Mumbai Jihad Madness

by Jerry Gordon (Dec. 2008)

 

In his opinion piece on Mumbai in Israel, Emanuel Winston noted the meticulous planning, insidious infiltration of targets like the Chabad Nariman House, hotels and other tourist centers in Mumbai: 

Information just released indicates that the Muslim terrorists rented rooms at the Chabad Nariman House, posing as Malaysian students. That may also entail smuggling in weapons, explosives, grenades for prepositioning. No doubt the same technique was used to infiltrate the hotels. Thus, they could reconnoiter the best entrances and exits. Recall how long and difficult it was for the Indian commandos to find the terrorists? Many of the police first responders and the commandos were killed in an ambush with interlocking fields of fire. 

Winston asked disturbingly: ”How many targets are now being prepared in America, England and Israel?”

 

A Los Angeles Times report focused on how events unfolded at the Chabad Nariman House, where several hapless ex-patriate Israeli, US and Mexican business travelers –all Jews- were ensnared in the murderous assault.  It noted that the Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka  and four others were murdered leaving the Holtzbergs’  traumatized two year son as a bloodied, anguished orphan seized by his Nepalese nanny from her hiding place and taken to safety. The Holtzbergs and the other Jews murdered in Mumbai were laid to rest in the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem.

What the Times report doesn’t comment on was that the Jihadi hit team tortured Rabbi Holzberg’s wife, who was five months pregnant with their unborn child in front of her husband who himself was subsequently tortured and murdered.  All done in full view of their son, two year old Moishe.

 

The Times article does give evidence of the savage extremist Jihadi ideology in this telephonic exchange between a Chabad official in Washington, DC and rants with an Indian TV station:

 

…on Thursday, the Mexican hostage, Rabinovich, was ordered to place two calls to Israeli diplomats and relay a demand that Indian forces refrain from attacking the building.

That afternoon the rabbi’s cell phone rang. A gunman answered gruffly in Urdu.

Rabbi Levi Shemtov was calling from Washington, trying desperately to reach his Chabad-Lubavitch colleague. The gunman spoke no English, Shemtov said, so the rabbi found an interpreter and dialed again.

Without identifying a cause or spelling out demands, the gunman promised to free his captives if he got what he wanted. He identified himself as Imran Babar, age 25, and said all the hostages were OK.

Shemtov promised to put Babar in touch with Indian authorities. But efforts to patch an Indian police official into a subsequent call failed.

Israeli officials said there was never any negotiation with the two gunmen.

“I asked if we could hear the voice of the rabbi, or someone who was alive there,” Shemtov said. “We only heard the voice of one woman screaming in English, ‘Please help immediately!’ “

That was the last reported sign of life from any of the hostages.

When Shemtov insisted again on speaking to Rabbi Holtzberg, he said Babar replied: “You’ve already asked for too much.”

The gunman hung up and called an Indian television station. He ranted against Israel’s security cooperation with India and an Israeli army general’s September visit to the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, the territory fought over by India and Pakistan.

“This is a matter between us and the Hindu [Indian] government,” Babar said. “Why does Israel come in here?”

“We are tired of facing tortures and injustices. We are forced to do this.”

Why was such savagery wreaked on innocent Jews: Israelis, Americans and Mexicans?

 

Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of  Political Islam has written about the ‘tears of jihad’ the estimated 270 million kafirs or unbelievers in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia slaughtered in successive Jihad assaults that followed the eruption of Political Islam in the 7th century C.E..  Among the ‘tears’ are the more than estimated 70 million Hindus slaughtered by several waves of Muslim attacks against the hated polytheists.

 

The UNESCO  designated world site of the Tal Mahal – the so-called ‘jewel of Islamic art in India’  was built in the 17th Century C.E. by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.   

 

As this map depicts, the Muslim Mughal Empire at its peak in 1707 stretched from Baluchistan and Afghanistan in the West to the Himalaya Mountains to the Northeast to what is now Bangladesh in the east. Only the tip of India and Sri Lanka remained free from Muslim control. The onset of the British Raj would witness the demise of the Mughal Empire with decentralization among the Muslim and Hindu Princely states, which accelerated following the Muslim Sepoy rebellion in 1857.

 

Were the allegedly ‘secular’ Mughal emperors ‘benign’ when it came to pursuit of the Islamic precept of Jihad?  Hardly. Witness this excerpt from a study by Indian scholar K.S. Lal on p. 459  in Dr. Andrew Bostom’s, “The Legacy of Jihad”:

 

Even in Emperor Akbar’s ‘secular’ reign the religious spirit of Jihad was not lost. Abdul Qadir Badaoni who was then one of Akbar’s court chaplains or imams, states that he sought an interview with the emperor when the royal troops were marching against Rana Pratap in 1576, begging leave of absence for “the privilege of joining the campaign to soak his Islamic beard in Hindu infidel blood”. Akbar was so pleased at the expression of allegiance to his person and to the Islamic idea of Jihad that he bestowed a handful of gold coins on Badaoni as a token of his pleasure. It may be recalled that as an adolescent, Akbar had earned the title of Ghazi by beheading the defenseless infidel Himu. Under Akbar and Jahangir “five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed,” says Emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration. Under Aurangzeb every chronicler avers that wars against infidels were fought in the spirit of Jihad. In short, Jihad was never given up in India from the time of Muhammad bin Qasim to that of Aurangzeb and beyond, so long as Muslim rule lasted.

 

Then fast forward and juxtapose the roiling contemporary sectarian tensions between 150 million Indian Muslims and over 1 Billion Indian Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, etc. 

Most Americans don’t realize how “Middle Eastern’ are these Muslim enclaves in India.  Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, a noted comparative religious scholar, distinguished Florida State Lawton scholar and former University of Bridgeport (CT) President made this comment during a telephone conversation about the Mumbai Islamic terror assault.  He said that during a trip to India that he chanced to encounter one of these Indian Muslim enclaves near Delhi.  What struck him was that, it could have been Cairo or Riyadh because of the presence of Minarets, Muezzins entreating the “faithful” to prayer times, women wearing Hijabs and burkas.

Not well known was one of the earliest visitors to Adolph Hitler after his release from Landberg prison in the 1920’s was an Indian Raj Muslim leader who reflected this Jihad tradition, Muhammad ‘Inayat Allah Khan. 

Here’s what scholar Dr. Andrew Bostom has written about this storied encounter between Khan and Hitler. 

 

Perhaps the earliest recorded evidence of Hitler’s serious interest in the jihad was provided by Muhammad ‘Inayat Allah Khan [who adopted the pen name “al-Mashriqi”—“the Orientalist” or “the Sage of the East”].  Born in the Punjab in 1888, al-Mashriqi was a Muslim polymath who attended Cambridge on a government scholarship, and excelled in the study of oriental languages, mathematics, engineering, and the sciences.

 

Not only did Mashriqi translate the standard abridged version of Mein Kampf (then commonly available) from English into Urdu, during one of his sojourns in Europe, which included time spent in Berlin, he met Hitler in the early years of the Fuehrer’s leadership of the National Socialist [Nazi] Party. Their meeting took place in 1926 at the National Library. Here is the gist of Mashriqi’s report on his interaction with Hitler as described in a letter to the renowned scholar of Indian Islam, J.M.S. Baljon:

 

I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement.

 

As Bostom notes in his piece, “Hitler and Jihad:”

 

Such concordance between Nazism and Jihadism reflects an historical continuum evident since the advent of the Nazi movement. This nexus was already apparent in Hitler’s own observations from 1926, elaborated upon over the following decades by both the Nazi leader, and other key Nazi officials, and ideologues. Not surprisingly, there are two predominant, recurring themes in this discourse: jihad as total war, and the annihilationist jihad against the Jews.

 

Our government is in total denial over recognition of these Islamic doctrinal warfare and primordial anti-Semitism. Witness the efforts by Heshem Islam, a personal staff aide to Deputy Defense Secretary England, engaged in Muslim outreach castigating the US military’s only expert on Islamic war doctrine under Sharia, Army reserve Major, Stephen Coughlin. Coughlin’s meticulous prepared and well grounded presentation has been made with great effect to senior serving general and staff officers in US Central Command. Yet, Islam got away with castigating Coughlin as a “Christian Zealot with a pen”, while embroidering his own resume-an example of Muslim taqiyyah – religiously sanctioned dissimilitude when dealing with kafirs, unbelievers. But then we have the US State and Homeland Security Departments in abject Dhimmitude, excluding terms like jihad, mujahedeen and Islamic supremacism from our official lexicons, directly denying recognition of Coughlin’s Islamic war doctrine that lay behind last week’s slaughter in Mumbai. 

 

Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles these telling remarks at a memorial service for the late Mumbai Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka at Chabad House in Westwood, California on November 30th:

 

The world has never experienced such a plague of darkness like the plague of Islamic fundamentalism that reveres death over life – that teaches young people that the preferred way to get to heaven is by murdering and maiming.

Even the worst murderers in the history of mankind, the Nazis, who gassed millions – for themselves would do anything to live another day. That’s what Eichmann and Mengele did when they were on the run.

The world should be very clear – achieving martyrdom by killing innocent civilians is an abomination – it is a concept that desecrates religion, denigrates humankind, and defames G-d himself.

But it is not only the terrorists who bear the responsibility – it is the religious leaders who programmed them, inspired them, and sent them, who are equally culpable. Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher never killed anyone – but they were named as war criminals at Nuremberg because on a daily basis, they poisoned the minds of tens of millions of Germans. That is exactly what the Imams of the Islamic Fundamentalists do.

The world must not remain silent. We have the tools to at least do something. The United Nations must make suicide terror a priority. Why is it that the General Assembly can call special sessions on drug cartels, on AIDs, on disarmament, on apartheid – all crucial issues – but it has not yet called for a special session on the greatest crime of the 21st century – suicide terror?

And to you, the supporters of the terrorists, wherever you are – your concept may be new, but we’ve seen your prototype before – you’re not the first to threaten our humanity. For 3,500 years, we’ve seen your likes during the pogroms, the Inquisition and the Holocaust and we’ve never changed our belief.

To use a metaphor that is appropriate for the forthcoming Chanukah festival – that one cruise of light that emanated from of the Chabad house in Mumbai has contributed more to humanity than your whole ideology and way of life. The Jewish people whom you seek to destroy will still be here –long after you and your haters have been deposited in the dustbins of history.

 

On December 14^th, a “Facing Jihad” one day conference will be held at the Begin Heritage Centerin Jerusalem. The event has been organized by M.K. Dr. Arieh Eldad head of the new Hatikvah  (‘the Hope”) party. Among those presenting at this conference will be Dutch Parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, producer of the controversial 16 minute film, “Fitna” (“chaos” or discord in Arabic) that intercuts excerpts of Suras from the Qu’ran with graphic evidence of contemporary jihad. Scholar Daniel Pipes and various members of the Knesset will be presenting as well. The events in Mumbai last week should re-energize the world’s attention on the realities of the Facing Jihad conference. For Israelis, Americans, Indians, U.K. and E.U. citizens recognition of what lay behind the Mumbai Jihad slaughter should lead to a civilizational event that would drain the murderous energy from Political Islam. Until that occurs, we simply have the continuation of a long bloody religious ideological war with ‘no-name’ this century.

 

 

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