The jihadist-multicultural alliance

Doctors at the Mumbai hospital who treated the victims of the past week’s jihadist attacks were rendered nearly speechless by the carnage. As two doctors explained to the Indian news Web site rediff.com, violent gang wars and previous terror attacks didn’t hold a candle to what happened.

The bodies of the victims showed clear signs of preexecution torture. The worst tortured, they said, were the Jewish victims. As one doctor put it, "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the [first day of the assault]. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again." India’s Intelligence Bureau revealed that a captured jihadist explained that they were instructed to seek out foreign and especially Israeli victims.

In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacres, it is hard to imagine that there is anything as pernicious as the jihadists who sought out and murdered non-Muslims with such cruelty. But there is. Their multicultural apologists, who enable them to continue to kill by preventing their victims from fighting back, are just as evil.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts throughout the world, were motivated to kill by their adherence to totalitarian Islam. Totalitarian Islam calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of all other non-Muslims.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West – particularly of the US and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners – or, in the case of India, Hindus – are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners.

IN THE case of the Mumbai massacres, the jihadists’ multicultural defenders began justifying their actions while they were still in the midst of their torture and murder spree. In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria hinted that Indian Hindus had it coming.

"One of the untold stories of India," he explained, "is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last 10 years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted."

[More]Then too, the multicultural media suppressed the fact that the jihadists were targeting Jews. Outside of Israel, it took the media nearly two days to report that the Chabad House had even been taken over by the jihadists. And once they did finally report that Jews were being targeted, they made every effort to downplay the strategic significance of the jihadists’ decision to send a team off the beaten path simply to butcher Jews.

Emblematic of the Western media’s attempts to play down the story was The New York Times. Two days into the hostage drama, the Times opined, "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

JEWS WERE not the only ones who had their identity obscured. The jihadists did too. For almost an entire day, major news networks in the West suppressed the fact that the murderers were Muslim jihadists, claiming oddly, that they could also be Hindu terrorists. This was odd not because there are no Hindu terrorists, but because the perpetrators referred to themselves from the outset as "mujahideen," or Islamic warriors.

Once the jig was up on their attempts to hide the identities of the perpetrators and their victims alike, the jihadists’ multicultural enablers started blaming the victims. For instance, on Sunday, The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum attacking Indian Hindus. After blithely dismissing the atrocities that were still under way while she wrote as "probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir," Nussbaum focused her ire against India’s Hindus. Recalling the gruesome and apparently state-sanctioned violence against Muslims in India’s Gujarat state in 2002, Nussbaum cast the jihadists as nothing more than victims of a Hindu terror state which has been victimizing Muslims for no reason since the 1930s.

Nussbaum’s essay was a patent example of selective multicultural memory. She apparently forgot about the Islamic conquests of India from the seventh through the 16th centuries in which India’s Buddhists were wiped out and 70 million-80 million Hindus were slaughtered by Muslim overlords. She also forgot about the thousands of Indian Hindus who have been murdered by jihadists since the 1990s.

After ignoring India’s long and recent history of jihad, Nussbaum condemned an imaginary double standard which she claimed labels all Muslims as terrorists and gives Hindus a free ride in subjugating them. Of course, thanks to multiculturalists like Nussbaum, the double standard we suffer from is the exact opposite of what she described: Muslim terrorists, we are told, are victims of persecution and represent a teensy-tiny fraction of Muslims. On the other hand, all non-Muslims involved in even marginally violent activities against Muslims are murderers, fanatics, extremists. Moreover, they are representative of their non-Muslim societies.

THE ATTACKS in Mumbai and the multiculturalists’ rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger.

The attacks in Mumbai were exceedingly sophisticated in design and execution. There were echoes of previous attacks, including the al-Qaida bombing of Mike’s Place café in Tel Aviv in 2003, and its execution of Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001. But there was also a clear implementation of the lessons learned from those and other attacks carried out by al-Qaida and other terror groups.

By making clear their ability to improve their skills by drawing on lessons from past operations, the jihadists in Mumbai were similar to their counterparts in Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and every other place where jihadists have safe operational bases. Their obvious knowledge of their enemies’ weaknesses also calls to mind the sophisticated modes of operation of Islamic terrorists in the West and in Israel.

In all places where jihadist forces operate in secure bases, they are becoming more sophisticated in their tactics, training and doctrine. Their weapons are increasingly advanced.

Jihadist regimes, like their terror proxies and allies, are not only increasing their direct support for jihadist terrorists. Regimes, and particularly Iran, are matching their increased support for terror groups with their own nonconventional weapons programs. So, in the case of Iran, its takeover of Lebanon and Gaza through Hizbullah and Hamas is being made even more dangerous by its progress in its nuclear weapons program. So too, nuclear-armed Pakistan’s military and ISI are expanding their support for al-Qaida and the Taliban at the same time they are facilitating jihadist attacks in Pakistan’s large cities as well as in India.

This progressive improvement in the capabilities and tightened coordination between jihadist regimes and jihadist groups lends credence to the view that the probability increases with each passing day that a jihadist regime will arm jihadist groups with nuclear weapons.

THE SECOND truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. And there is nothing effective that democratic governments can do to defend against the jihadists that multiculturalists will deem acceptable. This is the case because multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists. In line with this basic fact, it is worth returning for a moment to Nussbaum.

The only advice she offered the Indian government that had just absorbed a coordinated attack, launched and planned by domestic as well as foreign operatives on sea and on land, was to treat terrorists like regular criminals. As she put it, "Let’s go after criminals with determination, good evidence and fair trials, and let’s stop targeting people based on their religious affiliation."

And of course, Nussbaum herself is little different in her refusal to acknowledge the fact of the global jihad than many of the governments principally targeted by jihadist regimes and terror armies. Take the incoming Obama administration for example.

Iran daily threatens to destroy the US, annihilate Israel, close the Straits of Hormuz, use nuclear weapons and proliferate nuclear weapons to other states. It controls Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq and, with Pakistan, the major sponsor of the insurgency in Afghanistan. It has cultivated strategic ties with US foes in the Western Hemisphere like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.

Yet one of the first foreign policy initiatives promised by the incoming Obama administration is to attempt to diplomatically engage Iran with the aim of striking a grand bargain with the mullahs.

Or take Israel. The outgoing Olmert government may well lead the Western world in its attempts to deny the existence of the global jihad which has marked Israel as its central battlefield. During his visit to the White House last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was confronted by an incredulous US President George W. Bush who simply couldn’t understand his strange enthusiasm for the prospect of giving Syria the Golan Heights. Bush couldn’t fathom Olmert’s fervent, if rationally unsupportable belief that if Israel gives Syria the Golan Heights, Syria will happily abandon its best friend and overlord in Teheran.

What he apparently didn’t realize is that Olmert’s championing of an Israeli surrender to Syria stems from his devout adherence to multiculturalism. If Syria can’t be peeled away from Iran, that means that Israel can’t be blamed for Syrian aggression. And that is a prospect that Olmert simply cannot abide by.

SOME COMMENTATORS dismiss the danger emanating from the global jihad by noting that its global designs are not matched by global capabilities. They argue that when the West finally decides to defeat the jihadists, they will be utterly vanquished.

Unfortunately, this view ignores two things. It ignores the fact that the jihadists are devoting all of their energies to improving and expanding their capacity to fight their war. And it ignores the fact that the multiculturalists’ influence is growing steadily and has repeatedly stymied Western attempts to confront the jihadist threat head-on. Unless something changes soon, the consequences of the jihadist-multicultural alliance will be suffered by millions and millions of people.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.