2-Dec-08: Mumbai questions

How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?

It's the question of all questions. And it's asked very effectively by Tom Gross who used to be the Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and now produces incisive columns on a freelance basis. He has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "If this Isn't Terrorism, What Is?"

Please read the whole thing. A few more of Tom Gross' questions about Mumbai and the media's coverage follow:

Why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists?
Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors?
Why did Britain's highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the "militants" showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed" when exactly the opposite was true: targets and victims were very carefully selected.
Why did the "experts" invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?
What is the motivation of journalists in trying to mangle language - such as going out of their way to refer to terrorists as "militants," as one Mumbai story on yesterday's Times of London Web site seemed to do? Do they somehow wish to express sympathy for these murderers, or perhaps make their crimes seem almost acceptable?
How are we going to effectively confront terrorists when we can't even identify them as such?

Additional painfully sharp questions are posed by Dennis Prager, another incisive observer, in an article he calls "The Rabbi and the Terrorist".

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India’s major city devote so much of its efforts -- 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?
The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied?
Why did Hitler - as documented by the late historian Lucy Dawidowicz in her aptly named book “The War against the Jews” - weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?

Prager's article, which is certainly worth reading through in its entirety, ends with these two final points:

One is that it is exquisitely fitting that the same week the murders in Mumbai were taking place, the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions. As it has for decades, the U.N. has again sanctioned hatred for a good and decent country as small on the map of the world as the Chabad House is on the map of Mumbai.
Two: Statements from Chabad in reaction to the torture-murders of a 28-year-old Chabad rabbi and his wife called on humanity to react to this evil “with random acts of kindness.” Evil hates goodness. That’s why the terrorists targeted a Chabad Rabbi and his wife.

At almost every opportunity, we (the authors of this blog) personally try to explain to whoever will listen that the war against the terrorists is going badly, and it's going to get much worse. Most people don't really understand how dangerous terrorism is to every last one of us. Nor are they likely to understand how on-the-ball the questions we have mentioned here are.

Failing to understand these things, whether you are a journalist or a politician or the person in charge of security for a major railway station, is a life-and-death matter, and mostly the understanding is just not happening.

6-Sep-06: Lebanese Underground

Tom Gross provides an invaluable service by publishing the results of the monitoring of the BBC's Arabic service for this article.

On August 1, retired Egyptian Major General Hussam Suwailem, the main studio guest for the daily "Hadith al-Saa" program on the BBC Arabic World Service (the equivalent of the "Newshour" program on the English-language BBC World Service) said Israel's airstrikes were failing because Hizbullah was "invisible". Hizbullah's underground network where they were hiding, he said, was so extensive that it amounted to an underground city. He said the network had been built by North Korean companies in the six years since Israel left Lebanon. The tunnels, he added, were dug deeper than the penetration ability of the GBU-28 bomb used by Israel; they each linked to three small military cities, and in some places the network goes as far as to reach inside Syria. Inside this network, he continued, communications structures were built with the co-operation of German companies. Suwailem further stated that the central command center of Hizbullah is in the Harmal area (in the Northern Beka valley), in which the al-Manar TV transmitters were also placed.

Six years of preparation. A vast underground city. North Korean and German technology. A cross-border structure reaching all the way into Syria. Sort of suggests they had a fairly serious war in mind - perhaps a war that isn't over yet.

As Tom Gross points out:

Hizbullah fired 4,228 rockets at Israel during the 34 days of fighting, leading to 53 fatalities, 250 severely wounded, and over 2,000 less seriously wounded. There was extensive damage to hundreds of dwellings, several public utilities, and dozens of industrial plants. One million Israelis lived near or in shelters or security rooms, with over 250,000 civilians evacuating the north and relocating to other areas of the country.

And with all of this, we're treated to the spectacle of prominent politicial scientists speaking at an Islamic-sponsored conference in the US last week and blaming the entire catastrophe on Israeli premeditation and on its "influential Washington lobby". What's the world coming to if you can't form your political opinions on the basis of academic objectivity? Suggested answer: a fairly dangerous place. See CAMERA's research data for some disturbing indicators of how and why. And Benny Morris' powerful analysis "The Ignorance at the Heart of an Innuendo".