in January, 2004. It was publicised by Hamas as the ultimate expression of loyalty to Islam and sacrifice for the ummah. In a video tape recorded hours before she became a ‘martyr’ and which was shown on a television channel controlled by Hamas, she was heard saying, “I have always wished to knock at the door of heaven carrying skulls belonging to the sons of Zion.” Later it transpired Reem Riyashi’s husband had discovered that she was having an affair with a senior Hamas office-bearer. The hapless woman was given the choice of death due to infidelity at the hands of her enraged husband or death as a ‘martyr’ by becoming a suicide-bomber. She believed the latter would fetch her redemption in the eyes of god, her family and society; her children would respect her.

How, then, would we explain why an Iraqi mother strapped her unsuspecting little child with remote-controlled explosives and blew her up as she raced to collect chocolates from an American soldier who would visit the neighbourhood every day to play with the children? Or the sheer cruelty of a Taliban commander who trains young boys and girls to become suicide-bombers? The BBC recently ran the story of a 13-year-old girl who escaped from home, terrorised by the prospect of being turned into a ‘human bomb’. She told the BBC how her brother, who is a Taliban commander, trains ‘human bombs’, among them his own sisters. Nor is it easy to explain why Humam Khalid Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, an educated Jordanian who is believed to have been on the CIA’s payroll and was given the task of tracking Ayman al-Zawahiri, apart from being trusted by the Jordanian authorities, blew himself up at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA agents. His family had no clue about what he was planning to do; they thought he had gone abroad to study medicine.

Explanations are not easy to find for a phenomenon that defies logic. We are now told that MI5 has come across evidence to believe Muslim doctors who trained in British hospitals have returned home and joined jihadi ranks with the task of preparing ‘bosom bombers’ — women who volunteer to have explosives implanted in their breasts that cannot be detected by scanners and X-ray machines at airports. Technology and theory spun around a terrorist’s psychoprofile — there cannot be a psychoprofile to profile all terrorists — can help us only up to a point. Beyond that, it’s a grey area, a no-man’s land where logic is replaced by the illogical urge to die and destroy.

Go read it all.

J. Krishnamurti’s diagnosis appears to apply here. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Geert Wilders is facing the wrath of a profoundly sick society. As Pat Condell points out, Wilders is under attack because they are unable to attack the truth that Wilders is expressing. Condell says, “Fear of free speech is at the center of a profoundly neurotic and dishonest society — which is what we got now.”

Free speech is antithetical to Islam. Free speech undermines the very foundation of Islam which depends on unquestioned submission to tyrannical authority. Societies that succumb to that ideology end up being barbaric. Witness what is going on in India’s neighborhood. Islam brainwashes people from an early age to become terrorists and suicide killers, as the report from Islamabad reveals. It turns people into killing machines. Humanity is lost and often to a degree that parents bury their children alive for such trivialities as talking. A Turkish 16-year old girl was buried alive by her father.

Societies that fall victim to Islam become neurotic and paranoid. The Netherlands is committing suicide. But who knows, perhaps Wilders’ trial may wake up the Westerners to the reality of their suicidal tendencies.

[Hat tip to Oldtimer for the links to Wilders and Condell.]

That ad is from 1979. It says, “Via PIA” but if there was truth in advertising, it would be “Via Pakistan”. [via Liberty News Central.] And talking of Islamic terrorism and advertising, here’s something that does not surprise me.

What’s Islam? Don’t ask Google

Type a few words into the search field on Google’s home page and the engine automatically returns a helpful list of popular, similar searches for the words you’ve typed in so far — a convenient way to find the right information.

Enter “Christianity is” and you’ll find results that, while offensive, at least indicate common discussions on the Internet. Likewise, type “Judaism is” and Google suggests other, potentially offensive searches such as “Judaism is false” and “Judaism is not a race.”

But type “Islam is” into the search engine and Google’s auto-results pane mysteriously vanishes, leading some to conclude that Google, whose mantra is “don’t be evil,” is censoring its search results.

Google is a legitimate business. They are into making money the old fashioned way — delivering a service that users find valuable. You cannot expect them to be martyrs. You don’t mess around with Islam and its hordes of mindless zombies who are quick to anger and fly into murderous rages regularly. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie and others have to live in constant fear and under heavy security. Theo van Gogh and dozens of other high profile victims of Muslim rage have died for their bravery. (I am only mentioning the celebrities, as there is no count of the nobodies that were murdered — perhaps in the millions — for perceived insult to Islam.)

The rich are different from us, as F Scott Fitzgerald noted, in that they have more money. But they too are afraid of dying. Google, the corporation, is headed by humans. Rich but humans nonetheless. They fear for their lives just as much as we all do. Remember that practically no news agency in the world had the courage to reprint the Danish muhammed cartoons. Not the NY Times. Not Washington Post. Not Times of India. Not the Guardian. Not one single major newspaper in the whole of the “free” world.

Why single out Google for caving in to the Islamic demands? Aren’t the people at the UN also afraid? They must be because they want to make criticizing Islam a crime. They are all Islamophobes — afraid of Islam.

This is what’s going on in Pakistan.

. . . the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Sufi Muhammad, has expressed his desire of implementation of a similar law over the whole world.
Expressing his hatred for people’s rule, Muhammad said Islam does not have any mention of democracy or elections.

“From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by the infidels. Islam does not allow democracy or elections,” ‘The Daily Times’ quoted Muhammad, as saying.

He said that the continuous bloodbath in the region was due to the hesitant approach of different regimes in the country to accept the superiority of the Islamic law.

“Had the government accepted our demands in 1994, we would have not seen the violence we are seeing today,” he said.

The message is clear and very very old. The infidels by their obstinacy in not submitting to Islam have brought all the bloodbath upon their own heads. It’s not too late, however. As this National Congress party Congress party candidate, Kadir Maulana, declares in his manifesto, “Amanulla’s rule has to be brought back. Shivsena (and Hindus) have to be wiped out of this place. Allah has sent Kadir Maulana for that. To make the moon-and-star flag fly on the land of Aurang.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what a candidate of the National Congress Party Congress party, the party of MK Gandhi, proudly proclaims. No doubt the NCP Congress party approves of the subjugation and finally the annihilation of infidels. Ironically, the means to bring that about is democracy — “a system imposed on us by the infidels,” as Kadir Maulana’s fellow traveler in Pakistan, Sufi Muhammad calls representative democracy.

Clearly Pakistan is not sufficiently Islamic. Once they become fully Islamic, the violence will stop. For now, thousands die in run-of-the-mill Islamic terrorism. Mayhem & killings:

. . . Dawn highlighted statistics showing over 2, 200 persons were killed in about 275 terror attacks since 2007. The report said:

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of suicide bombings, commando-style raids and other attacks blamed on militants which have killed more than 2,200 people in about 275 attacks since July 2007. [India Today.]

When they are done with Pakistan, they will come for the infidels in India — helped no doubt by Kadir Maulanas of the NCP Congress party, led by Sonia Gandhi and her chief operating officer Mr Manmohan Singh.

Here’s the maulanan’s manifesto. Short and to the point.

This is what’s happening in India. Under the watchful eyes of the secular NCP Congress party. Vote for NCP Congress you infidels because therein lies your salvation. They will help usher in the peace that can only come from submitting to Islam and to sharia.

Correction: As shrijitp pointed out in the comments below, the celebrated “Indian” politician Kadir Maulana is/was a National Congress Party candidate, and not as I mistakenly claim in the post above from the Congress party at all. I regret the error. I stand corrected.

* There have been four acts of mass casualty terrorism since 1981. All the four were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi.

* There have been three instances of targeted attacks on foreigners since 1991—-two in J&K and one in Mumbai. All the three were carried out when the Congress (I) was in power.

* There have been seven acts of ISI-sponsored aircraft hijackings since 1971. Six of them were carried out when the Congress (I) and one when the BJP was in power.

* There has been one instance of an Air India plane being blown up in mid-air killing over 250 persons. This took place when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The LET was banned by the Musharraf Government as a terrorist organization through a Gazette notification on January 15, 2002. The Manmohan Singh Government has not been able to get the JUD banned by the Zardari Government through a Gazette notification even nine months after the Mumbai attack.

* Indira Gandhi was assassinated when the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated when an ally of the Congress (I) was in power in New Delhi and another ally in Chennai.

* The Indian Mujahideen came into existence when the Congress (I) was in power.

* The first commando-style complex terrorist attack in Indian territory by a group of terrorists, all hailing from Pakistan, has taken place when the Congress (I) is in power.

Now it is true that B Raman in his extremely detailed piece (54 bulleted paragraphs, no less) lists instances after instances of the absolutely incomprehensible incompetency of Dr Manmohan Singh in dealing with the terrorist state of Pakistan and the terrorism that it unleashes on Indians. But as I keep saying, Dr Singh cannot be held responsible for reasons of incompetency. I believe courts routinely refuse to punish murderers if it is determined that the murderer is mentally incompetent. Dr Singh does not deserve any less.

For the record, here are items 16 and 17 from Mr Raman’s paper:

16. The inexorable result of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s failure to act: The commando-style attack by 10 Pakistani terrorists of the LET, trained, armed and equipped in Pakistan on two hotels, a Jewish religious-cum-cultural centre and other public places in Mumbai, which started on November 26, 2008, and continued till November 28, 2008.It was an army-style operation involving the use of hand-held weapons, explosives, sophisticated communication equipment and modern internet telephony facilities, which shocked the world and created feelings of anger and outrage in India.

17. The enormity of the public anger against Pakistan forced Dr. Manmohan Singh to freeze the composite dialogue process without disrupting the normal diplomatic relations between the two countries. He did so not because he was convinced that his earlier policy of appeasement of Pakistan had failed, but because he and his Congress (I) party were worried that if they did not give the impression of taking strong action against Pakistan, it might affect the party adversely in the elections of April-May, 2009, to the Lok Sabha, the lower House of the Indian Parliament. The resumption of the composite dialogue was made conditional on Pakistan acting strongly against the LET, its operatives based in Pakistan who had planned and got executed the terrorist attack in Mumbai and its terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory.

If you continue to support a political party that consistently screws you over decade after decade, impoverishes you, and treats you like a retard, you might be a third world country.

One witness at the railway station: “There was a baby. His mother was still alive next to him. The baby started to cry so the mother picked him up, and was shot dead.”

The CST railway station after jihad (52 killed, 100 injured)

And reading that makes you reconsider and realize that no matter how insanely stupid the unbelievers are, they do not deserve to be killed so ruthlessly.

The untold story of 2008’s terrorist attack on the Indian city of Mumbai. The story is told in the words of its victims and the gunmen. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Dan Reed, Terror in Mumbai tells the story of what happened when 10 gunmen held one of the world’s busiest cities hostage; killing and wounding hundreds of people while holding India’s crack security forces at bay.

I cannot afford to watch those videos.

A few bits of the review below the fold.

. . . it is great luck to come across a book like Moorthy S. Muthuswamy’s “Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War.” It contains all the answers to the questions looming over our widening and deepening presence in “AfPak,” and more.

In short, the United States fails to understand Pakistan – whose army, not incidentally, sports the motto “Faith, piety, and holy war in the path of Allah” – for what it is: a member state of what the author calls “the axis of jihad,” which also includes Saudi Arabia and Iran. These three nations – with their arm’s-length proxy armies of the Taliban, al Qaeda and Hezbollah – are the most aggressive purveyors of what the book describes as “political Islam,” the jihadist creed based on Islamic doctrine that is destabilizing the world, from India’s Kashmir region to Britain’s old mill towns, from all of Israel to Parisian banlieues.

. . .

Mr. Muthuswamy urges, for example, a propaganda campaign against political Islam akin to that waged against communist ideology. It would target “educated Muslims” in the West, he writes, who “would benefit from the local media and the government propaganda machinery willing to discredit the theological roots of political Islam.”

That they would, but here’s the rub: how first to deprogram the “local media” and the “government propaganda machinery” of their politically correct outlook on the world, including Islam?

. . .

What “Defeating Political Islam” tells us is that the United States, in fighting the so-called war on terror, not only has allied with nations that can never be our friends – which explains the incorrigibilities of the AfPak theater, for example – but also has effectively shunned friends, such as India and Israel, that would love to be our allies.

It all makes perfect sense; in some ways, it’s even obvious. Survival strategy usually is. Which isn’t to say that “Defeating Political Islam” won’t come as eye-popping revelation to its readers. I only hope they won’t take the book’s urgent message to heart too late.

I will most likely be giving Muthuswamy’s book a miss. [Clarification #1: Going by the review of the book, I am sure that it is a very valuable book and that it should be widely read.] Unless one has been living in a cave in some remote island in the middle of the Antarctic ocean, one cannot avoid concluding that “political” Islam is a problem.

What exactly is political Islam anyway? Does it come in various flavors such as economic Islam, biological Islam, chemical Islam, social Islam, etc? As far as I can tell, there is only one sort of Islam, the sort that we read about every day. I think people say “political Islam” instead of just “Islam” to have some sort of an escape hatch. [Clarification #2: It was pointed out to me that the title of the book uses "political Islam" to identify the fact that Islam is dominantly a political ideology with a token spritual component.]

One cannot fail to notice that when it comes to most dogmas and ideologies, most people don’t hesitate to say it like they see it. But when it comes to Islam, many non-muslims slip into mealy-mouthed prevarication. It is clearly CYA action. Fear of violence drives their caution. Those who do speak up, though, stand out and are lightening rods for the wrath of the faithful. [Clarification #3: I am making a general point here. The juxtaposition of this and the mention of Muthuswamy's book title is unfortunate as I really don't have any grounds to believe that he is afraid to speak the truth. I apologize for giving that impression.]

Some do write fearlessly. The late Samuel Huntington wrote with brutal honesty, “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards.”

Who was this man, this Samuel Huntington? From the Wikipedia:

The LA Times columnist Jonah Goldberg observes that Professor Huntington, whom he called “one of the lions of 20th century social science,” was not shy at spotting trends and making predictions but he did so based on a solid grasp of the facts.[5] Goldberg reports that Huntington’s 1996 “The Clash of Civilizations” work:

“was deeply, and often willfully, misunderstood and mischaracterized by those who didn’t want it to be true. But after 9/11, it largely set the terms for how we look at the world. In it, he argued that culture, religion and tradition are not background noise, as materialists of the left and the right often argue. Rather, they constitute the drumbeat to which whole civilizations march. This view ran counter to important constituencies. The idea that man can be reduced to homo economicus has adherents among some free-market economists, most Marxists and others. But it’s nonsense on stilts. Most of the globe’s intractable conflicts are more clearly viewed through the prisms of culture and history than that of the green eyeshade. Tensions between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Arab world have little to do with GDP.“

I love the phrase that Goldberg uses — “nonsense on stilts.”

Pakistan is building even more nuclear bombs. Why? Because it wants to destroy India. Why? Because India is not Islamic. But let’s remember that the people of India and the people of present-day Pakistan were once part of the same civilization. What changed? The people of one part follow Islam and the “holy war in the path of Allah” as the Pakistani army motto says. Remember Kashmir? Well, once the entire population was Shaivite. Then it changed and now the remaining non-muslims have been killed or driven out.

Bloody borders and bloody innards.

“Death to the (Zionist) Juice” urges the demonstrator in London. Why? Because it’s written in the holy book.

Besides, they corrupt the world. The Nazis in sheer desperation, merely to avoid getting corrupted, tried to kill all of them but ended up killing only a few million. As an Egyptian cleric commenting approvingly on what the Nazis did it, “This is what we hope will happen, but, Allah willing, at the hand of the Muslims.”

He quotes from the Qur’an (Koran) what Allah said about the juice, “They fear you in their hearts more than Allah. Prepare for them whatever force and steeds of war you can, to strike terror in the hearts of Allah’s enemies and your enemies.” (8:60).

Here’s a translation of a bit of what the mullah said:

The Jews is afraid of you more than he is afraid of God. When the Germans revealed the treachery and the war of the Jews against them, and the fact that they were spreading corruption in their country – let us watch how oppressors are killed by the people they oppressed.

What we have here are German graves, but let’s watch what the Germans do to the Jews. These are corpses of dead humans and the shattered bones of Jews. Here we have a crematorium, in which the Jews were burnt. These are Jews who are being prepared to be burnt. Look, these are Jews dying of hunger or by gas. Look how they round them up and put them on trucks. Note the humiliation on his face, Allah be praised. “Abasement and humiliation were brought down upon them, and they became deserving of Allah’s wrath.”

Well, now we know. The poor Nazis were so oppressed that to protect themselves, they sent the juice to concentration camps and then to the gas chambers and mass graves.

The Jews are pigs and monkeys, according to the holy book. And if that is what is waiting the so-called “people of the book”, let’s not even go into what polytheistic infidels have in store.

A leading imam (mullah) from the great mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdur-Rahman Al-Sudais:

The worst … of the enemies of Islam are those… whom he… made monkeys and pigs, the aggressive Jews and oppressive Zionists and those that follow them: the callers of the trinity and the cross worshippers¿ those influenced by the rottenness of their ideas, and the poison of their cultures the followers of secularism… How can we talk sweetly when the Hindus and the idol worshippers indulge in their overwhelming hatred against our brothers… in Muslim Kashmir… [source]

Spencer warned that “the ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.” That observation holds with special force in the context of the misgovernment of India. If the policy makers (the bureaucrats and politicians) are shielded from the ill-effects of their policies, they have little incentive to act prudently. Eventually, as the stock of bad policies keep building up, the country ends up in ruin. We have to remember that in the main, the success or failure of an economy is solely determined by the quality of its public policies.

Allow me a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.

First, the state of Indian roads. They are generally really shoddily constructed, very poorly maintained, and unimaginably congested. Corruption in the public works department ensures that it could not be otherwise. The residents of the cities suffer and have been doing so for so long that it is taken as normal. That’s just how it is, the person on the street says, and struggles on. The policymakers, in sharp contrast, don’t suffer bad roads and traffic congestion. The roads are cleared of traffic when the top politicians have to use them. Often times, entire stretches of roads are repaired and paved over urgently within a few days in anticipation of a visit by some politician. High level officials (such as judges) and bureaucrats travel around in cars with red flashing lights and traffic yields to them — as if they were imperial rulers riding rough shod over the plebs.

What if the politicians had to use the Indian roads regularly? What if they had to ride the local trains in Mumbai to get to work?

Second, electrical power. The chronic shortage of power is entirely man-made in the sense that is a direct consequence of bad policies. Those who made these bad policies don’t ever suffer a shortage of power, however. In the areas where they live, power is always available by decree. What if power to their residences and offices were turned off first? What if they had to suffer the summer heat without electrical fans and airconditioners?

Ubiquitous bad road and chronic electrical power shortages are just two examples of scores of other ills that arise from the bad policies that are made by people who are insulated from the consequences. One of the most disturbing aspects of current Indian reality is Islamic terrorism. In my view, Indians are suffering because the policymakers don’t suffer Islamic terrorism.

According to the Home Ministry figures, over 7,000 Indians have been killed, mostly but not exclusively by Islamic, terrorism. Average people going about their daily grind end up as terrorist targets, as do the ill-equipped cops and other professionals in charge of public safety. The politicians and high level bureaucrats never die. In fact, every terrorist attack only leads to increased security for them. Thousands of special commandos are deputed round the clock to protect them. So what incentive do they have in actually preventing terrorism?

I think that one of the first steps that needed to be taken is to bring the effects of terrorism on the policy makers. For every act of terrorism, the security of the politicians should be reduced. I do believe that if this were done, they would do their best to see that the police and other law enforcement people are successful in removing terrorism by its roots.

Related posts:

March 2006.Terrorism, the way out.

The people whose business it is to do their utmost to ensure security fail to do their job and the people suffer as a consequence of that ineptitude. All they do after a terrorist attack is to make a bunch of ineffectual and inane statements, and don’t feel motivated to prevent future attacks with any vigor nor make the terrorist pay. Why? Because they don’t feel the pain.

Pain matters. If due to some neurological injury, you were to stop feeling pain, you could be in dire danger. Pain signals that the body is injured and that steps need to be taken to mitigate the threat and to take appropriate action to heal the already damaged part.

Terrorism threatens the body of the society and damages it. It is when the pain of the terrorism inflicted wound does not reach what constitutes the “brain” of the society – the policy makers who control the mechanisms that can prevent terrorist acts and can respond appropriately when they do happen – that society is in danger. The solution is therefore simple: the brain has to know that it will feel the pain if and when injury occurs to the body. Only then will the brain be motivated to seek appropriate mechanisms for stopping terrorists, and be prepared to deal forcefully with terrorists if it does occur.

NOTES:

1. Spencer is one of the greatest of the dead white men that I admire. Why? Read his essay “The Right to Ignore the State” (1884) to know why. [Return]

In the ultimate analysis, ideas matter. Ideas are what distinguishes humans from all known forms of terrestial living beings. The differences one observes in the development of various societies ultimately boil down to the set of ideas that a society developes, borrows, adopts, adapts, and uses. Ideas as embodied in the institutions and mores of society ultimately dictate how prosperous it is. A set of ideas that persist and pervade the collective consciousness of a society can be called an ideology. After controlling for all other factors such as natural endowments and accidents of history, the state of development and prospects of growth of a society (and therefore its economy) are fundamentally and inextricably tied to the dominant ideology of that society.

Ideologies that deny humans freedom are not consistent with development. The world has seen many totalitarian ideologies and witnessed their eventual and inevitable passing. That is not surprising because totalitarian ideologies are weak in the evolutionary sense: they cannot compete against ideologies that admit the ultimate force in human societies — human freedom.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It literally means submission and that submission is to a man who lived in 7th century Arabia and who determined that all have to submit to the will of his god, Allah, and that he was the one who was entrusted with the task of conveying the wishes of his god for the rest of humanity for all times and all places. As an ideology, it is inimical to humanity’s primal drive: freedom from dictation from above. As far as it goes, Islam was a perfect instrument for winning in tribal conflicts of 7th century Arabia. But the world is temporally and spatially much bigger than 7th century Arabia. Islam’s ideology cannot win in a globalized world, a world where the fittest ideas survive in a battle of competiting ideas and ideologies. Any ideology that has to resort to violence to maintain itself merely demonstrates its weakness and its days are ultimately limited.

Empirical and analytical evidence abounds with regard to the developmentally harmful effects of Islam. As an explanatory factor for underdevelopment and retarded growth, Islam is significant. Most of the Islamic majority economies are far behind in most indicators of human development. Even those Islamic states that have immense natural endowments such as oil and natural gas — and they earn hundreds of billions of dollars annually in exporting them — even they lag behind other states that are not so fortunately endowed. This is not conjecture or mere prejudice. Even a cursory reading of the present state of Islamic states reveals that fact.

The Arab world, overwhelmingly Islamic, has not contributed in any significant way to the modern world in terms of discovery, invention, production of art, advances in the sciences and humanities. It surely must be remarkable that Jews — vanishingly small in number relative to Arabs — have contributed astonishingly to technology, sciences, arts and humanities. Evidence is everywhere but just look at the number of Nobel prizes won by the Jews. Why?

The prime minister of India, echoing the reports of many committees, has noted quite rightly that Muslims of India are on average poorer, less educated, less skilled and generally do poorly in many generally accepted indicators of social development compared to non-muslims in India. That is not a badge of honor even though it is apparently proudly worn by some to claim that they are discriminated against by non-muslims.

The claim is that they are victims and therefore they are entitled to not only income transfers but also get a free pass for any transgression against basic human values. Not given to critical self-examination, the fault is always of the other. Proudly wearing the cloak of the victim, they cannot do any wrong. Predictably, after every act of Islamic terrorism, the so-called “intellectuals” and opinion-makers emerge with a ready-made explanation: Islamic terrorism is a response to poverty.

That is an untenable explanation. India has a large number of poor Muslims. But then it also has a much larger non-muslim population which is in the same economically dire straits. Why aren’t these non-muslims using terrorism as an instrument of influencing public policy? Since Kashmir is a favorite example trotted out dutifully in the explanation of random Islamic violence in India, how does one explain the total lack of terrorism by non-muslims who were driven out of Kashmir and are huddled in pathetic refugee camps for decades? Why aren’t poor Biharis terrorising India in their attempt to secure economic justice from the rest? What about the dalits and the other downtrodden? Why?

Every act of Islamic terrorism currently undertaken in justified on two incidents: Godhra riots and Babri masjid. Anyone will grant that destroying a mosque is damnable; and so are the roits that killed innocent Muslims and Hindus following the Islamic terrorism of burning innocents on a train. But how long can every act of Islamic terrorism be justified on those two incidents?

Here’s a bit from the most recent act of Islamic terrorism as reported in The Wall Street Journal:

On the 20th floor, the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell. They lined up the 13 men and three women and lifted their weapons. “Why are you doing this to us?” a man called out. “We haven’t done anything to you.”

“Remember Babri Masjid?” one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India’s first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.

“Remember Godhra?” the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.

“We are Turkish. We are Muslim,” someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.

Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.

They left a pile of dead bodies. Like they always do. But then can Godhra and Babri masjid be used to justify the thousands of temples that were destroyed in India over the last thousand years? Can they be used to justify the killing by the millions that Islam unleased on non-muslims in India over the centuries? Are there any statutes of limitation on the revenge that will be extracted for these two acts? When will be non-muslims in India finally have paid fully in terms of innocent blood, sweat and tears for these two acts of wanton violence and destruction?

I am far from done on this line of enquiry. But before I close this post, two additional points. First, the concluding paragraphs from an opinion piece (Is Yoga Bad for You?) by a Pakistani commentator, Irfan Hussain, writing in The Dawn commenting on the outcome of the lastest spectacular episode of Islamic terrorism:

Whatever the reason, such desperate and ultimately futile measures only serve to further marginalise Muslims. Already viewed as a backward community by much of the world, Muslims risk withdrawing from the rest of mankind at a time when globalisation is breaking down barriers at a frenzied pace.

In India, Muslim ulema have won the right to dominate women as a religious right. This exemption was granted to them by a secular Congress Party. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Taliban and their supporters want to ban music, movies and even kite-flying. When the Taliban were in power, they had banned education for girls, and had denied women medical care from male doctors. Where will this madness end?

It will end if and when Muslims decide that enough is enough, and that they do not want to live in the sixth century. Unfortunately, there is much confusion in the Islamic world, with the result that uneducated mullahs issue half-baked edicts on everything under the sun, and ordinary people, unsure of themselves, pay lip service to these teachings.

Millions in the Islamic world have convinced themselves that their current weakness has been caused by the West. If they examine the causes for their backwardness more closely, they will discover that they lie much closer to home than they would like to admit.

Irfan Hussain leaves the reader to make up his or her own mind on the ultimate cause of the distress of Muslims in India and around the world. I am convinced that it is Islam. Muslims, in my opinion, are also victims of Islam as much as the rest of the world. That is the unvarnished truth and in all likelihood expressing that view publicly is not too good for my health. It is just an opinion but in today’s world, it is not safe to do so. This is significant. I can voice my opinion on what’s wrong with capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or nazism, or whathaveyou and people who disagree with me will call me all sorts of unkind names but only Islam will call for my beheading. Which brings me to the other point that I want to make before I conclude this piece.

Islam does not allow dissent — not just to its own adherents but also to non-muslims. Its supremacist and triumphalist doctrine essentially says that it has to subjugate the rest of humanity eventually, and if that means the total and complete annihilation of the non-muslims, so be it.

In the estimation of Islam, I am an idolator and therefore have to be killed merely because I refuse to bow my head in submission to Islam. I am guilty a priori. By my mere refusal to submist to Islam, I am the enemy. I, along with the rest of the non-muslim world, am guilty and therefore my destruction is ordained by the divine edict of the Islamic god Allah.

But as I said before, to me it appears that Muslims are as much the victims of Islam as the rest of the non-muslim world. (Some wit noted that Pakistan is a victim of Islamic terrorism; the first to die in a suicide bombing is a Pakistani.) I am not against Muslims for the simple reason that I have nothing againt random people I have never met. I can only like or dislike people for what they have done to me, not just because they subscribe to some ideas or ideology, however kooky and senseless it may be. Islam divides creation between two opposing and warring factions: the Muslims and non-muslims. I don’t. It is just unfortunate that I — an idolator — am categorized as an enemy of Muslims but I am not. As an average human being, I could not be bothered to go out seeking Muslims to kill.

And that is the point: non-muslims don’t wish any harm to Muslims merely because Muslims believe in Allah. But Islam does declare in no uncertain terms what Muslims are required to do to infidels. Hindus — such as yours truly — are not even classified as dhimmis — those who can buy protection from their Muslim overlords because they are the “people of the book.” I am to be killed outright if I refuse to submit to Islam.

Islam is a failed ideology, just like communism and nazism. The surest sign that it is failing is that it resorts to mindless violence against humanity, just as nazism and communism did. They have been consigned to the dustbin of history and so will Islam — soon.

{To be continued in Part 3.}

PS: And now I would like to very politely suggest that all those who believe that they have read in what I have ever written that I am calling for violence against Muslims, that they should get their effing heads out of their collective behinds and read what I actually wrote. I am against Islam — an ideology — not Muslims — a collection of humans. If you cannot distinguish betwen the two, you should get yourself some remedial reading courses at your local high school. Furthermore, if you are misconstruing what I wrote as a diatribe against Muslims, perhaps it reveals your subconcious hatred of Muslims. Take a deep breath and ask yourself if you harbor ill-will against people merely because they are different. If you do, perhaps you subscribe to the Islamic doctrine of labeling people without justification.

To the candle burners: there’s illumination required where the sun doesn’t shine. Stick them up there please.

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.}

With terrorists using unsecured wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks to shoot off emails every time they carry out bomb blasts, TRAI is examining a series of measures to have security processes in place to protect such networks. [Source]

Once the WiFi networks are secure, Islamic terrorists will not be able to use them to send emails to mass media claiming responsibility and justifying their mass murders based on ideology. This will have the salutary effect of the terrorists stopping their mass murders because (if one were to go by the reasoning of the telecom authorities) their main reason for killing innocents was clearly that insecure WiFi networks are scattered all over the country.

I suppose soon enough internet service providers will be forced to look over your shoulder while you use their services. Lots of employment possibilities here. But wait! What if terrorists figure out that they can use phones to call the media? No problem. The government will require people to sign a register somewhere stating who you are calling and what you are calling about. That would close that loophole. Now at last there will be no bombings. Unless of course, the holy warriors of Islam decide to use the postal service. One cannot be too careful, can one? So the next step will be to get a bureaucrat’s permission before using the postal services.

Good. So we have finally got the terrorism problem licked. Just prevent the terrorists from communicating with the mass media. Don’t bother looking into the ideology that motivates them. After all, their ideology cannot be very important. They merely claim that it is their ideology of subjugating the whole world through terror is what motivates them to commit mass murder. That is just a claim and it is clearly smart to totally disregard that. What the government must focus on is to foil the terrorists’ attempts at emailing, telephoning, and writing letters. Do that and the terrorists will lose all interest in their avowed goal of claiming India for Dar-ul-Islam.

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means “land.” In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means “land of the pure.” It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country’s name “might as easily be rendered as ‘Akpistan’ or ‘Kapistan,’ depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore.”

Humans can be programmed to do astonishing feats of technological and scientific marvels. Take the large hadron collider (LHC) which will go online in a few days. What seemingly superhuman planning, coordination, determination, knowledge, curiosity, foresight, . . . I am running out of adjectives to properly spell out the amazement I feel at the LHC . . . is demonstrated by the LHC? I get goosebumps just looking at the pictures of the LHC.

At the other end of the spectrum of human capacity lies something that is abhorrent, something that is driven by an ideology that is ignorant, anti-human, anti-progress, anti-life, anti-inquiry, anti-knowledge, . . . A cult of death and destruction that spawns monsters. Here is the story from Mirror.co.uk of how children as young as 5-year olds being taught by the taliban to become killers.

India continues to suffer from terrorism. The terrorists are home-grown but the ideology that fuels the terrorism is imported from Arabia. Kanchan Gupta’s article “The Truth about Islamofascism” should be required reading for Dr “BT” Singh. But I suppose he is fast asleep — perhaps catching up on the sleep that he lost while worrying about the pain and suffering of terrorists.

Karma, neh?

POSTSCRIPT: Do check out the amazing blog The Big Picture “News stories in pictures.”

Sorry, Dr Singh is busy driving a taxi.

What the hell is that supposed to mean, “driving a taxi”?

You know, busy doing other things. And besides he is not that type of doctor, the type you call in hospitals.

So what exactly is he doing. I demand to know. I don’t know why he should be driving a taxi.

Perhaps I should use a Hindi expression. “Sir-ji roti bel rahen hai“

This is bloody ridiculous. Why is Dr “BT” Singh roti-bailing? Is he in the kitchen?

No. He’s in the kitchen cabinet. It’s an Eye-tay-leean kitchen. He is the “commie” chef. The chef is Eye-tay-leean. So now you know that paging Dr “BT” Singh is pointless. Mango Man should go fug himself. After all, it was Mango Man who ordered the Eye-tay-leean dish. Now he has to eat it.

Here’s a transcript of the message, Dr Singh. The original is “Band Aid for Cancer.” From the Khaleej Times Online, dated 4th Aug, 2008. The author is M J Akbar.

In the general elections of 2004 the irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible Lalu Prasad Yadav used to tow around a maulvi when in campaign mode. Nothing particularly wrong with that. Politicians have this tendency to turn mullahs into best friends at election time.

What was the particular competence of this maulvi that attracted Lalu Yadav? Was he a great aalim, or scholar, erudite in the finer points of Sharia? Was he a fine economist with specialised knowledge in the intricate problems of rural Bihar?

The reason was less subtle. He was a lookalike of Osama bin Laden. He even handed out autographs signed “Osama”.

Lalu Yadav sent out two unmissable signals with his thoughtless pandering. He told non-Muslims that the true role model of all Bihar Muslims, irrespective of what they said in their politically-correct avatar, was a person whose name had become synonymous with terrorism. And he told Muslims, particularly their impressionable young, that Osama was a legitimate role model.

Did Mrs Sonia Gandhi, an ally of Lalu Yadav, question him or even raise the subject? Not a word. Votes were more important, even if they came in the name of Osama bin Laden. Did the subject arise when Mrs Gandhi offered Lalu Yadav a prominent place in Dr Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet? No.

To be fair to Lalu, this travelling Osama was not by his side in the Assembly elections that soon followed the general elections. He had switched over – or, to be more precise, had been purchased by – Ram Vilas Paswan. Did the Congress ask questions this time around? Not a chance. Votes, votes, votes: that was the only morality. It was all dismissed as a joke, and the laughter was doubtless very hearty in the comfortable drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi.The joke has soured on the killing fields of Malegaon, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and a roster of cities that could enter the list of dread. The dead do not laugh even when there is a comedian as rich in range as Lalu Yadav.

The innocents have been killed and maimed by terrorists who have Osama bin Laden as their inspiration. I could produce a spread of direct and indirect evidence, from the manifesto of Indian Mujahideen to the taped speeches of Mohammad Masood Azhar (released by the BJP during the bargain over the hijacked Indian Airlines) to the honorifics used by “commanders” of the terror groups. A little will suffice. A certain television evangelist based in Mumbai, who has a devoted following among the terror groups, glorifies Osama as the ultimate Islamic hero.

On a different level, Maulana Sufiyan Patanigia, once head of the Lal Masjid seminary in Ahmedabad, and now on a revenge mission after the Gujarat carnage of 2002, is known as the Indian Mullah Omar, while his deputy Suhail Khan delights in the nickname “Chota Osama”. The hate literature spawned by the Indian terrorist groups are full of the anti-Hindu venom that is encouraged by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, with its haven in Pakistan.

Common sense would suggest that those Indian politicians who claim to have some sympathy for Indian Muslims would seek, in their speeches, to create a distance between this deadly extreme fringe and the broad mass of the community, not only because this was wise but primarily because this was true. Instead, such of their ilk who are in the present government in Delhi have indulged in a curious, and inexplicable, dichotomy. On the one side, the Lalu Yadavs tout an Osama to fuel the worst kind of sentiment. And, on the other, there is what amounts to a complete denial that is inconsistent with facts. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, seems to subsist on comfort food, perhaps because the truth is politically indigestible.

The most serious instance of comfort food was the formulation he offered to his good friend George W. Bush during the latter’s official visit to India. He said that no Indian Muslim was involved in terrorism, and offered as evidence that you could not find any Indian Muslim in Osama’s Al Qaeda. President Bush, in his wisdom, picked this up as proof of his theory that democracy was a panacea for all ills. Not only did democracies never go to war against one another, but they also managed to secure Indian Muslims from the temptations of terrorism.

Dr Singh had clearly not consulted his intelligence agencies when he came to such a conclusion. Even a check with the Mumbai courts might have persuaded him otherwise. Indian nationals have been involved in terrorist conspiracies at least since 1993, after the trauma of the demolition of the Babri mosque and the Congress government’s startling indifference to both its loss and the communal havoc that ensued. It is possible that Dr Singh meant well.

But self-delusion is not diagnosis. It is perhaps such a frame of mind that takes the government towards a soft view of the guilt of Afzal Guru. Afzal Guru has been convicted for possibly the most outrageous attack on the Indian state. His conviction has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. There are no more legal avenues to traverse.

Look at this situation from the point of view of the veteran or the prospective terrorist. To start with, he knows that in India there is a lot of crime and very little punishment. If the guilty do get caught, it is often fortuitously. For lesser crimes, corruption is the sanctioned solution. For unforgivable crimes like terrorism, there is a pattern. An incident occurs, and lights flare in media. Worthy dignitaries visit the site and trot off to hospital.

The Home Minister of India repeats the same inane things he has been saying for four years. And then everyone retreats into the default mode of complacency. What is there to worry about? And when an Afzal Guru is caught and convicted, the state dithers. Perhaps this is why the Indian Mujahideen had the belligerence to taunt the government, through an email (sent before the timers wreaked their damage) that they were Indians and that there was little use in explaining this away with alibis.

The most interesting characteristic about homegrown terrorism is the degree of sophistication it has acquired. The Ahmedabad bombings began with an automobile theft in Navi Mumbai; the cars travelled to Surat and Vadodara to pick up their arsenals before reaching Ahmedabad.

The detonators were timed to inflict maximum damage on innocents, with a first, second and third tier of victims. This is a large operation from mastermind to foot soldiers, with a foreign connection but an Indian network. If our police cannot fold in a net, then policing has lost all meaning.

The battle is in India. India is being poisoned with a cancer. And all the government has as an answer is Band Aid.

From: “jaya kamlani”

As soon as I heard about a string of bomb blasts in Gujarat, I sent out the information to some journalists and posted it on the SAJA (South Asian Journalists Assoc) blog, I am a long time member of the organization. I also posted updates to it on the blog. Yesterday, too, we had bomb blasts in Bangalore. It is so sad what is happening in India. My heart goes out to the grieving families.

Since I am working on my book on rural India and the ones left behind in the booming economy, I do a lot of research on the subject each day. As you know I traveled through the villages and slums of India for over two months this winter to gather material for my book. I certainly feel that the model of Indian economy is based on the American economy, which is capitalism. The ordinary man has been forgotten in India. What you are seeing is the dissatisfaction of the mass. . .

Jaya Kamlani is wrong. It is immoral, unethical, stupid and insane to pin the acts of barbaric savagery of killing innocents on the poor. The poor suffer enough and endure enough indignities without being also gratuitously blamed for acts of terrorism.

I am disgusted and repelled by Jaya Kamlani’s suggestion that it is the poor retaliating against the system by killing indiscriminately. Shame on you, Mr or Ms Jaya Kamlani.

“I appeal to the media and the public not to brand the perpetrators of the Bangalore blasts as Muslims,” State president of IUML K M Khader Mohideen told reporters here on Saturday night.

“These kind of people are neither Muslims, Hindus or Christians. The Centre and the state government should take steps to nab them quickly,” he said.

That’s an example of what is called the “No true Scotsman” fallacy, a fallacy of equivocation and question begging. Here it is, from Thinking about Thinking (1975), by Andrew Flew:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

As long as we are declaring that the self-proclaimed bombers who self-identify themselves as Muslims and their organizations as explicitly Islamic are not Muslims, why don’t we go the whole hog and declare that there were no terrorists bombings, that there were no deaths, that everything is peaceful and tranquil?

Let’s live in fairy-land as the reality is too painful and our so-called leaders are powerless to do sh!7.

Mr Modi has been accused of failing to protect Muslims in the riots in Gujarat during 2002 in which at least 1,000 people died, including many in Ahmedabad. The violence erupted when a fire broke out on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing at least 59 people.

I suppose BBC had reported the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 with something like:

The US invaded Afghanistan after the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NY collapsed after fire broke out killing over two thousand people.

Mysterious fires suddenly erupting in building and trains. So mysterious that even the BBC has no clue how or why the fires started. Truly astonishing.

What is interesting is that the BBC is not reluctant to report an accusation — almost as if it were an established fact — but cannot bring itself to report an established fact that the torching of the train was a premeditated act of Islamic terrorism. I wonder if the BBC reporters get funded by Islamists.

A few people wrote advising me to not to mention Islam on a blog about India’s economic development. They think it is taboo to mention Islam and point out its influence on the world today. That is puzzling to me.

It makes perfect sense to me that violent strife cannot be conducive to anything beneficial. All development — not just economic — is threatened by violence, domestic or foreign. It is clear to anyone who is even minimally aware of the state of the world today that terrorism is a wide-spread problem. Every living person is affected by it, however indirectly. That is part of the price we pay for living in a globalized world where you can enjoy YouTube videos in the morning and get blown up by an Islamic suicide bomber in the afternoon.

I am sure to get some mail/comment which would not have appeared if the last sentence had not contained “Islamic” in it. At least to some people, anyone naming the motivation for the overwhelming instances of terrorist suicide bombing immediately loses all legitimacy and further examination of evidence is considered totally unnecessary.

Well, I am not willing to do that. Because it is motivated by Islamic ideology, it has to be recognized as such. It hurts the feelings of devout Muslims to be told that the ideology kills. But hurt feelings are well worth risking if the first step to stop the killing of innocents is to recognize the fountainhead of the violence. Whether we want to admit it or not, globally humanity is suffering from violence and much of that violence is ideologically motivated. We have to pay attention.

Some excerpts from Dershowitz:

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women — some married with infant children — are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”

“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”

How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach a preference for death?

On a related note, the Guardian.co.uk reported that (as of Feb 17th), “180,000 demands to remove images of the Prophet” from the Wiki page on Muhammad have been made. I assume that these were followers of Islam who made that demand. Islam forbids the depiction of Muhammad because it could lead to idolatry — that is worshiping of Muhammad — and Islam calls for the death of all idolaters.

Yes, the followers of Islam if they so choose should not depict Mohammed or any other living creature. But demanding that non-Muslims follow the dictates of Islam is patently idiotic, and ridicule and derision should be heaped on attempts at controlling others.

Here’s a clue to those clueless retards that want to control others. You are not required by law — human or physical — to go check out any material that is not consistent with your ridiculous belief system. If you don’t like to read something or watch something because it offends you, then don’t do it. Just read or watch or listen to what you don’t find offensive. Don’t like a novel? Don’t read it. Write your own which suits your taste and follows your religion’s dictates.

Let me remind you. I find your belief system offensive and inhuman. (Don’t thank me. I am merely returning the compliment. Check out what your “holy” books say about my belief system.) But I would not presume to tell you not to practice it in the privacy of your own home. I don’t call for the ban of your “holy” writings that the majority of humanity finds offensive. Yes, however millions of Pastafarians exist, there are more non-Pastafarians. And that goes for the followers of every other religion — including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Let me also remind you that the world is a pretty big place. It is much much bigger than could be conceived by the writers of the “holy” books who lived and died their whole miserable lives in a desert in the Middle East a couple of thousand years ago. They thought that what they could see from the top of their camels is all that the universe was. Nope, the world is much bigger. Other people have other ways of living and thinking. Believing that the entire world was just a huge freakin’ desert where everyone must do everything exactly the same way is retarded and unimaginative.

It is stupid and dangerous insanity to want to dictate to others how they should live under your religion’s prohibitions. Let me give you an example. To most Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists, killing cows and eating them is offensive and against their religion. Would you support a worldwide ban on the slaughter of cattle? If not, why not? What makes your ban any more reasonable than the ban on something that most Indians find offensive?

Grow up. It is way past the 7th century and we are no longer in the Arab peninsula, Toto.

The Wikipedia team told the wackos who want to control what is published on the web to shove it but did it very politely.

Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.

So long as they are relevant to the article and do not violate any of Wikipedia’s existing policies, nor the law of the US state of Florida where Wikipedia’s servers are hosted, no content or images will be removed because people find them objectionable or offensive.

See, there is a place outside of the desert and it is called Florida and there is a time called the 21st century that is not the 7th century. Sweetie, if you are offended by something that you have no reason to be able to control, then it is your problem, isn’t it? Can’t you get it into your pointy little head that YOU are the one who is taking offense — others have better things to do than go around offending you.

Live and let live, my preciouses.

This ends my little rant. But wait, there is more. Here’s Christopher Hitchens on YouTube. It is part of a debate on free speech in Canada in November 2006.

Hitchens (the author of “God is not great: How religion poisons everything”) is great. An Englishman who became an American citizen a few months ago. What is with these Englishmen? You have Hitchens, and Dawkins, and Pat Condell. Condell’s rants on religion are amazingly lucid and hard-hitting. Here are two for your watching pleasure. As Condell says, “Peace.”

NOTE NOTE

Follow up to this post is here.

CBS News reports that “an American businesswoman was carted off to jail by religious police in Saudi Arabia for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks in Riyadh.” Hauled before a judge after her arrest and interrogation, she was told that “You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell.” Seems fair to me: hang out with unrelated males for a coffee and burn in hell for all eternity. Saudi Arabia does look like an Islamic paradise to me — at least for the women. Don’t know about the men, though.

Here’s one from CNN about the treatment of women in Iraq.

The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion — some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.

The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other “rules” that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.

Basra’s police chief says

I think so far, we have been unable to tackle this problem properly. There are many motives for these crimes and parties involved in killing women, by strangling, beheading, chopping off their hands, legs, heads.

When I came to Basra a year ago, two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, whether the Archbishop has lost his marbles. Nick Anthis of Scienceblog tells him to “Take Your Fancy Schmancy Legal Tradition and Shove It.” Why? Because what the UK has is incomparably precious compared to a medieval barbaric code.

The idea that the UK–a society that like Europe at large has almost fully rejected the shackles of religious tyranny–would take such a huge leap backwards is almost unthinkable. Not only that, but one of the fundamental pillars of the British legal tradition is equal treatment under the law. While multiculturalism is a fact of life in the modern world, there’s a fine line between multiculturalism (good) and exceptionalism (bad). Recognizing sharia law would cross that line… and then some.

But why, WHY would you want to do this in the UK of all places? British common law is by far Great Britain’s most valuable gift to the rest of the world. Much more than just outrageous white wigs, it’s a system that has evolved to promote fairness, equality, and justice while effectively balancing the often competing forces of change and stability. It forms the basis of law in the United States and in countries across the world, and it is the bedrock of stable democracies worldwide.

Although colonialism was a morally bankrupt endeavor–one that colors some of the darkest chapters in the history of our globe–former British colonies by and large escaped much better off than others, to a great extent due the stable legal systems left behind. Of course, the net gains and losses of British colonialism can be debated endlessly, and the picture that emerges is far less rosy. Regardless, British common law is at least one tick mark on the side of the positives.

Some civilizations actually commit suicide when barbarians knock on their gates. Londonistan could be the capital of Eurabia. Pity really as the Enlightenment was pretty neat while it lasted.

I am opposed to violent ideologies. I make no distinction between religious or secular ideologies. If it is violent, I am opposed to it. It’s ideology I oppose, and not people. I have nothing against Germans, for instance, but I am against Nazism. But Nazism is dead and Germans today themselves oppose Nazism. That ideology has been defeated by rationality and humanity — backed by superior fire power. Communism is not as violent on the surface but it inflicts incalculable harm on human society. I am opposed to it. Communism is dead around the world except in India where it persists in its cancerous influence. Islam is a religious ideology, and from all evidence historical and contemporary, causing harm to humanity. The people who follow it to the letter cannot coexist with non-believers. The fundamentals of that ideology do not allow peaceful co-existence — only subjugation or war. As subjugation is not possible at present, it is war by Islam against the rest.

Yes, the majority of Muslims are not violently opposed to non-Muslims all the time and in all places. But that does not in any way indicate that Islam itself is willing to compromise with non-believers. Surely there are moderate Muslims — just as there were Germans who did not fully subscribe to the Nazi supremacist dogma. But their mere existence did not moderate the horrors that Nazism inflicted on “undesirables”. The question was where were they? Why didn’t they prevail? Or at least, why didn’t they get heard? The question today is where are the moderate Muslims? Why don’t we hear from them as vociferously as the true believers of Islam? Ayaan Hirsi Ali opines about that in NY Times op-ed recently. I reproduce it fully here.

Islam’s Silent Moderates

By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Published: December 7, 2007

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)

IN the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes, we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror.

A 20-year-old woman from Qatif, Saudi Arabia, reported that she had been abducted by several men and repeatedly raped. But judges found the victim herself to be guilty. Her crime is called “mingling”: when she was abducted, she was in a car with a man not related to her by blood or marriage, and in Saudi Arabia, that is illegal. Last month, she was sentenced to six months in prison and 200 lashes with a bamboo cane.

Two hundred lashes are enough to kill a strong man. Women usually receive no more than 30 lashes at a time, which means that for seven weeks the “girl from Qatif,” as she’s usually described in news articles, will dread her next session with Islamic justice. When she is released, her life will certainly never return to normal: already there have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her because her “crime” has tarnished her family’s honor.

We also saw Islamic justice in action in Sudan, when a 54-year-old British teacher named Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail before the government pardoned her this week; she could have faced 40 lashes. When she began a reading project with her class involving a teddy bear, Ms. Gibbons suggested the children choose a name for it. They chose Muhammad; she let them do it. This was deemed to be blasphemy.

Then there’s Taslima Nasreen, the 45-year-old Bangladeshi writer who bravely defends women’s rights in the Muslim world. Forced to flee Bangladesh, she has been living in India. But Muslim groups there want her expelled, and one has offered 500,000 rupees for her head. In August she was assaulted by Muslim militants in Hyderabad, and in recent weeks she has had to leave Calcutta and then Rajasthan. Taslima Nasreen’s visa expires next year, and she fears she will not be allowed to live in India again.

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Infidel.”

{Continued from part 1.}

Taslima Nasreen got hounded out of Kolkata by rioting Muslims. The state of West Bengal displayed its spinelessness and instead of providing protection to a visitor, gave in to intimidation and violence. She was packed off to Jaipur. The fear of murderous mobs compelled the Rajasthani government to kick her out. She is now hiding somewhere in New Delhi, the capital of India. One does not expect state policy to be dictated by rioting mobs but it appears that Indian policy is.

To be fair, no government of the civilized world is quite equipped to deal with the menace of Islamic extremism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s case illustrates the weak-willed incompetence of even governments of the so-called first world countries.

Like Taslima Nasreen, Ayaan too became the object of Islamic anger because she began writing against the repression of women sanctioned by Islam. She’s become a fugitive. Here’s what Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (no stranger to being the object of murderous threat) wrote in an Oct 9th International Herald Tribune article:

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.

The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Read the whole article.

Harris and Rushdie don’t mince their words in their condemnation of the Dutch government’s broken promises of protecting Ayaan.

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

. . .

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for Parliament, and to become the world’s most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Gerrit Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands, while refusing to grant her even a week’s protection outside the country during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

At least in the case of India it is clear that speaking too frankly about Islam is forbidden. And the disturbing thing is that the prohibition does not arise out of respect for someone’s sensibilities but rather out of fear of being killed.

I think that the first thing that has to be admitted is that we are afraid of Islam. I know that I am and I openly admit to being a card-carrying Islamophobe. Fear is natural and is a good first response for self-preservation. If you are not afraid of that which threatens your life, you are unlikely to leave too many descendants in the Darwinian game of life.

What I am afraid of is that the supporters of Islam are not inclined to engage those who criticize Islam in debate or rational inquiry. The first impulse is to respond violently and often the call for the murder of those who question Islam.

Sometimes the race card gets pulled out, especially in the US. If you criticize Islam, you are a racist. Sam Harris puts paid to that charge:

Especially unscrupulous critics of my work have claimed that my critique of Islam is “racist.” Such criticism is almost too stupid to merit a response. But, as prominent writers can sometimes be this stupid, here goes:

My analysis of religion in general, and of Islam in particular, focuses on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. My antipathy toward Islam–which is, in truth, difficult to exaggerate–applies to ideas, not to people, and certainly not to the color of a person’s skin. My criticism of the logical and behavioral consequences of certain ideas (e.g. martyrdom, jihad, honor, etc.) impugns white converts to Islam–like Adam Gadahn–every bit as much as Arabs like Ayman al-Zawahiri. I am also in the habit of making invidious comparisons between Islam and other religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Need I point out that most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains are not white like me? One would hope there would be no such need—but the work of writers like Chris Hedges suggests that the need is pressing.

As I regularly point out when attacking Islam, no one is suffering under the doctrine of Islam more than Muslims are—particularly Muslim women. Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as “racist” or as a symptom of “Islamophobia” display a rather nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, forced marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” This is a crime to which otherwise well-intentioned apologists for Islam are now accomplices.

I think it would be good if people agreed to examine ideas without feeling offended if their ideas are seen to be silly and idiotic.

Enough for now but there is more to come.

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious zeal, employed heavy artillery in an attempt to destroy the statues. Nadir Shah, too, had cannon fire directed at the statues. But over the centuries the statues had largely been left untouched.”

I marvel not just at the destruction that Aurangzeb unleashed but also at the ultimate expression of dhimmitude — naming a major street “Aurangzeb Marg” in the capital of India, New Delhi. I doubt that Jews would be naming a major thoroughfare after Hitler anytime soon. I recommend that some street in Delhi be now named “Taliban Marg.”

What brought all this to mind is the recent destruction of a Buddha statue in Swat in Pakistan. So what else is new? Islam mandated destruction of cultural and religious artifacts is really old hat. Just keep moving, folks. There’s nothing new to see here.

Here’s a piece I had written back then in 2001. This one is a re-run, just like the destruction of Buddha statues.

Do the Taliban have Buddha Nature?

I bumped into my old friend CJ at Cody’s bookstore at the corner of Haste and Telegraph in Berkeley yesterday. I was browsing through the pile of discount books when I saw him similarly engaged. I was thrilled to see him.

“Hey, CJ, what’s up?” I said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Want to grab a coffee? I am about done here,” he said. We walked to the donut shop next door and sat down with our coffee.

“I suppose you must have heard about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan. That really sucks,” I said.

“Naah. In fact it is great news. Excellent bit of good luck. Couldn’t be better,” he replied. The pressures of his thesis must have finally gotten to him, I thought. I reached across and touched his forehead.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked.

“I was just checking to see if you were running a high fever. You are incoherent,” I explained.

“Don’t you see that the Taliban are heaven sent for mankind?”

“Are you on drugs or is it that you have stopped taking the drugs that you should be on? I really worry for you,” I said.

“Let me explain,” he said. “The Taliban are the poster boys for Islam. They are keeping to the letter as well as the spirit of Islam.”

“Letter of Islam? Haven’t you heard what Prime Minister Vajpayee said? He said that what the Taliban were doing was un-Islamic,” I protested.

He smiled. “Ah, good old Mullah Hajpayee, bless his soul. I would not be surprised if they revoke his mullah status and put a fatwa on his head for misrepresenting Islam. He ought to read the Koran,” he said.

“Very funny, CJ. But this is no laughing matter, you idiot,” I said.

“I am serious. See, very few people know history. And even if they know it, they prefer to ignore the lessons if they are inconvenient. The Taliban are the heirs of a long line of temple-breakers. It was from Afghanistan that Mahmud of Ghazni arrived and destroyed the Somnath Temple. Today it is an unremarkable event because over the centuries too many thousands of temples have been razed to the ground by Islamic invaders. The Taliban are succeeding in doing what the historians have failed to do. They are forcing the world to pay attention and are succeeding in what the scholars and historians have failed. They are giving us a living lesson in history. If this doesn’t wake up the pseudo-seculars in India, they are totally brain-dead.”

I sat sipping my coffee. “Still it is a tragedy,” I said. “Instead of feeding their starving children, these heroes are inviting international condemnation. Why don’t they just let the statues be? The statues are not the cause of their misery.”

CJ replied. “Actually, the Taliban are following their tradition once again. Mahmud of Ghazni had the choice of sparing the Shivling at the Somnath temple in exchange for immense wealth. He chose to forego that just so that he could destroy the idols as his holy book commanded. After all, the rewards in heaven for slaying idolators far exceed the rewards that you can get on earth. No, the Taliban know which side of the bread is buttered, so to speak. Between feeding their children and breaking idols, there is no contest in their minds.”

“But CJ, what about those priceless treasures that will be lost to humanity forever?”

“That’s the other wonderful thing about these Taliban fellows. They are teaching the world the truth about what the Buddha said many centuries ago. The Buddha had said that the cause of suffering is the attachment to things that are impermanent. Stone buddhas are also impermanent. So you should be examining your attachment to them to seek the cause of your sorrow,” he said.

“Spare me the philosophizing, CJ. I feel sick just thinking about the dynamiting of these magnificent towering Buddhas at Bamiyan.”

CJ continued. “But there is a practical aspect to the whole thing too. The Buddha statues are huge. It would take a whole lot of ammo to destroy them. Therefore, the more ammunition they throw at stones, the less they will have to throw at sentient beings. Less suffering all around. Karma, neh?”

I saw that he had a point. I had run out of arguments. But he evidently had not finished. Then he added something that I thought was very insightful.

“You know about the bodhisattva ideal: the vow to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. Those stone buddhas are fulfilling those vows by drawing fire away from other sentient beings. Ironically, the Taliban’s promoting those very ideals that are symbolized in the Buddhas that they are hell bent on destroying.”

“Do the Taliban then have Buddha-nature?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Mu,” he said with a serene smile on his stupid face.

Notes::

1. The story goes that a monk was trying to understand the Zen idea that “all things have buddha-nature.” He asked Joshu, a Japanese Zen master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu replied, “Mu.” That response is generally understood to mean “yes and no” — a paradoxical state of affairs that is beyond yes and no, something like an indeterminate state. I am reminded of Schrodinger’s cat’s state of being, beyond dead and alive.

2. Long time readers of this blog have met CJ before. Here are some other posts featuring CJ:

a. The Ownership Society.

b. The Future of Energy.

c. How to Study Economics.

d. Choosing between WCs and PCs.

In a secular state such as India, there is little role for the state in matters of faith and religion. But the rise of a radical, intolerant version of Islam around the world is also not in its interests. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran have no self-imposed restrictions on promoting their own Islamic values. It is unlikely that India can counter these exertions of soft power by promoting the virtues of secularism to the Islamic world. But it could promote its own syncretic Islamic tradition to offer an alternative narrative to the world’s Muslims.

Nitin is an astute observer and I have the utmost respect for his incisive commentary and analysis of matters of importance. Try as I might, however, I cannot see what he means in that op-ed.

I like his use of the word “syncretic” which the big dic defines as the “reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.” I think that word is very well chosen.

My position is that we need to understand that there is a distinction between Islam and Muslims. There is in a very strict sense something called Islam which is defined by the Koran and the Hadiths. The literal meaning of Islam is “submission to the will of Allah” or just “submission” and at its core, Islam proclaims that it is the perfect religion and therefore unalterable and is the final word of god. Any change or dilution of the core beliefs is by definition not Islam. Islam’s claim to be the only true and perfect faith automatically relegates all other faiths to be false and evil. Other faiths, which are by definition imperfect from an Islamic point of view, can change or mutate but Islam cannot — and indeed does not — need to change.

I have read the Koran in translation and I must admit that it does not appeal to me. I am fiercely atheistic and value free expression and the equality of all humans irrespective of sex, sexual orientation, caste, creed, national origin, etc. Islam apparently is antithetical to all that I value and hold sacred. But then I am an “infidel”, a non-believer, and what is worse, I am an idol-worshipping Hindu. But others who are not similarly burdened do criticize Islam also. Here’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in a devout Muslim family, in a recent column in the Washington Post titled “My View of Islam“:

On the issues of holy war (jihad), apostasy and the treatment of women, the Koran and Sunna are clear. It is the obligation of every Muslim to spread Islam to unbelievers first through dawa, or proselytizing, then through jihad, if the unbelievers refuse to convert. It is the obligation of the unbelievers to accept Islam. Exempted from this edict of conversion are the people of the book: Christians and Jews. Both peoples have a choice. They may adopt Islam and enjoy the same rights as other Muslims, or they may stick to their book and lead the life of a dhimmi (lower citizen). Legally, the rights of the dhimmi are not equal to those of a Muslim. For instance, a Muslim man may take a Jewish or Christian wife, but Jews and Christians are not allowed to marry Muslim women. If a Christian or a Jew kills a Muslim man, they should be killed immediately. In contrast, the blood of a Muslim should never be shed in recompense for the blood of Christians or Jews.

It is also the obligation of every Muslim to command virtue and forbid vice. Apostasy, the worst possible vice a Muslim can commit, should be punished by death. The punishment need not be carried out by a state, but can easily be enforced by civilians. When it is a question of Islamic law, justice is in the hands of every Muslim.

[I am appending the entire column at the end of this post.]

But that criticism comes at enormous personal and public costs. Islam tolerates no dissent. And if a Muslim is true to the faith, he or she is mandated to enforce the punishment for apostasy. One example most of us are familiar with is that of Tasleema Nasreen. Reuters reported yesterday that Muslim lawmakers attack Taslima Nasreen in Hyderabad, India.

Muslim protesters assaulted the exiled Bangladeshi author and feminist Taslima Nasreen at a book launch in Hyderabad on Thursday, incensed by her repeated criticism of Islam and religion in general.

Some radical Muslims hate Nasreen for saying Islam and other religions oppress women.

On Thursday, lawmakers and members of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen party attacked her at the press club in Hyderabad at the launch of a Telugu translation of one of her novels.

An uneasy-looking Nasreen backed into a corner as several middle-aged men threw a leather case, bunches of flowers and other objects at her head and threatened her with a chair, according to a Reuters witness and television pictures.

Some of the mob shouted for her death.

Other men tried to shield her and catch the projectiles. She ended up with a bruised forehead, and described the attack as barbaric before being taken to safety by police.

Nasreen fled Bangladesh for the first time in 1994 when a court said she had “deliberately and maliciously” hurt Muslims’ religious feelings with her Bengali-language novel “Lajja”, or “Shame”, which is about riots between Muslims and Hindus.

At the time, thousands of radical Muslims protested against her, demanding that she be killed for blasphemy, and some have continued to threaten her life ever since.

Police said they have arrested three state lawmakers from the political party along with 15 party workers.

Islam, according to itself, is perfect and it makes no sense to claim that there are different kinds of Islam. Indeed, a non-Muslim’s claim that there are different versions of Islam smacks of arrogance and condescension that is only matched by Islam’s arrogance and condescension that it is perfect and immutable. Muslims, on the other hand, are humans and live all over the world and are therefore understandably a heterogeneous lot. Though they profess the same faith, how they live differs according to local conditions. Indian Muslims are distinctly different from say Egyptian Muslims but that does not mean that the Islam they both profess is different. Therefore it is not very clear that there is such a thing as “Indian Islam” while there is such a thing as an Indian Muslim.

So back to the matter of exporting Islam as Nitin advocates. Suppose we were to admit that Indian Muslims were different and in some sense “better” than the Muslims in other parts of the world — that Indian Muslims are less radical than others — then we have to ask ourselves what is the reason for the difference. Could it be that Indian Muslims are embedded in a largely non-Muslim society and that perhaps is the reason for the difference? If so, then one can argue that it is not that Indian Muslims practice a different Islam but it is their environment in which they exist that makes them different. So then the radical Muslims in non-Indian locations can only be made non-radical by embedding them in largely non-Muslim populations.

Imagine surrounding Muslims in Pakistan with such numbers of non-Muslims that they become non-radical. Ridiculous doesn’t even come close to describing it. I am sure that Nitin does not mean to imply that exporting Hindus to Saudi Arabia is part of the plan but that is the logical implication of his proposal.

My basic proposition is that to the extent that Muslims in India are who they are is not because they follow a different Koran but because they live among people who are non-Muslims. Therefore in countries that are predominantly Muslim, what you find is a more accurate practice of Islam. I think that it is the height of arrogance to believe that it is alright to force your brand of Islam on people. It is abhorrent to me for the same reason that I find it abhorrent that monotheists in their arrogance try to convert other people.

The question of Islam and its present disposition around the world has serious implications for India both economically and socially. The political entity we call India today is of course a modern invention going back less than two centuries. But the civilization that is at the core of this modern India — the Indic civilization — is very ancient. That ancient civilization has been losing ground — both metaphorically and physically — to Islam for a millennium. It can be argued that the places that the Indic civilization lost have seen a deterioration as a result. For example, present day Afghanistan has lost much of the glory that it had as a Buddhist civilization.

I am mindful of the fact that stating one’s opinion on Islam is a crime against humanity or something tantamount to that in some people’s opinion. It is the only sacred cow left, it would appear. One can honestly state that one is opposed to Nazism, or communism, or libertarianism or Christianity or Hinduism or Voodooism. But you are not allowed to criticize Islam. You are an “Islamophobe” and have offended 1.5 billion Muslims. I just don’t quite understand why Islam has to be above criticism. I can understand that Muslims are bound by their faith to follow the dictates of Islam and not criticize Islam. But since when have non-Muslims come to be governed by Islamic laws in their non-Islamic societies?

To be very clear about this, I am an “Islamophobe” in the sense of the word that I am terrified of Islam. Islam seeks my annihilation in no uncertain terms as I am a non-believer and an idol worshiper. (I hope that it is clear that I am not a “Muslimophobe” — so back off with the outraged comments about “how dare you insult 1.5 billion Muslims”.) My hatred of an ideology is a reasoned response to what the ideology is. Other people can and do have different assessments of different ideologies and it is certainly not a crime (at least not yet in India) to hold differing opinions. So, yes, my opinion of Islam is no higher than Islam’s opinion of me.

To oppose those who actively seek your destruction is an eminently reasonable position to me. Islam in India came as the ideology of conquerors and even now India is an unfinished business for the forces of Islam. I value my cultural heritage and I don’t care how the pseudo-secular brigade wants to wipe it out but I will defend it with all that I have. I am willing to live and let live but I will oppose as a moral duty — my dharma — any attempt at the Islamization of my land, just as surely I would expect the Saudi Arabians to defend their culture from being over-run by Hindus or Christians. What I oppose is typified by the statement of a Pakistani in a recent article in TIME magazine article, “Pakistan: Divided by Faith“:

Still, many South Asian Muslims insist Islam is the one and only force that can bring the subcontinent together and return it to preeminence as a single whole. “We [Muslims] were the legal rulers of India, and in 1857 the British took that away from us,” says Tarik Jan, a gentle-mannered scholar at Islamabad’s Institute of Policy Studies. “In 1947 they should have given that back to the Muslims.” Jan is no militant, but he pines for the golden era of the Mughal period in the 1700s, and has a fervent desire to see India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunited under Islamic rule.

The Koran perhaps promises the entire universe to Muslims as wages for jihad on non-believers but it should not surprise anyone if I oppose my destruction with equal force. It is time to take a stand against oppression and hatred. Else one should be prepared to be annihilated.

By the way, if you are offended by my position, do send me a link to your writings where you protested the call for murder of writers and cartoonists by an Indian Muslim minister of the government, send me where you opposed the banning of books by the government of India, where you opposed the division of Indian society through religion-based discrimination, etc. I will entertain your objections. Otherwise stuff it you know where.

~ / ~ /~ / ~ / ~

My View of Islam
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

On holy war, apostasy and the rights of women in Islam.

The undisputed definition of Islam by all her adherents is “submission to the will of Allah.” This divine will is outlined in the Koran and in the teachings and deeds of Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith or Sunna.

While the Koran is considered to be the true, undiluted word of God revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, the Sunna carry less weight and have always been a cause for disagreement amongst Muslim scholars. Theologians of Islam have, however, reached consensus on the authority of a set of six volumes from the Sunna called the Sahih Sita, or authentic six.

On the issues of holy war (jihad), apostasy and the treatment of women, the Koran and Sunna are clear. It is the obligation of every Muslim to spread Islam to unbelievers first through dawa, or proselytizing, then through jihad, if the unbelievers refuse to convert. It is the obligation of the unbelievers to accept Islam. Exempted from this edict of conversion are the people of the book: Christians and Jews. Both peoples have a choice. They may adopt Islam and enjoy the same rights as other Muslims, or they may stick to their book and lead the life of a dhimmi (lower citizen). Legally, the rights of the dhimmi are not equal to those of a Muslim. For instance, a Muslim man may take a Jewish or Christian wife, but Jews and Christians are not allowed to marry Muslim women. If a Christian or a Jew kills a Muslim man, they should be killed immediately. In contrast, the blood of a Muslim should never be shed in recompense for the blood of Christians or Jews.

It is also the obligation of every Muslim to command virtue and forbid vice. Apostasy, the worst possible vice a Muslim can commit, should be punished by death. The punishment need not be carried out by a state, but can easily be enforced by civilians. When it is a question of Islamic law, justice is in the hands of every Muslim.

As for the treatment of women, in the Koran and more elaborately in the Sunna, Islam assigns to girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, makes them dependent on their male relatives for money and gives dominion over their bodies to these same male kin.

In Islam there is a strict hierarchy of subservience. First and foremost, all humans are required to be the slaves of Allah. In Muslim societies, all children must obey their parents. Beyond this, women and girls must obey and serve without question their male guardians and especially their husbands. This decree of marital obedience is not in any way reciprocal.

A woman in Islam is not competent and must always have a guardian. The responsibility of guardianship may pass from father to brother to uncle before a girl is married off, at which point she must answer to her husband. Marriage is typically arranged, with no choice given to the girl, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Thus, under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not know, and most likely does not love.

As for education of girls under Islam, there is a clear program of indoctrination of inequality. Under Islam, education is the passing on of the rules of submission to the will of Allah. Intrinsic in this “education” is the dictation of gender roles. Girls are instructed in subservience first to God, then to the family and finally to the husband. There is strict emphasis on modesty, defined by virginity. A Muslim girl is taught to guard fiercely her virginity as an expression of loyalty to her creator and to her family and husband.

This form of education hampers her chances of ever becoming self-reliant or financially independent. A woman’s lack of social equality and freedom is a direct consequence of the teachings of Islam. Under Islam, a wife must always ask her husband for permission and she must obey indefinitely. This stricture is lifted in the unique event that he asks her to forsake God, wherein she is allowed the right of disobedience. While it is true that in Islam, technically speaking, women have the right to trade and own property, the condition of total obedience to guardians makes this “freedom” hypothetical, at best.

The goal of education given to girls under Islam is the achievement of control over female sexuality. The result of this indoctrination is that Muslim girls believe legitimate and often vocally defend their position of subordination. The lengths a Muslim society will go to in the pursuit of sexual control often cross into the territory of the absurd and, by western standards, criminal. In Islam the minimum age of marriage for a girl is after her first menstruation. Muhammad was engaged to his wife Aisha when she was six years old, and he married her (had intercourse with her) when she turned nine. Millions of Muslim men across the world follow Muhammad in this deed, one of the most prominent examples being the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Under sharia law (Islamic law), such as governs in Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Nigeria, the civil rights of women are dramatically reduced. Threat of violent punishment in the form of whipping and stoning makes the prospect of financial independence and sexual freedom for women all but impossible. Miraculously, even in such harsh circumstances you will find women who are relatively well educated, have some say in choosing a husband and manage to earn a living. Let us be clear that these exceptions are due to the compassion and progressiveness of families who have been influenced by the West, and not to rules derived from Islam.

In the quest for reconciliation between Muslim and western societies, it is important to recognize that Muslims are as diverse as Islam is monolithic. Islam attempts to unify more than a billion people of different geographical origins, languages, ethnicities, and cultural and educational backgrounds into one religious tribe. And while I acknowledge that generally stereotyping believers is difficult since belief is subjective, for the sake of discussion I would like to distinguish between five types of Muslims.

The first group includes those Muslims who leave the faith because they cannot reconcile it with their conscience or with modernity. This group is important for the evolution of the Islamic world because they ask the urgent and critical questions believers usually avoid. Ex-Muslims living in the west are just beginning to find their voice and to take advantage of the spiritual and social freedoms available to them.

The second group is comprised of genuine Muslim reformers, such as Irshad Manji, who acknowledge the theological out-datedness of the Koranic commands and the immorality of the prophet. They tend to emphasize the early chapters in the Koran urging goodness, generosity and spirituality. They argue that the latter chapters wherein Islam is politicized and the concepts of sharia, jihad and martyrdom are introduced should be read in the context in which they were written, some 1,400 years ago.

The third group is made up of those Muslims who support the gradual perpetuation and domination of Islam throughout the world. They use the freedoms offered in democracy to undermine social modernity and, though initially opposed to the use of violence, foresee that once the number of believers reaches a critical mass the last remnants of unbelievers may then be dealt with in violence, and sharia law may be universally implemented. Ayatollah Khomeini used this method successfully in Iran. Erdogan of Turkey is following in his footsteps. Tariq Ramadan, deeply rooted in his Muslim Brotherhood heritage, is devoted to such a program among European Muslims.

The fourth group is the most obvious and immediately threatening. In this group we find a growing number of hard-line Muslims who have defined martyrdom as their only goal. This is an army of young men whipped into a frenzy of suicidal violence by power hungry clergy. These clergy have public platforms and work with impunity from institutions untouched and often funded by national authorities.

The fifth group is largely ineffective and only threatening in their refusal to acknowledge the truth. Here we find the elite clergy who make a show of trying to reconcile Islam with modernity. They are motivated by self-preservation and have no interest in true reform. They take selective passages from the holy books to make a case for a peaceful Islam, ignoring the many passages inciting violence, such as those verses which command the death of apostates.

It is through the first two of these five groups that progress and reform will come. As for the rest, the western world would be wise to recognize the realities of Islam, a religion laid down in writing over a millennium ago with violence and oppression at its heart.

Born in Somalia and raised a devout Muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an active critic of Islam, an advocate for women’s rights and a leader in the campaign to reform Islam. Her willingness to speak out and her abandonment of the Muslim faith have made her a target for violence and threat of death by Islamic extremists. She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington D.C., and is the author of the bestselling memoir “Infidel.”

It is easy to slip into self-pity when battling what appears to be a nasty ‘flu. One’s view of the world is jaundiced and it all appears rather pointless. Events appear a grimmer shade of black when viewed from the context of physical illness. Yet, to put it in perspective, one should not complain about a temporary illness when others go through real ordeals. It is exactly one year ago that nearly 200 people lost their lives and several hundreds horribly injured just going about their daily business in Mumbai.

Normal human reaction to the terrorism unleashed on the Mumbai local trains is one of horror and pity. There are other emotions. There’s outrage at the hateful ideology that fueled the carnage. And there’s disgust at the spinelessness of the country’s leaders and their total lack of concern for the welfare of the citizens. In a sense the unconcern of the so-called leaders should not come as a surprise. They don’t suffer the consequences of their ineptitude.

I don’t know which is more: my pity for the Prime Minister or contempt for him for his warped sense of justice and total lack of empathy for the victims of terrorism. Read Tavlin Singh’s column where she asks why didn’t the PM lose sleep after numerous acts of terrorism and yet is losing sleep over the anguish of the mothers of Muslim doctors who tried to kill kuffars in the UK recently.

As a Sikh, he said sadly, he understood well the horrors of being labelled. And, as prime minister of India, he could not sleep after seeing the face of the mother of the alleged bombers from Bangalore. “We should not fix labels like Muslims or non-Muslims. It won’t help us in understanding the situation or dealing with it.”

This week marks the first anniversary of Mumbai’s train bombings and my first question to our prime minister is, why has he never lost sleep over that ghastly event? My second question is, why can he become so eloquent over the suffering of the mothers of alleged terrorists and so sanguine over the suffering of nearly 200 Mumbai mothers who lost their children for no reason? When he made his visit to Mumbai after the July 11 bombings last year, many noticed that he exhibited no emotion.

The PM should check out the distinction between “momins” and “kuffars” before wringing his hands anxiously about the Muslim non-Muslim labels.

Upon reflection, I think my self-pity is nothing compared to the pity that I feel for the Prime Minister. Pity triumphs because some things are beneath contempt.

Promoting Indian Islam

It is more than a little ironic given the recent events that one of my favorite blogs, the Acorn, recently suggested that “it is in India’s interests to promote the Indian interpretation of Islamic values not just at home, but more importantly, abroad.” This is truly bizarre. Since when has India been an Islamic theocracy that it should go about promoting Islam in India and abroad? I realize of course that covertly Islam is being promoted by the Indian government (as I have argued here before) but to use public funds to promote Islam in India and abroad is insane and creepy. Perhaps it is the “if you cannot beat them, join them” strategy.

The discussion following that Acorn post and its follow up post is interesting and I did add my two bits to it.

Exporting Religion

The fact is that India has been in the exporting of religion business well before Islam or even Christianity were born. India is the land of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. Buddhism was exported all the way from Greece to the Far East thousands of years ago. Bodhidharma went to China to bring the enlightenment of India and from China Buddhism traveled to Japan. And like Bodhidharma, many other gurus have traveled abroad to spread Indian thought in the recent past. India has given the world yoga and ayurveda and kama sutra.

India has no business promoting jihad, however softer the Indian version of jihad is. So the Indian version of the jihad just blows up local commuter trains, and not fly commercial jetliners into skyscrapers; the Indian version just drives Jeep Cherokees into terminal buildings and sets train compartments on fire. Promoting a softer version with the hope that it will overpower the virulent version is misguided Faustian bargain.

Dancing in the Streets

It was of course my cultural bias but I couldn’t help feeling light-hearted when I used to see the Hare Krishna people dancing in the streets of Berkeley. See the video and tell me if you see rage boy anywhere. They are dancing in Times Square in the video.

If the Indian state has to export religion (as the Acorn wants), then I think that it should export an ideology that promotes dancing in the streets, not the killing of innocents for gaining admission into a paradise full of virgins.

Grim Humor

Just to add a bit of humor to this rather grim post, check out a fictional account of our very own Khaleel Ahmed’s trials as he prepared for his tryst with the 72 virgins.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Here is a classic Christopher Hitchens piece for you reading pleasure. “It’s impossible to satisfy “Rage Boy” and his ilk. It’s stupid to try.” And don’t forget to see the pictures of Rage Boy here.

BOSTON — A federal judge yesterday ordered an Indian national whose behavior at a Smithfield trucking school spawned a nationwide antiterrorism investigation be deported.

Mohammed Yousuf Mullawala la “is not the person who he claims to be,” said U.S. Immigration Judge Matthew J. D’Angelo, as a shackled Mullawala listened a few feet away at the court room’s defense table.

While Mullawala’s “ultimate intentions and motives have not yet been revealed in full,” the judge said, “this court reaches a finding that mirrors the grave concern expressed by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, The Rhode Island State Police and the Rhode Island Fusion Center” — which spearheads local homeland security matters.

D’Angelo ordered that Mullawala, 28, remain in the custody of Homeland Security officials while officials there continue investigating his alleged suspicious behavior.

. . .

He has been under investigation since Nov. 29, after an instructor at the Nationwide Tractor-Trailer Driving School became suspicious of him and contacted authorities. According to court papers, Mullawala’s lack of interest in learning how to back up a tractor-trailer, his request to buy software on hazardous materials and his queries on whether fingerprinting would be required for a commercial driver’s license raised concerns with the instructor.

Six days after the investigation began, Mullawala walked into the state police headquarters in Scituate to file a harassment complaint against a detective who called him on his cell phone. After questioning, he was taken into custody on a student visa violation.

During an immigration hearing last month Mullawala admitted he lied to the state police, as well as on applications for permanent residency, admission to colleges, driver’s licenses and the trucking school. But he denied being a criminal or a threat to anyone.

Then Wayne knocked on my bedroom door and told me to see what was on the TV in the living room. The first image I saw was a close up of a burning building. Then the camera pulled back and there were the Twin Towers of the WTC. Later I saw the towers collapse one by one. I can still recall the shock and disbelief. I stood there in my pajamas glued to the TV till about 1 PM when I had to get ready for teaching at 2 PM.

What made it personal, I have often wondered. I had seen NYC from the observation deck of one of those towers nearly 20 years before. I recall the ride up in the high speed elevator and then the thrill of being in the tallest building in the world. Been in that building, been in those planes. But the most important thing was this: I had been ranting about the dangers of Islamic terrorism for years to Americans. Now it was a stunning confirmation of what I had been convinced about.

The following week I spoke at a panel discussion on campus on terrorism. Normally restrained, I was not at that event. A few days later, I wrote The Looking Glass War.

Five years and a few thousand more big and small acts of Islamic terrorism later, the world is still asleep at the wheel. Slowly we are getting accustomed to living with terror if we are lucky, and dying horribly if we are unlucky enough to be going about our mundane lives when the Islamic terrorists strike.

That day was so traumatic to the Americans that they simply refer to it as 9/11. Short, crisp, unique. Of course, in their parochial ignorance, they thought that Islamic terrorism was invented that day. Nope. The world has been the victim for centuries; it was the first time that it was caught live on TV.

The world likes aping the Americans. So every major event of Islamic terrorism is referred to with the American date naming convention of month/day. The Mumbai blasts of 11th July is now 7/11. Be that as it may, this whole naming convention of MM/DD is silly because soon enough the entire calendar will get populated with such dates, starting with 1/1 and ending with 12/31.

The breast beating that Americans indulge in on Sept 11 every year is somewhat nauseating. Sure about 3,000 died on that day. To someone whose country has seen much worse and for centuries, American reaction seems as being both hypocritical and silly. The US created those monsters which attacked it on that day. The chickens were coming home to roost.

The US is the world’s sole superpower. It can, if it really wanted, end Islamic terrorism. But its interests lie not in world peace but in selling weapons. To give military aid to the terrorist nation of Pakistan would seem to be an act of supreme stupidity. It is an entirely rational strategy if the goal its goal is to maintain its hegemony. How?

Here are the key concepts which tell the story: Middle East oil, despotic Islamic oil-rich kingdoms, weapons trade, winking at Chinese and Pakistani nuclear proliferation, gifting weapons to Pakistan, funding jihad around the world, borrowing trillions from the poor, arming third world countries, fueling conflicts, preaching “democracy” and practising colonialism.

We do live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes.

The world spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to protect itself. The security apparatus we go through at the airports is in place largely to dissuade jihadists. Soon I guess the local train stations in Mumbai will have to have some sort of security in place.

Islamic terrorism impedes the free flow of law abiding people, it hurts commerce, it hurts development, and most importantly of all, it destroys lives and families. Around 200 dead and a thousand injured in Mumbai last week was just one more the hundreds of incidents of jihad the world suffers each year.

Jihad is a regular feature of our world. Jihad Watch will be a regular feature on this blog. Why? Because we must understand the enemy if we wish to prevail. We need to understand what motivates them and why. I will highlight articles and viewpoints which I believe can help inform our understanding of jihad.

Kanchan Gupta declares This is Jihad in The Pioneer of July 17th.

The holy warriors who carried out the 7/11 bombings in Mumbai, and before that in Delhi on the eve of Diwali last year and in Varanasi on the eve of Holi this year, may be members of local sleeper cells of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and SIMI, but the battle they are fighting is part of the global war being waged by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda, at present headquartered in Gen Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan, to establish the primacy and dominance of Islam. With Islamism finding an increasing number of converts in India, and pretended victimhood becoming a convenient cover to unleash manufactured rage on issues ranging from President George Bush’s visit to the alleged lampooning of the Prophet by Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, from India’s vote against Iran in the IAEA’s board of governors meeting to Western aid agencies refusing to fund Hamas’s terror campaign – issues that fit into the larger matrix of pan-Islamism – Osama bin Laden and his generals will now find it easier to deploy foot soldiers in our country to push the frontiers of jihad and expand the theatre of this clash of civilisations.

Barbara Stock in Free Repulic asks “Can There be Peace with Islam?” She notes:

Islam, the self proclaimed “religion” of peace and love cannot stop killing its own people in the name of Islam and Allah. Islam is a religion that proclaims murder is wrong, and the killing of a fellow Muslim absolutely forbidden. Despite that, Muslims seem to have no problem killing a fellow Muslim if it is convenient or will lead to one sect having more power than another.

Recently in Iraq, Shia Muslims stopped buses and cars and anyone who was not a Shia Muslim, was executed. Over 40 Sunni Muslims were murdered by their fellow Muslims. Apparently, this was done in retaliation for the bombing of a Shia mosque by Sunni Muslims. This week, a funeral procession was stopped and all the mourners were executed. Muslims are killing Muslims and there isn’t an American soldier in sight to blame.

She concludes her column with:

Now there has been a brutal attack in India with hundreds dead and injured. Some will say that this has nothing to do with the war America is involved in. Only the foolish believe this. Whether it is the attack on 9/11, London, Madrid, Russia, Bali, and now India, the common denominator in all these attacks is Islam. Attacks have been thwarted in Australia, Canada, England, France, and the United States.

The “politically correct” (and grammatically incorrect) term for this is the “War on Terrorism.” The PC folks of the world need to wake up and smell the burning train car. This is a war against the ideology of Islam. It is Islam that is behind nearly every terrorist attack in the world today. There is not a day that passes that someone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, does not die at the hands of a follower of Islam. It is not possible to have peace with a “religion” that only believes in war.

Interestingly, her article appears on a website that is conservative and supports Bush. Yes, the very same Bush who is waging a “War Against Terror” — but his is a limited war. As long as the jihad leave the US alone, he is quite willing to support global Islamic terrorism through his friendly dictator Gen Musharraf whom he calls his friend. Bush supports terrorism through his support of Musharraf who supports jihad.

B Raman, Additional Secretary (retd.), Govt. of India, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai writes that BUSH KEEPS MUSH GOING & MUSH KEEPS JIHAD GOING – and here is a (partial) list of what Bush is sending Mush.

36 new F-16 Block 50/52 planes.

60 upgrade kits for F-16s

26 free old F-16s.

500 AIM-120C5 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM)- This is the latest US Air-to-Air missile which outclasses anything India has. It is reputed to have a range of 120 km and every Indian fighter will be threatened by this.

500 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) Guidance Kits: – Again India has nothing of this sort. This is in addition to the Joint Standoff Weapon that Pakistan recently received.

1,600 Enhanced-GBU-12/24 GBUs; – Guided bombs of the same type used by the USAF today.

700 BLU-109 2,000 pound bombs – These are the state of the art US “bunker buster” bombs that can make mincemeat of any IAF or Indian Army deep bunkers and storage facilities

The latest Link-16 Datalink to connect every Pakistani F-16 with their recently ordered Swedish Erieye AWACS aircrafts.

Why the US supports war and terrorists around the world is easy to understand — the military-industrial complex requires that the demand for weapons is kept high. By stimulating demand for weapons, and supplying to that demand, the makers of the weapons of mass destruction rake in the billions, and use the billions to buy the congressmen and legislators and fund candidates in elections who support the weapons of mass destruction industry.

[Related link: Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.]

I should acknowledge that I am borrowing the title of this series from very popular blog called JihadWatch.org.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 13 November 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia) is a Dutch human rights leader, feminist, and a member of the Dutch Parliament for the liberal party. She is a prominent and often controversial spokesperson, author, film maker and critic of Islamism. Her movie “Submission” on abuse of women in Islam, directly led to the murder of the director Theo Van Gogh in November 2004. A death letter left on the body was addressed to Ms Hirsi Ali.

In 2005 Ms Hirsi Ali was chosen among the world’s 100 most influential people of Time Magazine and Reader’s Digest voted her ‘European of the Year 2006’. Meanwhile, she also receives heavy criticism on her views and approaches for change. Ms Hirsi Ali is under severe and permanent security protection.

She, like Wafa Sultan, is fighting for the emancipation of women in Islamic countries and more generally for reforming Islam. She has a collection of essays called The Caged Virgin, an “Emancipation Proclamation” for women and Islam.

I guess that her life insurance premiums must be sky high. Not just a pretty face, she is articulate and courageous. Here is a short video of an interview of her on Swedish television (I don’t have details on the date of that recording).

There are more videos of Hirsi Ali on YouTube. But before you do that, you must see the Wafa Sultan video — she is unbelievable.

Update (May 16th): There are google videos on Ayaan here.

Today’s New York Times has a profile of Dr Wafa Sultan. The Washington Times editorial of March 4th began thus:

To judge by her appearances on al Jazeera, Los Angeles psychologist Wafa Sultan is the very definition of fearlessness. Face-to-face with radical Islamists before millions of potentially hostile viewers around the Arab world, Ms. Sultan — a secular Arab American fluent in Arabic — does not flinch when called a heretic and a blasphemer. For all we know, she is endangering her life.

She has received death threats, naturally.

I am of course unconditionally in favor of free speech and free beliefs. My most memorable line from her confrontation with her Egyptian interlocutor Mr. Al-Khouli (who had compared Christians to apes and pigs) after he had called her a heretic is, “Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don’t throw them at me.”

I could not have said it better. I don’t care what you believe in or what you hold sacred, just don’t go on a murderous spree if I refuse to share your beliefs or your views. All the good things that the world has to offer arose out of the enlightenment which is congruent with the freedom of humans to think thoughts that could be considered heretical and blasphemous. I have defended the freedom of speech, although I would have wished that it needed no defense. All development — including economic development — is predicated on the freedom of speech and expression. India needs to understand that. Otherwise India will continue to be part of that backward set that kills people for speaking their truth.

Dr Wafa Sultan’s days are numbered. So I bow deep in recognition of the courage that she displays in speaking because she is in effect signing her own death sentence.

Breaking news: Bombs recovered from local train station in Mumbai. I expect that Dr Manmohan Singh will ask people to stay calm and go about their business as usual. Ms Sonia Gandhi has saris already. Would anyone like to contribute to a fund for buying saris for her handmaidens who don’t have saris?

NEW DELHI, 19 February 2006 — A minister in India’s Uttar Pradesh state government has offered a reward of $11.5 million to anyone who would kill any of the cartoonists who drew the images of the Prophet Muhammad …

Muhammad Yaqoob Qureshi, minister of state for Haj and Minorities Welfare in the Uttar Pradesh government, told a rally in Meerut, 65 km east of New Delhi, after Friday prayers that he would give “the avenger” 510 million rupees ($11.5 million) and his weight in gold.

India should really have a Minister of State for Haj and for the Calling for the Murder of Infidels for Insults to the Religion of Peace. And the same source for the bounty as for the Haj subsidy: the Indian infidel tax payers. The BJP missed its chance while in power to get this wonderful vote mechanism in place. May I suggest the “secular” Congress government to get this underway.

“Drawing a cartoon of the Prophet is blasphemous and Muslims will not tolerate this insult,” he said in a speech that was broadcast by Indian television stations. “The money will be paid by the people of Meerut,” said Yaqoob … “Muslim women of Uttar Pradesh have decided to give away their jewelry to weigh in gold any one who beheads the cartoonist, while I would collect 510 million rupees and donate it to him.

“Our protest is against none other than the United States which is solely responsible for masterminding a war against the Muslim world,” he said. “The Indian government should sever all diplomatic ties with the United States and recall its ambassador,” Qureshi said by telephone from Meerut.

Aw, come on, Mr Yaqoob. Aren’t you getting to be a bit of a softy in your old age? Should India not just go ahead and nuke the United States and vaporise a few million satanic Americans? After all, the Danish infidels have hurt the sentiments of billions of Indian muslims. This cannot be avenged by merely severing diplomatic ties with the ugly Americans. No wait, why stop at Amercians? After you are done with that, how about nuking a few million Hindus. There are more where they come from. Your compatriots in Pakistan will be happy to help on this venture.

Here’s an idea: why don’t you get the UP Muslims to cough up a little more and send it to your friendly compatriot Mr Osama Bin Laden and he will deliver the nukes to the Americans courtesy of the people of Uttar Pradesh. And with the leftovers, since Bin Laden has already called for war against Hindus, he can nuke the Hindus in India.

Qureshi also said he had made these comments as an individual and not as a minister.

The government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state that has a large Muslim community, said the minister’s statements were “his personal wish” and did not violate government rules.

Thank you, thank you. Inciting murder of people is quite alright as long as one is not speaking in one’s official capacity? OK, that makes me feel better.

The state’s Principal Home Secretary Alok Sinha said: “Mere announcement of this kind does not amount to a crime.’”

Mr Sinha, calling for the murder of people, placing a huge bounty on them, is alright, eh? I announce a Rs 1 million reward for the lynching of Mr Sinha and his family for having insulted the Indian flag. This cannot be a crime because I am not speaking officially, only in my private capacity to advocate murder based on hurt feelings.

“Let me clarify that he did not make the announcement in his capacity as a minister.

“Secondly, the reference is being made to something that has happened outside the geographical boundaries of India. Lastly, he was simply expressing the common feeling of members of his community,” Sinha said.

Ah, so, according to right honorable Mr Sinha, the members of the community–Muslims–strongly advocate the killing of infidels who hurt the feelings of Muslims. Are you a moron Mr Sinha or are you merely playing one so that you can please your pay-masters? I think that Mr Sinha should be taken out and shot.

The following is unbelievable. Read and see how low dhimmitude can lay some people.

The home secretary also denied that such an announcement could cause sectarian tension.

“I am sure the minister has no intention of inciting communal passions and his statement is not intended to hurt the sentiments of any other community,” Sinha said. “But, of course, I am aware that the issue is a sensitive one. We are taking due precautions to ensure maintenance of law and order.”

Well, there you have it. The largest state of the largest “democracy,” and officers of the government calling for the murder of people and condoning the call for murder, eh? Read the rest of this report and weep for the beloved country.

In the state capital, Lucknow, most establishments owned by Muslims kept their shutters down as a mark of solidarity with the protesters in Meerut.

But the influential All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, an authoritative national body of Muslim scholars, slammed the announcement as “anti-Islamic and anti-humanity.”

The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party demanded immediate arrest and dismissal of Qureshi from the state government. BJP leader N. Venkaiah Naidu said: “He should be dismissed forthwith and arrested. He should also be tried under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code.”

Describing Qureshi’s comments as cheap, vote-buying tactics, Naidu said told reporters in Madras that he hoped the Uttar Pradesh government, governor and the federal government would take immediate action against the minister.

On the cartoons, Naidu said: “I can understand sentiments of the community being hurt by such caricatures. The BJP strongly disapproves and condemn such acts.”

In Indian-administered Kashmir, some 1,000 people yesterday protested the publication of the offending drawings and demanded punishment for the cartoonists.

Carrying banners and shouting slogans, the protesters marched through the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state, before handing over a memorandum to United Nations officials posted in the state.

“We love our Prophet” and “Down with enemies of Islam” read some of the banners carried by the protesters, who were led by the mayor of Srinagar, Ghulam Mustafa.

The protesters demanded that the governments of the countries where the drawings were published “tender unqualified apologies for such drawings and deal with the editors and publishers with an iron hand,” Mustafa said. “We are peace loving and secular people. Such acts outrage us,” he said, before the protesters peacefully dispersed.

I am waiting to read reports of people rioting in India any day now. A bunch of innocents will get killed. An already poor India will slide epsilon-degree closer to chaos.