Mumbai; 80 dead, over 900 injured

This is the result of false fostering "otherness",  and by the military imperialism of the USA and Britian, plus the savage exploitation of "others". And it is a huge wake up call for Canadians who are still being reluctant to bring our military home.

___________________________________________________________ "watching the tide roll away"

The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, has insisted that the terrorists were based outside the country. The Indian media has echoed this line of argument with Pakistan (via the Lashkar-e-Taiba) and al-Qaeda listed as the usual suspects.

But this is a meditated edifice of official India’s political imagination. Its function is to deny that the terrorists could be a homegrown variety, a product of the radicalization of young Indian Muslims who have finally given up on the indigenous political system. To accept this view would imply that the country’s political physicians need to heal themselves.

Al Qaeda, as the CIA recently made clear, is a group on the decline. It has never come close to repeating anything vaguely resembling the hits of 9/11.

Its principal leader Osama bin Laden may well be dead (he certainly did not make his trademark video intervention in this year’s Presidential election in the United States) and his deputy has fallen back on threats and bravado.

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

That CBC news bit with Celine Galipeau was interesting. The "wealth creation" in India is somewhat impressive. And I noticed that running water and sewage still eludes millions. It's supposedly against the law, but the news broadcast showed one child defecating in the middle of the street. They need socialism not free markets in poverty.

I also find it offensive to those in poverty who would never dream of murdering innocent civilians.

Hashem yinkom dama.

But it is too soon to know who is behind the current attacks. Some or all of the attackers may indeed come from or have supporters in Pakistan. Equally, some or all may be Indian. The desire of some in India to ascribe guilt to Pakistan before the evidence is in is, therefore, an attempt to avoid introspection.

India and Pakistan are more alike than politicians of either country tend to acknowledge. The triumphal narrative of India as an incredible success, and the defeatist narrative of Pakistan as an impending disaster are both only half true. For much of this young century, Pakistan has enjoyed economic growth rates not far behind those of India, and this year Pakistan has emulated its neighbour by returning to democracy.

India, meanwhile, is, like Pakistan, home to many simmering insurgencies. Had recent protests in Indian Kashmir occurred in a former Soviet Republic, they would have been hailed by the world as a new Orange Revolution (and had they occurred in Tibet, they would have resulted in calls for international pressure on Beijing). Similarly, the tensions in India's northeast, the armed Naxalite movement, and the slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat all run counter to the half-truth of "India shining".

Both Pakistan and India are plagued by extremist violence. Both have in their six decades of independence dramatically failed their poor. Earlier this year, the World Bank reported that half of Indian children are so malnourished their bodies fail to achieve normal size. That is twice the rate of child malnourishment found in sub-Saharan Africa.

Let me suggest that you ignore this narrative. To follow this storyline, to see these events as civilizational warfare, is to misconstrue the nature of India and, importantly, the nature of the whole world to a dangerous degree.

India does have a problem with terrorism and extremism, one that threatens to destabilize the amazing humanitarian and economic progress it has made in recent years. But it isn't one of Islamic extremists trying to take over the state. Quite the contrary.

The most prominent Indian killed in the terrorist attacks on Wednesday was Harmant Karkare, the head of Mumbai's anti-terrorism squad, who was assassinated in the city's central train station along with several of his deputies.

The day before, he had received a death threat. That didn't surprise him, he told reporters, as it came just days after he had filed charges against 10 men in India's recent major terrorist attack, the Sept. 29 bombings in the city of Malegaon that killed nine and injured 80.

The accused are Hindu nationalist activists, young women and men associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr. Karkare also linked BJP-tied Hindus with the much deadlier bomb attacks in Malegaon two years ago, which killed 37 and injured 125 and had been blamed by local police on Muslim groups - an odd accusation, since the targets in both attacks were mosques.

EPIDEMIC OF TERRORISM

These were not lone attacks. In the past decade, India has seen an epidemic of Hindu terrorism that reached its nadir - I hope - in 2002, when almost 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the state of Gujarat. That massacre, like so many others, had been whipped up by Hindu-nationalist parties, in response to an earlier, smaller instance of Muslim violence.

There are certainly extremists from both religions. But there's a difference: One side has formed a government and is trying to do so again. It already controls Mumbai and is close to gaining power in much of the rest of the country.

The BJP ruled India from 1998 to 2004, and its politics are those of racial nationalism - it was born of Hindutva movements that get their ideas directly from German national socialism.

That's right: The movement that has overtaken and politicized sections of this traditionally peaceful religion believes India should be an "Aryan" nation, and, in the same confusion of linguistic and racial identities that made Adolf Hitler's movement possible, it believes that only Hindus (and sometimes only Hindus from the central state of Maharashtra) are legitimate citizens….

From this, you may believe that India has been overtaken by sectarian divisions and religious polarization. That also would be wrong.

This is, after all, a country whose people, 80 per cent of whom are Hindu, have overwhelmingly elected a government with a Prime Minister who is Sikh, a President who is Muslim and a governing party led by a Roman Catholic woman.

Most Hindus have no interest in the politics of religious nationalism. And most of India's 150 million Muslims have nothing to do with Islamic politics - they're the Muslims who rejected Pakistan, an Islamic state, during the Partition of 1947.

Among the defendants was Rabbi Sholom Ber Levitin, director of Chabad House in Seattle and, for the past 16 years, leader of the local Hasidic community. Levitin and two other defendants arrested in Seattle recieved cash from the group's New Jersey-based leader, Adi Tal, according to court documents, and converted to cashier's checks at local banks, packed up the checks and shipped them off for deposit in Panama.

Prosecutors alleged in the indictments that millions of dollars were converted from cash to cashier's checks and money orders then sent illegally to Panama, Colombia, West Germany and Israel.

One package seized contained $450,000, according to an affidavit filed with the indictments.

Special Agent Mercier said all the defendants were apparently motivated by "personal gain . . . We have no information to believe there is any type of ideological interest involved."

The evidence centers on intercepted packages and hundreds of wiretapped telephone conversations. Several sites were searched Friday, including Zeltzer's room at the Chabad House.

Levitin allegedly got involved during the latter part of the enterprise, months after U.S. authorities began monitoring it, according to court documents. Levitin is mentioned in phone calls between Jan. 26 and March 11.

In May 1986, Rabner said, the alleged leader of the operation in the U.S., Adi Tal of Edison, N.J., was arrested briefly in Israel with $481,000 in cash but released because he had not violated any Israeli law.

GUILTY RABBI MEANT WELL, HIS LAWYER SAYS

A lawyer for a Seattle rabbi who pleaded guilty to federal money- laundering charges in Newark, N.J., says his client mistakenly thought he was helping Jews who were trying to emigrate to Israel.

Rabbi Sholom Levitin, a leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic community in Seattle, last week admitted conspiring to arrange currency transactions to evade reporting requirements.

He faces up to five years in prison at sentencing March 1.

Prosecutors linked Levitin to a ring they say concealed at least $25 million worldwide over 18 months. Levitin, a 41-year-old father of nine, founded Chabad House, a Seattle community center that gives Hasidic Jews emergency housing, food and money.

In answer to questions by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart J. Rabner, Levitin admitted taking chunks of cash larger than $10,000 - the amount that requires a banking report to the federal government - and depositing the money in smaller amounts in banks before sending it to Israel.

The violence that is sweeping Mumbai’s tourist and business areas is the work of rival Hindu nationalist terrorists and Muslim gangs, according to WMR’s Asian intelligence sources.

Scores have been killed and hundreds injured in the violence that swept India’s financial capital. Although the “Indian Mujahedin” and “Al Qaeda in India” are the corporate media’s suspects in the violence, the attacks have more to do with score settling and a warning by a CIA asset and Muslim-Hindu gang violence.

The violence began with some crude “dud” bombs being planted around the city. However, these are seen as “false flag” attacks carried out by HIndu nationalist terrorists who support the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which hopes to beat the ruling Congress Party in forthcoming elections. The Hindu nationalists often wave the “Muslim terrorist” shirt to win popular support.

In the past, Mumbai’s exiled Muslim “Mafia” boss, on-and-off again CIA asset Dawood Ibrahim, a veteran of the CIA’s mujahedin war in Afghanistan and who is now living in exile in Karachi, Pakistan, and is wanted by Indian authorities, has the street muscle in Mumbai to stop further violence. Ibrahim owns a construction company in Karachi, has financial interests in Dubai, and is, according to our intelligence sources, involved with the CIA in Kathmandu casinos and the drug trade in Nepal. The CIA has shown no inclination to apprehend Ibrahim and with the Hindu nationalists making a power play in Mumbai with attempted “false flag” attacks, Ibrahim has shown no desire to stop the violence.