Author: Premen Addy
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: July 6, 2009
URL: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2289002/posts
Mumbai yesterday, London tomorrow! This is
the message sent out by BBC's investigative reports on 26/11 which have revealed
Pakistan's skulduggery in its starkness. Terrorists have been called terrorists,
not 'militants'. Violent Islamism has been ruthlessly exposed
Mumbai's 26/11 tryst with Islamism and its
hours of terrorist hell were shown in vivid detail on prime time British television.
The first was a half-hour report on BBC's Newsnight programme with a commentary
by Richard Watson. The second was Channel 4's hour-long Despatches documentary.
Both films drew heavily on tape recordings of the instructions from controllers
in Pakistan to their Pakistani terrorist charges in India - compiled by Indian
intelligence listening in - and snatches from the interrogation of the captured
terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab, together with the traumatised voices of Mumbai's
bereaved and injured and the narratives and reflections of ordinary policemen
and senior officers. With the scale of the Pakistani skulduggery revealed
in its starkness, nothing was fudged. Terrorists were called terrorists, not
'militants,' as the media in Britain are wont to do. The story was told, step-by-blood-stained
step, nothing extenuated along the way. The BBC film proved an appetising
trailer.
The Channel 4 film -more satisfying in sight
and sound - its words delivered at a perfect pitch and exquisitely crafted,
carried an appropriate emotional charge. Some 10 million and more British
viewers were brought face-to-face with a primal force, with evil incarnate.
Mumbai today, London tomorrow was the message. Both films were at one relating
the role of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba in the commando-style attack, operated with
military precision.
The Pakistani military and intelligence hand
was self-evident. Nothing was left to the imagination. The terrorists, illiterate
zombies all, were programmed by their masters back home and directed on the
ground by controllers with satellite phones. There were jihadi exhortations,
reminding the faithful of Islam's war against unbelievers, of martyrdom and
the paradise awaiting those falling in battle for the cause. And so the spree
of murder and mayhem moved from setting to setting, the perpetrators convinced
that a greater glory would be theirs to savour.
In this remorseless tide of depraved blood
lust, two incidents stood out. A Turkish couple, held hostage in the Oberoi
Hotel, owed their lives to the recited Quranic sura for the dead uttered by
the man as those around him lay dead. Realising they were Muslims, the gunmen
spared the pair as 'brother' and 'sister'. They were in shock when they recounted
their traumatic ordeal.
The second incident relates to the Jewish
Chabad Centre at the city's Nariman Point. The controllers directed their
killers to the building and ordered them to shoot the resident Rabbi and his
pregnant wife - which act was duly performed, but not before the doomed couple
were subjected to horrific tortures. The assassins had been told that the
life of a single Jew was worth 50 other human lives that the Jewish people
were Islam's foremost enemies. It is a familiar cry on the Arab street and
beyond, from the slums of Karachi to the salubrious, leafy cantonments of
Lahore and Islamabad and immigrant ghettos in London, Paris, Amsterdam, et
al.
Meanwhile, Kasab had been taken prisoner;
his controllers were desperate to see him freed. An elderly Jewish woman hostage,
a visitor at the Nariman Point centre as it happened, was brought to a terrorist's
phone. The man at the other end, speaking fluent English, as is the custom
with senior Pakistan military officers and bureaucrats (the terrorists were
restricted to Urdu), asked the lady to call the Israeli Consulate with an
appeal to the Government of India for a swap: Her freedom and that of her
husband for Kasab's release and getaway. The fruity voice assured her that
she had nothing to fear and would soon be on her way to celebrate the Sabbath.
The exchanges between the gunman and his controller
grew fraught as the hours ticked by. Eventually, the voice, having lost patience,
issued an order that the Jews be shot. The gunman appeared to procrastinate.
The summons sharpened and his resolve weakened. Came a loud gunshot, then
a chilling silence. In the milling crowd outside was the Indian nanny clutching
the dead Rabbi's little child. It was an unforgettable image, one that will
surely endure for those who witnessed it first-hand and many millions more
in television audiences throughout the globe.
Whatever the contrary wails of pusillanimous,
overblown celebrities such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (the cross of Jesus
was light in comparison) and his show pony Martha Nussbaum and their loquacious,
self-serving ilk, truth is that Islamism is at war with the civilised world:
A war of the worlds unlike HG Wells's in its concept but bearing more than
a passing resemblance in subtext. The late professor Samuel Huntington, of
Harvard University, was reflexively pilloried by many of the lazy Left-liberal
great and good for exploring a subject they had consigned to purdah.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,
an incredible hulk of arrogance and insensitivity, preached Kashmir to his
Indian hosts in the aftermath of 26/11; the harridan Oxford don Maria Misra,
whose anti-Indian diatribe in The Times pointed to the Mumbai carnage as just
retribution for the country's alleged oppression of Muslims; and the cadaverous
Polish American Zbigniew Brzezinski whose boast, that as US National Security
Adviser in the Carter Administration, he had brought militant Islam into play
against the Soviet Union: These invite our scorn and contempt.
In seeking to crucify Russia, Mr Brzezinski
has instead dug a snake pit for America. Such are the wages of sin, whose
toll includes peace of mind.
Islamism, once a trusty instrument in the
perpetuation of British imperial power in India and West Asia, and its destructive
uses by America in the Cold War, is much like an awakened science fiction
dinosaur coming home to roost. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was surely the original
Islamist Dracula, his successors, vampires of the night.
Pay heed to Islamism's 20 primordial calls.
"I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains
no one on the face of the Earth who does not acknowledge Allah." (Saladin,
January 1189.)
"We will export our revolution throughout
the world... until the calls 'there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is the
messenger of Allah,' are echoed all over the world." (Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini,1979.)
"I was ordered to fight the people until
they say there is no god but Allah, and his Prophet Mohammed." (Osama
bin Laden, November 2001.)
Do not say we weren't warned.
