India Pakistan and the mubmai attack - Must read

Tolerating intolerance
The Sunday Telegraph (Australia)
November 30, 2008

By Piers Akerman

THE involvement of Britons among the terrorists responsible for the murders of more than 150 people in Mumbai last week signals another milestone in the march of multiculturalism and the failure of Western and democratised nations to deal with Islamists.

In the mosques of London, leaders like Anjem Choudary, right-hand man to the hate-filled cleric Omar Bakri, were praising the killers, saying any Britons or Americans among the dead were targeted legitimately because they should not have gone to India.

"Muslims are being killed in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan every day through acts of atrocity against them. But the media only report events like Mumbai,'' he told The Daily Mail as Indian police revealed that at least two terrorists they had captured were British-born Pakistanis.

In the UK, as in many European nations and in Australia, governments have permitted Muslim migrants to create their own enclaves and ghettos and preach their own interpretations of their religion, unhindered by the cultures of their host nations and often in contempt of the laws of the society of their host country.

Aided by the powerful civil rights lobbies and squadrons of lawyers, Islamists are waging a successful war to prevent further assimilation of Muslims into Western society, forcing women to wear traditional Islamic garb to emphasise their separateness, urging the introduction of Islamic sharia law into local courts.

From the shores of Somalia to the cells of Guantanamo, the West is in confused retreat, its politicians too concerned about appearing to be in breach of international civil rights covenants than they are about the safety of their citizens.

India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population - the largest outside Indonesia - is no different.

Though the vast majority of its Muslims are peaceable and law abiding, it has not been able to develop a coherent policy to deal with the terrorists, despite continuing attacks in which more than 4000 people have been murdered in the past four years.

Lying between two backward, Islamic-loving nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is a forward-looking country with a vibrant economy that is seeking to take advantage of its assets, its large English-speaking population, its legacy of British laws.

The Indian Islamic community is isolated within the greater population, its members attuned to the cults of victimhood and hate which spew from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, across the Gulf from Mumbai.

Fearful, perhaps, of an Islamic uprising supported by the jihadist groups allowed shelter by Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Indian government has moved to appease, rather than challenge, Islamist supporters.

It was the first nation to ban Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988, though the Nobel prize-winning author was born in Mumbai; and, 11 years later, it released three terrorists, in exchange for an aircraft hijacked by Taliban supporters and taken to Afghanistan.

One of those freed was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a former London School of Economics student who later murdered The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, recording the crime on a video which has been seen worldwide. Another case of failed appeasement, like Israel's regular releases of Palestinian terrorists.

With Indian commandos still freeing hostages, the usual voices in the West are busily disseminating their preferred version of events.

Typically, your ABC's Sydney morning presenter Deborah Cameron spent much of Friday attempting to find guests who would agree with her theory that disparity of wealth was the motivating force behind the massacre.

This peculiar view is regularly trotted out by the soft-headed adherents of the suburban Left, who instinctively believe that a caring, sharing approach will persuade terrorists to leave their AK47s at home.

Nowhere has it worked.

Everywhere the terrorists have taken the money, or their freedom, and gone on to commit more and greater atrocities, having benefited from the West's lack of intellectual resolve.

It is the same muddling nonsense that has prevented the West from blockading the Somali ports used by growing numbers of pirates, secure in the knowledge that they can exploit a torrent of sympathy by claiming that the vessels they hijack are owned by nations which support fishing fleets netting in their waters.

There is one Australian, of course, who knows well what lies in the minds of those who conducted the murderous raid on Mumbai - David Hicks.

He embraced radical Islam, trained in Pakistan with young men no different from those responsible for this atrocity and expressed his desire to kill Indians at the first opportunity.

He was a good hater, as his own letters to his family revealed. He wanted to overthrow what he termed "Western Jewish domination'', he wanted to kill non-Muslims and he joined the Taliban after the World Trade Centre tower attacks.

Now, of course, he is the darling of a subset of the suburban Left, those who either have no memory, or no love of democracy nor grasp of morality.

The ABC should hire him as its terrorism commentator, when his control order lapses in three weeks.