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December 11, 2008
Sadly, Americans sat down for dinner this past Thanksgiving with the horror of the terrorists’ attack in India playing out in the background. For American Jews there was also the horrible news that these Islamic terrorists assaulted a Jewish facility, in addition to the other sites they had attacked.
The Mumbai attack signaled a reversion to a type of terrorist campaign different from the car bombs and planted incendiary devices that had become the terrorists’ recent destructive instruments of choice. There were trained terrorists who marched into two of the finest hotels in Mumbai — as well as the Chabad house and the train station — and calmly started shooting. They took no hostages and made no demands. They were pure nihilists. They sought only to wreak havoc among the local population and shake up the region and the world. Their goal was strictly to create chaos.
According to many experts, these presumably Pakistani-based and -trained terrorists represented merely a handful of the hundreds of eager young volunteers who have been “educated” in the Islamic madrassas in Pakistan, standing by awaiting their assignment. They have been infused with hatred of the West, Hindus, Jews, and Israelis. They are even educated to hate those Islamists who are different from them — witness the bombings and suicide attacks occurring in Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, etc.
On a geopolitical level, this attack intensified, once again, the saber rattling between India and Pakistan. After a period during which the two sides appeared to be reestablishing a more civil relationship as well as a strategy for regional problem solving, the Indian government, as well as the Indian people, are once again accusing the Pakistani government of directly or tacitly encouraging radical Islamists. In addition, the unsettled situation in Kashmir continues to feed Indian-Pakistani tension.
The potential nuclear confrontation is not confined to these two antagonists. Not only do India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, but so do the Chinese, with whom the Indians have had a tense border situation since the 1960s. The Iranians may be close to joining the nuclear club. In addition, given Pakistan’s technological development, other Islamic states are accelerating their own pursuit of nuclear weapons, with money being no obstacle for many of them. Weapons experts assume that there are those in Pakistan who would have no qualms about disseminating fissionable material or weapons for the right price.
Alternatively, radical Islamist groups could opt for nonconventional terror strategies, which might well include the use of dirty bombs or “merely” the spread of fissionable material. Such a tactic would render the current terrorist threats chicken feed.
The Mumbai attacks also complicate the West’s pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan and adjoining regions of Pakistan. The presence in India of cells of the Taliban and Al-Qaida, and the Lashkar in Pakistan, opens new fronts in the war on terror.
Finally and no means least, the entire world recognized that Jews and Israelis were singled out by these terrorists. The terrorists chose the Chabad house over larger, more populated targets in Mumbai. While the Chabad-Lubavitch movement has pledged to continue its outreach to Jews throughout the world, it was demoralizing, nevertheless, to Jews around the world to see the terrorist leadership once again injecting their hatred of Jews and Israel into the equation.
President-elect Barack Obama already has a long line of international challenges awaiting him in January. With the attacks in Mumbai, the crisis on the Indian subcontinent jumps to the head of the queue.
Dr. Gilbert N. Kahn is a professor of political science at Kean University in Union (e-mail gkahn@kean.edu).
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