India and Pakistan, another front in the war

The Mumbai train bombing was large, but it’s nothing new to India. Islamofascists have been attacking them for years.

The Mumbai train bombing was large, but it’s nothing new to India. Islamofascists have been attacking them for years. At the CT Blog, Walid Phares has a great article outlining the history, it’s well worth a read. I also recommend that you click “read more” and read the comment left by Viinod, it’s one of the most incisive analysis’ of the roots of Islamofascism in Pakistan that I have seen.

The troubling part about Pakistan is that they already have nuclear weapons, so we certainly would not want the government there to fall to the Islamofascists currently terrorizing India, shielding Bin Laden, and aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Al Qaeda and Bin Laden have issued fatwas and declarations against Hindu nations at least four times. From the article:

And finally, to bring it home, where is the American connection? Is there one? American diplomats, of course, must monitor tensions between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan, as they already are. But U.S. Homeland Security must be aware of these strikes on Mumbai, for Laskar Taibe is not alien to our shores. Just three years ago, a jihad group known as the “Virginia Paintball cell” was training to “extend support to Laskar e Taiba.” Indeed, 60 miles from downtown Washington, a number of American-born believers in jihad and followers of al-Qaeda’s ideology were training in urban combat. Among them was one Ismael Royer of CAIR, now sitting in jail as part of a jihadist conspiracy against the infidels.***

*** Note that this particular piece of agit prop was later determined to be hyperbolic mischaracterization and scaremongering by known & extreme hard right liars in the clash of civilizations camp.

4 thoughts on “India and Pakistan, another front in the war”

  1. I have been saying for years now that the only way to put an end to this menace is to take out the nation-state of Pakistan. Drastic as it may sound, there is no other way. Earlier, the West thought it was purely an India – Pakistan issue and conveniently looked the other way. 9/11 changed all dramatically and made the rest of the world realize that Pakistan was the real cradle of international terrorism.

    Afghanistan, Taliban, Al Qaida, Lashkar-e-toiba, ‘freedom struggle’ in Kashmir etc are all visible faces of the extremely dangerous and destructive state policy of Pakistan, nurtured and pursued overtly for decades. And it is not a simple India-Pakistan matter as has been carefully projected by Pakistan to curry favor with the West till a critical mass is achieved .The proliferation of nuclear weapon technology by the highest ranking members of the Pakistani establishment had nothing to do with India at all. The blossoming of Al Qaida and the Taliban with complete knowledge, support and encouragement of Pakistan govt and military was not India-centric either.

    These were concerted efforts by Pakistan towards the objective of bringing to an end the domination of the Islamic world by the Christian West. This may sound illogical.. But dig into history and look. Pakistan is an artificial entity created on the basic premise that Muslims cannot co-exist with people of other religious beliefs, no matter how closely related they may be ethnically, except when Islam is dominant. This idea was tenuously floated in the 40s as a bargaining political tool, but, thanks in no small measure to the British, it gave birth to a new country which interpreted it as the ‘divine’ right of Islam to rule, yet again, after being in an eclipse for a couple of centuries. Having tasted blood in breaking up India and carving out an Islamic state, the ambition of Pakistan was initially to ‘reclaim’ Delhi in the name of Islam. Remember Gen Ayub Khan’s boast of having his evening tea in Delhi, in 1965? The Pakistani political, military and religious leadership fanned this idea in an increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant manner, particularly after Muslim East Pakistan broke away in 1971 dealing a severe blow to the very basis of existence of Pakistan. In the process, the idea has progressed, as it logically had to, to the belief that if Islam cannot accept a dominant ‘Hindu’ India, how can it straddle the irreconcilable contradiction of accepting the overwhelming dominance of Christian West over the entire Islamic world. Two generations of Pakistanis and a large number of Muslims in India have grown up on this poison pill of hatred and intolerance, spawning a full fledged industry of terror and violence, which has provided a fertile ground for extremists of other nationalities too. Skeptics who conveniently overlook the extremely dark face of this pernicious ideology would do well to read ‘Who Killed Daniel Pearl’ by Bernard-Henri Levy. Why not just read the posters openly displayed in the office of the Students Islamic Movement of India(SIMI), ‘Waiting for Ghaznavi’, ‘No Democracy, No Secularism, Only Islam’. What else is Pakistan about? What else is international Islamic fundamentalism and terror about? This is the real terrorism which everyone in India is ignoring in their misplaced zeal to sound ‘secular’ and bipartisan. That is exactly what such outfits need to flourish and mount an increasingly formidable challenge to the perceived domination by Hindus in India and Christians in the West. And yet, Indian media and politicians choose to completely ignore this foundational challenge to the nation which brazenly seeks to convert the ‘Indian’ part of India into Pakistan too. They want to remain in their cozy make-believe world of engaging with and publicizing ‘secular’ Muslims. The media’s naiveté in believing that the real Muslims living in large numbers in the ghettos will bare their real beliefs in front of the camera is, indeed, disturbing, to say the least. Indian politicians have consistently displayed a remarkable lack of integrity to be on the right side of electoral mathematics. One wonders about the compulsions of the media.

    In the wake of 9/11, Musharraf had no choice but to align with the US against the Al Qaida and Taliban his country helped flourish and unleash the most horrific face of Islamic fundamentalism and terror. As he himself admitted, it was a question of ensuring the very survival of Pakistan. Notwithstanding this purely tactical and opportunistic alliance with the US, the hard fact remains that the ideology put in place remains intact and will remain so as long as Pakistan continues to exist as a nation. No govt in power there can effectively check this if it has to survive. Even if we were to lull ourselves and believe that the hawkish commando ,’Kargil’ President of Pakistan has genuinely become a dove after 9/11, there is little he can do to stem the flow of the poison that has corrupted the very soul of his country and has been exported like blood cancer to large parts of the globe. At various levels in Pakistan, the poison is still being assiduously cultivated and harvested, because it has become the sole justification for Pakistan to remain an independent country and not re-merge with India or split further on the more logical basis of ethnicity. It has also become the opium fuelling the ambition of ensuring the rule of Islam in this world and pleasure of young virgins in the next. .

    I may be wrong, but at a macro time and space level, I see events involving the Islamic world in the last two centuries or so, as the painful pangs of a dying philosophy.The pangs are getting more frequent, more painful….and deep down there is a frustrated sense of helplessness and fear finding expression in the vortex of ever increasing violence and self-destruction. The effective religious leaders of Islam cannot teach their followers to live peacefully with others in a plural world. With that insurmountable difficulty, there is no hope. It is the End. They know it too, but want to believe that the End is of others.

    The rest of the world has a responsibility to ensure that the fallout is minimized and not prolonged unnecessarily.

  2. Thank you for stopping by Viinod, and I am humbled by your well-thought-out, and well-written post. It contains much more about the roots of Islamofascism in Pakistan than my original post does, please keep up your good work friend.

  3. The other day, I was watching a program addressing a similar question on another channel, when I heard the celebrated anchor ask the dumbest question ever asked by an anchor : ‘Do terrorists have a religion?’ Such a question not only trivializes a very serious issue but also betrays the fact that despite many years occupying prime media space, some journalists remain little public school boys/girls taking part in an inter-school debate. Their focus is always on scoring points and emerging the winner through the sheer force of their debating skills and the carefully chosen coterie of panelists who enable them to remain in a comfort zone and hide their often superficial understanding of the many issues taken up in their programs. That is fine in school. But when one dominates national media and influences the opinion of a small but powerful section of society which enjoys a disproportionately large voice in policy making at the national level, casual arrogance must give way to a realization of one’s societal and national responsibility.

    Coming to the very upsetting question, it is obvious that anchor in question, and perhaps others too, have never even bothered to find out where the term ‘Jihad’ comes from.And they have all pretensions of being experts It needs to be mentioned that the first jihad was fought by the Prophet against those who refused to accept his prophethood, i.e. Islam. His jihad (battle) at Medina against the Meccans and Jews resulted in his victory. And do you know what he did after the battle was won? He beheaded all the 800 captured soldiers of the defeated Jew Army and took all their women and children as slaves, proclaiming both acts to be the Will of God. In today’s context, mass massacre of defeated, unarmed soldiers will be classified a war crime. And what about the sexual and other exploitation of innocent women and children? Perhaps that was the requirement of those extraordinary and difficult times when Islam was struggling to take root. Cut to the present day and it needs no genius to understand that killing of the ‘enemies’ of Islam by jihadi terrorists, be they fighting soldiers or passive supporters (ordinary citizens, women, children?), gets its justification from the Prophet himself, however much it may arguably be distorted.. There are no ‘innocent’ citizens in the jihadis lexicon. Even if there are a few, well, that is collateral damage, as the Americans love to say. Add to this the Prophet’s promise of young virgins in the next life for those who die fighting for Islam and you have a perfect recipe for extremely merciless, ruthless and dangerous jihadi terrorism. And Pakistan, which has somehow conceptualized itself as a creation of jihad, a jihad incomplete, is providing the perfect Islamic pan to cook this diabolic dish in.

    Informed Indian politicians understand this quite well but choose look away because they have been completely corrupted by their lust for power. They cannot antagonize Muslims voters ( a clear unspoken belief that a vast majority of Indian Muslims support the jihadis in some manner at least), even if , in the process the nation is lost in the long run. Then there is another class of politicians who believe that their sole hope of survival is in blindly supporting Nehruvian idealism to be on the right side of The Family which simply cannot get itself to accept that changed circumstances demand a radically different approach. Family ‘honour’ takes precedence over national interest. On way or another, all these people may prove to be as dangerous and as anti-national as the jihadis,

    To compound the problem, they have the powerful backing of large breed of rootless Indian journalists (including their in-house experts) who dominate the national media. They are comfortably cocooned in their ‘secular’ world and come into their element only when they ridicule and question Hindu religion ( without having the foggiest idea of its intellectual, philosophical, rational and spiritual dimensions) and brand as communal and jingoistic anyone who tries to awaken his countrymen to the real danger posed by jihadi terrorists. Imagine playing down and perversely justifying jihadi terrorism by comparing it with Hindu communalists, naxalites and militants of the Northeast, but that is what is being done ad nauseum by politicians and the media. Net result : 20 years down the line, this country has not been able to formulate a coherent and effective strategy to counter the most serious challenge to our secular state, our very nation.

    Thank God Bush did not have Indian media and Indian politicians to contend with post 9/11… he might have still been paralysed by a relentless, ingenious and essentially dishonest campaign of comparison of Al Qaida with Ku Klux Klan, radical Christians and other racist elements, with shrill calls to check them too with an even eye before acting against Afghanistan, while Al Qaida terrorists would have grown stronger, inflicted far more damage and perhaps duplicated what jihadi terrorists have achieved in India. Fortunately, Americans never lose sight of their supreme national interest. ‘Rootless Indians’, on the other hand, never fail to impress with their thorough knowledge, admiration, assimilation, even awe of everything else American, particularly bohemian. Pity they are not white….may be that is why they cannot understand India’s national interest, fathom national pride, and above all, experience real self esteem as an Indian..

  4. Thanks again for stopping by Viinod, again your comments are well appreciated. I would be well-pleased if you would write me an email. You can reach me at tark (at sign) kc (dot) rr (dot) com

    I agree with you that people who are in power sometimes decide by not deciding, however over time delayed decisions can crush you. They do this because over time all things do get better, as most of history demonstrates. However the cause of that is because there are always people who expend time and energy making them get better. Some decsions are obvious, essential, and unavoidable — delaying those causes angst, sturm und drang in the people, and always forces nations closer to the brink of unreason.

Comments are closed.