Mumbai Clarification

Something that I have become passionate about is the concept of language and the importance of ideas. With the horrendous actions in Mumbai and their immediate implications for the region, I feel that it is important to stress the need for clarifications. As I wrote in a previous post, "we must call cowardly acts like these what it is, murderous evil." The current trend within media outlets is to call the perpetrators by every name other than Muslim fundamentalists. The cowardly murderers are portrayed as "militants," "gunmen" or "practitioners." The evil that civilization (Western, Far-Eastern, Near-Eastern) faces is the threat from Radicalized Islam.

While American foreign policy does play a role in the tension between the clash, it is not the sole reason. While Deepak Chopra and others might blame America, these attacks were not solely based on American policy. Bali hardly was an extension of American Imperialism when it was bombed several years ago. Turkey stood up against America in the prelude to the 2003 Iraq War, yet it was hit by bombings in Istanbul. This threat touches moderate Islamic states and secular democracies alike, it is a global force that needs to be reckoned with. It is important to also note that this threat is not an easy puzzle that many of my fellow conservatives paint. The government of Iran, the finances of Saudi Arabia and the youth of Central Asia are not mobilized with similar goals or objectives, bonded together in a unified plot. Instead it is going to be a Long War and this war needs differing solutions for different problems. The implementation of Soft and Hard Power will be key.

The murderers in Mumbai attacked civilians and a Jewish center. They targeted a Rabbi purposefully. One of my favorite columnist wrote a brilliant piece that speaks to this issue powerfully. Mark Steyn wrote,

"In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If they were just "teenage gunmen" or "militants" in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Mumbai? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: 'Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous.'"

Quite frankly, the populace of the West must be honest. We must be able to properly identify who the enemy is and what is their ideology. If we remain dishonest and merely call the perpetrators "teenage gunmen" we will forget the gravity of the situation. Clarification of the issue needs to be also met with restraint in our language as well. All Muslims are not terrorists and the "silent majority" must stand with the rest of the world. The problem is that these murderous thugs use the guise of Islam for their cowardice, thus implicating peace-loving Muslims. As Keith Pavlischek writes in First Things, "They do not appeal to Hindu or Buddhist texts, they do not justify their actions by appealing to Catholic encyclicals and papal pronouncements, they do not appeal to Protestant confessional creeds or to Jewish literature. They justify their resort to terrorist violence, rightly or wrongly, to Islamic canonical sources in the Koran and the Hadith." Moderate Muslims must remember that silence is acceptance. A reformation will only come from within Islamic society, it cannot be forced upon them. Peace loving Muslims must stand against the perverse terrorists, that is when true victory will occur. All that Westerners can do is stand with those vocal people and fight to eradicate the evil, through both word and deed.