I watch CNN often and I noticed that for a few years after 9/11 Wolf Blitzer seemed to see al Qaeda coming out of the woodwork.

Train wreck;

"Any signs of al Qaeda, Joe"?

Attack in Korea;

"Bill, does the White House see al Qaeda behind this attack?"

For the last year or so he's backed off mentioning them, but, considering it was India, of all the possible suspects when the Mumbai attack got underway there was old Wolf babbling about al Qaeda.

Yep. There will be an absolute flood of stories and columns deploring how awful Muslims are. There will, of course, be no mention of the Hindu Nationalists in Indian who have been waging all out war against India's Muslim minority for over a decade. Nor will anybody notice the reports that most of the attackers spoke perfect Indian Hindi and were thus undoubtedly local people. Likewise no one will mention that while India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, there has been relatively little Islamic terrorist activity that is not linked to Kashmir and Punjab.

Does anyone remember when it was that Ariel Sharon, or one of his top representatives, made a special and well-publicized trip to India to secure a massive Israeli arms sale to that country? I wondered at the time, why sell Israeli arms to India,a confirmed foe of Muslim Pakistan. Why publicized. Now I wonder if the slaughter in Mumbai, or any relatively up-scale Indian enclave, by Muslims or their sympathizers was the intended reaction, and if so, why.

Why is it so hard to differentiate between extremists and non-extremists? Why must fear be such a controlling factor?

-- Cris
My site: Obama Wallpaper Archive

Marty Peretz saysm and I quote, "But I very much doubt that this was a deliberate act of the Pakistan government."

the fact that MJ can ignore this sentence and blithely say that the usual suspects can't wait to blame Pakistan should tell us something about MJ's reading comprehension scores.

it's funny how MJ would like to us never put the blame for horrific terror attacks at the Islamists' feet--but he's wetting his own pants wanting to blame Israel for trying to defend itself. double standard much?

if MJ and his hate-America-first fans want us to stop blaming Muslims for terrorism, maybe Muslims should stop terrorizing.

So let's get this straight....the attack in India, carried out by Muslims, is, according to MJ and others, NOT (note the capital letters) due to any organized or semi-organized international extremist Islamic movement with a coherent ideology that is anti-Jewish and anti-Western. It was due to "local" conditions....the struggle in Kashmir and supposed "discrimination" suffered by Indian Muslims. The fact that a Jewish institution was specifically targetted and the Jews trapped there murdered in cold blood while being tied up, is NOT (again, the capital letters) any indication of a specific hatred of Jews, they simply "got in the way", by coincidence. Add to this the fact that the terrorists searched out Britons and Americans.

We hear from some here, on the other hand, that the fact that Jews were specifically targetted is actually due to these "local conditions" (but, again, not, perish the thought, that Muslim extremists have anything against Jews per se)...that Israel has developed trade and military relations with India. However, this has only been in recent years. Let's look at Indian history....who was India's main ally for many decades and their main arms supplier when they were fighting wars with Pakistan and absorbing Kashmir? Who was it? Was it the US? NO (again, capital letters....call a cop!) India's relations were poor with the US through most of its history. The US's main ally in the region was.......(guess who?)....PAKISTAN! Who was India's ally who armed them agaist Pakistan and to control Kashmir.......(drum roll)... RUSSIA/USSR! So as a result of these "local conditions" who would have been the logical target for terrorists? Russians! Did they go after Russians? No, they went after Jews, Americans and Britons. (Yes, I know the large majority of victims were actually Indians..I am referring to the foreigners they went after).

A few quick thoughts on this:

1. Islam is the world's second largest religion. About one in five people are Muslims, roughly 1.5 billion people or about 20% of all human beings alive today. If Islam were inherently violent, we'd see much more Islamic violence than we do today simply because there are so many Muslims.

2. Most Islamic populations are concentrated in a band from North Africa through the Middle East and into South Asia. Most of the areas Muslims live in were recent (mostly British) colonies. They remain in political turmoil as a result of the aftermath of colonialism. Much of the violence we see in the Muslim world is political violence wrapped in a veneer of Islamism.

3. Compared with sub-Saharan Africa--the other large region where European colonisation ended relatively recently--the Muslim world is actually far less violent. Africa has been racked with wars (the current war in the Congo is the most violent conflict of the past decade), ethnic conflicts, and even large-scale genocides.

4. The Muslim world borders Europe and remains important both strategically and economically to the West. This means there is far more interaction between the Muslim world and the West than there is between Africa and the West. This tends to result in comparatively more conflict and tension between the Muslim world and the West as well.

5. Islam and the Islamic world have a proud history. Revolutionary and liberation movements in the Muslim world (especially in the Arab and Persian Muslim world) can look to an idealized past as a model for the present. Islamic militancy develops from this backward looking romanticism and provides a useful ideology to motivate Muslims who are unhappy with their present to join revolutionary or anti-Western movements. Islamism is a powerful veneer in which to wrap political resistance. It's success in Iran (against the US-backed Shah) and Afganistan (against the Russians) has increased its appeal.

6. The political and economic instability of the Islamic world (in part the result of the weak, artificial states left behind by the colonialists and continued Western intervention) creates an abundant source of discontent to fuel revolutionary and liberation movements--or to simply stimulate violence among disenfranchised groups or bored youths.

7. The creation of a Jewish state within the Muslim world with the backing of the US and Britain has increased tension between Muslims and Britain, the US, and Jews considerably. Muslims view the removal and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians as ethnic cleansing, a grave injustice, and an insult that sends a message that the West believes Jews are more worthy than Muslims. This motivates more Muslim violence against English-speaking Westerners and Jews. At the same time, pro-Israeli groups and pundits in the West have a motive for demonizing Muslim resistance movements like those of the Palestinians and exaggerating their threat to all Westerners. This results in powerful anti-Muslim propoganda in the US combined with a general lack of promotion of Muslim perspectives.

Muslims murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and you respond by condemning Martin Peretz?

Pathological Jew hatred is a mental illness, Mister Rosenberg. Please seek help.

It's part of the continuum of disruption that emerged with the creation of Pakistan, which in turn led to the creation of Bangladesh.

Imagine the disputes that would occur if the U.S. were divided by general political boundaries, e.g.

It doesn't help things in South Asia for the U.S. to be inextricably involved in the politics there. The advantages of the tried and true stratagem of divide and conquer used so often by interlopers has apparently not been lost on the Americans.