Mumbai is limping back to normal. The Indians are shellshocked that the United States forewarned their leaders about a potential attack on Mumbai from the sea, yet they made no preparations to stall these attacks or to protect ordinary citizens and businesses. The politicians in Delhi are spineless and corrupt. They surround themselves with police for protection and sycophants to boost their egos.
The Indians are stuck with two bad choices: The Congress Party that has enervated federal anti-terror laws and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with its connections to the RSS, a Hindu extremist group. The Congress Party is more intent on discrediting the BJP than protecting the citizens of India. The BJP waits in the wings to ride back to power like a knight in shining armor. The Muslim marauders of Mumbai gave the BJP the perfect opportunity to blame the Congress Party for the swagger of Islamic terror across India.
Congress, it is said, is soft on home-grown Islamic terrorists because it chose to pander to Muslim voters. The BJP, whose identity is distinctly Hindu, does not seek votes from Muslims, is happy to pounce on Islamic extremism and gives a nod and a wink to Hindu atrocities against Muslims. This was particularly evident in the state of Gujarat in 2002 when Hindu extremists killed nearly 2,000 Muslims to avenge the death of Hindu pilgrims rumored to have been torched to death in a passenger train by Muslim extremists. The chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, deliberately did not protect the Muslims in his state even as they were cut to pieces by Hindu mobs.
Modi could become the next prime minister of India, if Hindus fall for BJP’s show of brawn and vote his party into power during the next election cycle. Add to this mess the murders and mayhem wrought by Bhajrang Dal, an armed Hindu extremist group bent on either killing or converting Christians back to Hinduism, you have the picture of India, a hotbed of terrorists running amok, their machismo aroused, making literal chickens without heads of innocent civilians. While these happenings are deplorable and all extremism should be condemned and addressed, not all are equal.
Islamic terror has woven a bloody network across the globe. It obeys no single master or rule. Not one nation seems free of this menace. Russia, China, Western and Eastern Europe, the horn of Africa, the Middle East, Indonesia, Philippines, wherever one looks on the world map, Islamic terrorists operate with impunity. They are not merely criminals like the mafia. They are religious zealots who are also criminals, nihilistic in philosophy and apocalyptic in vision. Pirates on the seas, they disrupt maritime activities and international trade. Hijackers of planes, they threaten international tourism, and on land they bring weak and strong governments to their knees.
Fattened by oil money, nurtured by rogue elements in doddering states like Pakistan and fundamentalist states like Iran, the lieutenants of Islamic terror mint their foot soldiers in formidable terrains and eject them to sow failed states across the world. Given the nuclear bomb, these misanthropes and misogynists will not hesitate to indulge in mass annihilation for no purpose other than to return the world to a primitive state. They are adept at technology, but they are not guided by the logic of modern men. The disgusting and insane Hindu extremists are puny in comparison, their dreams confined to achieving a Hindu state.
Simply put, the Nazis of the past are not the same as Islamic terrorists. The Nazis had a state, Islamic terrorists do not. Islamic extremists are not the same as mafia gang members. To Islamic extremists money and power are merely the means to an end: The establishment of pan-Islam. And Islamic terrorists are not the same as the Basque separatists of Spain, or the Hindu extremists of India or the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. They may share characteristics with members of these groups, coming from failed families and killing civilians without conscience, but to lump Islamic extremists with other terrorist groups is illogical and a clear and present danger to the world. This obvious truth seems to escape the left-leaning intellectuals of America like Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago who subscribe to a theory of equivalence and equivocation on the subject of Islamic terror.
Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air . Reach her at [email protected].
