Our World: The jihadist-multicultural alliance
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 2, 2008
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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."

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 Bush 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.