Were There Muslims in Mumbai?

By Don Feder
GrassTopsUSA.com
Thursday, December 04, 2008

Islamist students burn Israeli, U.S. and Indian flags as they shout anti-U.S. and anti-Indian slogans during a demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari indicated Wednesday he would not hand over 20 terrorist suspects wanted by India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Come on along and listen to the Lullaby of Mumbai, the hip hooray and politically correct coverage, and never say the “I” word. That doesn’t rhyme, does it?

In its coverage of a series of coordinated attacks in Mumbai last week that left 172 dead, the New York Times – America’s newspaper that sounds like a broken record – scrupulously avoided any suggestion of possible sectarian motivation for the atrocities. The perpetrators were variously referred to as “terrorists,” “gunmen,” “militants” and “assailants.”

The only time “Islam,” “Muslims” or similar expressions were used was in reporting on statements of the terrorists themselves – as when they railed against the alleged mistreatment of Muslims in Kashmir and India or demanded that “mujahedeen” prisoners be released. Sky News reported that the terrorists called on the Indian government “to return stolen Muslim lands” – which, in the wide world of Islam, is all of India.

It’s not just the New York Times that engages in extreme reality-avoidance when it comes to the nastier aspects of the Prophet's creed.

At its annual convention in October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists issued “Diversity Guidelines,” that instructed reporters and editors to, “Avoid using word combinations such as ‘Islamic terrorist’ or ‘Muslim extremist’ that are misleading because they link whole religions to criminal activity.”

Let’s see: In the past 30 years, the overwhelming majority of acts of terrorism were committed by Muslims. Most terrorist groups have names like jihad-this and Islamic-that. Terrorists regularly quote the Koran’s kill-the-infidels verses. (“O True Believers, when you encounter the unbeliever, strike off their heads!”) Al-Qaeda and company tell us that their goal is to advance the global jihad . Those inciting inter-religious violence have titles like sheikh, imam and mullah. But linking Islam to terrorism is “misleading”?

Since 1993, there have been at least 17 terror-bombings in India – 12 of them since 2005. In each, the death toll has ranged from a dozen to more than 200. That the victims were (almost exclusively) Hindus, and the perpetrators (when identified) Muslims, is happenstance, according to the mainstream media.

It’s also a coincidence that, along with the U.S. and Israel, India is one of the principal targets of international terrorism, and India has the second largest Muslim population in the world.

In an op-ed in the November 29, New York Times (“What They Hate About Mumbai”) Suketu Mehta – a professor of journalism at New York University – insists the terrorists were striking out at city’s cosmopolitanism, which they loath. “Religious extremists” (Mehta indicts both Muslims and Hindus) were enraged because “Mumbai stands for lucre (wealth), profane dreams and indiscriminate openness.”

Well, that explains why the terrorists invaded Mumbai’s Chabad House, a citadel of decadence run by Hasidic Jews. Among those murdered were Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum and three Israeli girls, all in their teens.

What debauchery was going on at the Mumbai Chabad House to make it a target of anti-cosmopolitan extremists? Eating gefilte fish and dancing the Hora?

The Chabad House was targeted because it was Mumbai’s center of Jewish activity. Muslims like killing Jews almost as much as they enjoy killing Hindus. Their religion commands it. A doctor who performed post-mortems on the Jewish victims said they were tortured before they were killed and "bore the maximum torture marks" of all who died in Mumbai (as quoted on the Indian news website Rediff.com).

There must’ve been a whole lot of shaking going on in 8th century India, when the Muslim subjugation of the subcontinent began. Millions were murdered. In the city of Somnath alone, more than 50,000 were slaughtered.

The slave markets of the Middle East were glutted with Hindu women and children taken captive. An ancient civilization was nearly destroyed. (Libraries were leveled and manuscripts burned.)

In his book The Sword of the Prophet: Islam History, Theology, Impact on The World, Serge Trifkovic offers the following account: “Muslim invaders began entering India in the early eighth century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. Starting in 712, the raiders, commanded by Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces, killed vast numbers of men – it took them three days to slaughter the inhabitants of the port city of Debal – and carried off their women and children to slavery.”

Strange how the plunderers of palaces and killers of vast numbers usually have names like Muhammad or Osama instead of Seymour or Sanjay.

In his multi-volume work, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant singled this out as among the bloodiest episodes in history. Durant characterized it as “a discouraging tale, for it’s evident that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.…”

Multiple-choice quiz: The barbarians Durant refers to are: 1. Episcopalians 2. Jehovah’s Witnesses 3. Scientologists or 4. Muslims? The correct answer is the religion of Muhammad.

Closed circuit television footage released on December 3, 2008 shows gunmen walking across a parking lot after a shooting spree at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station in Mumbai on November 26, 2008.
REUTERS/Investigating Team Video via Reuters TV (INDIA) QUALITY FROM SOURCE

Here’s another remarkable coincidence: When Muslim authorities, religious or secular, open their mouths, what issues there from is frequently abominable or absurd.

* On September 14, Sheikh Muhammed Al-Munajid told viewers of the Saudi religious station that Mickey Mouse was an agent of Satan (along with Zionists, Hindus, and Christian missionaries). The former diplomat attached to the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi embassy in Washington explained that mice are unclean. But the Disney character – like Warner’s Jerry – teaches children to revere rodents. Ergo, “Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though, according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.” Try to imagine a rabbi putting out a contract on Porky Pig.

* On October 30, a thoroughly charming Egyptian lawyer, Ms. Nagla Al-Imam, suggested on the Arab TV channel Al-Arabiya that Palestinian men should threaten to rape Israeli women and girls as a form of “resistance” against the so-called occupation. Non-Muslim women in Europe are frequently the targets of gang-rape by Muslim men – but to link these crimes to Islam would be misleading.

* On November 28, the Associated Press reported that Al-Zawahiri – Al-Qaeda’s primo capo – released a video urging Americans to convert to Islam to avoid a financial meltdown. The U.S. economy had been destroyed by 9/11 “and usury (interest paid on loans)” Zawahiri declared. Americans should “embrace Islam to live a life free of greed, exploitation and forbidden wealth.” Islam’s aversion to what it calls greed (capitalism) is one reason that, absent oil, Muslim societies’ most important products are fleas, filth, fanaticism and poverty.

The naked emperor is nowhere more evident than in the way the West goes to absurd lengths to be sensitive to those who decapitate hostages and shoot 13-year-old American girls (one of the victims in the Mumbai massacre).

Jesse Nieto is a 25-year veteran of the Marine Corps whose youngest son was one of 17 killed in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Now a civilian employee of Camp LeJeune, Nieto was ordered to remove from his car decals with the slogans: “Islam = Terrorism” and “We Died, They Rejoiced!” In fact, the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 were celebrated from Indonesia to the shores of Tripoli.

Base police gave Nieto a ticket for displaying “offensive material” on his vehicle.

The Corps certainly wouldn’t want to offend the fine folks who murdered 241 Marines in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, or the non-denominational militants who’ve been killing leathernecks for the past six years, from Kabul to Fullujah.

Mumbai is the latest chapter in the millennial bestseller, Gone With The Jihad. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, communities in the Negev have been under continuous bombardment.

On Friday, November 14, Sderot was hit by 11 Qassam rockets. Ashkelon – a city of 120,000 north of Gaza – got six incoming, courtesy of the Al-Quds Brigade, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad. If it bothered to report such attacks at all – which is doesn’t – the New York Times would assign blame to the Militants’, Assailants’ and Gunmen’s Group for Spiritual Struggle.

Naturally, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Amnesty International have condemned not the rocket attacks, but the Israeli response – a partial blockade of Gaza, which they called “collective punishment.” It’s irrelevant that Gazans collectively condone and abet the aggression.

If the U.N. has its way, soon, a commentary like the one you’re reading will be against the law – at least the international law.

Four days before the beginning of the Mumbai massacre, the United Nations General Assembly passed a measure called “Combating Defamation of Religions” – which seeks to root out “acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religion.”

Enactment of the Orwellian measure has been high on the agenda of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which maintains that “Islam is frequently associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

Imagine the infidel dogs implying that there’s a connection between Islam and honor killings, floggings for minor infractions of Shari'a law, flying planes into buildings, bombings, rocket attacks and the murder of rabbis and their wives. Infamous!

A Pakistani Islamist student wears headband reading: 'God is Great' as he shouts anti-U.S. and anti-Indian slogans during a demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari indicated Wednesday he would not hand over 20 terrorist suspects wanted by India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
(AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

My friend Robert Spencer – author of Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs and editor of the website Jihad Watch – warns that the U.N. enactment is “a veiled attempt to restrict speech that Islamic authorities find offensive or inconvenient, including honest discussion of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists and how they make use of Islamic texts to gain recruits and justify their actions.”

The measure will not be deployed against the imams who regularly call for the blood of Christians, Jews and Hindus, or the government of Egypt that condones church burnings, or the Saudi Religious Police who smash down doors in search of covert Christian services, or Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Syrian President-for-life Bashar Assad, who told Pope John Paul II that Jews “try to kill the principle of religions,” or the producers of the 2002 Egyptian television multi-series, “Horseman Without A Horse,” a dramatization of the anti-Semitic canard “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion,” or the U.N., whose 2001 Anti-Racism Conference in Durban turned into a hate-Zionism fest.

It will be used to silence the likes of Geert Wilders (the Dutch parliamentarian who produced Fitna), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-American journalist and author of Because They Hate), Bob Spencer, Ann Coulter, and ex-Muslims who run websites like “Islam Watch.”

The United Nations was founded in response to the carnage of World War II. Considered by many to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, Winston Churchill was one of the leaders of West in that titanic struggle.

Were he alive, Churchill would be among the defamers of religion targeted by the U.N. edict. Having encountered Islam as a young soldier in India and the Sudan, this is what the future British PM had to say about the subject over 100 years ago:

Several generations have elapsed since the nations of the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy and the evil memories of the gloomy past have soon faded in the strong, clear light of Rationalism and human sympathy…But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment, the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside…Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis (warriors for Islam) – as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such…The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually better armed. (from Churchill By Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations.)

Someone forgot to issue the Diversity Guidelines to Winnie. Then, too, Winston Spencer Churchill was part of a generation that confronted evil, instead of trying to make it go away by refusing to acknowledge its existence.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website,
DonFeder.com.