Senseless Attack on Mumbai

Some Unanswered Questions?

By Latheef Farook

(February 19, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Is the senseless attack on Mumbai and the heartless killings of innocent people on Thursday 27 a pretext to unleash a campaign to slaughter Muslims as it was done in the aftermath of the 9/11 events in New York and Pensylvania? The ever growing Washington. London, Tel Aviv and New Delhi axis buttress this fear.

Will the Hindu extremist forces, which hijacked Indian politics under the umbrella of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, unleash, yet another anti Muslim pogrom or prepare the ground to invade and turn Pakistan into another Iraq?

These are some of the questions lingering the minds of Muslims all over in the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage last week. This fear emanates from the fact that this exactly what happened in the aftermath of the 9/11 events in New York when the most detestable US President George Bush, backed by disgraced British Prime minister Tony Blair, unleashed a global campaign demonizing Islam and Muslims to implement their evil designs.

Since then almost every independent inquiry into the WTC attack came to one conclusion. And that was neither Al Qaeda nor any other Muslim had anything to do with it”. However, the evil forces behind this tragedy had done the damage .They continue the anti Muslim campaign unabated hand in glove with Europe, Russia, India , China and with the active collaboration of Arab dictators. The pro Jewish Western media, which remains an integral part of Western war machine, has been in the forefront in selling the myth that Muslims promote terrorism.

As expected, even before a suspect was captured the Western media joined by the Indian media, began involving Islamic militants to mislead people all over.

First, an unknown group called Deccan Mujahedeen was blamed. The question is how such a sophisticated, well coordinated ,simultaneous and multiple attack was planned and executed by such an unknown group without being detected by the Indian intelligence services?

Within hours, Lashker e Taiba ,fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, was accused. Then the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused a group based in a neighboring country- obviously meaning Pakistan .Traditionally Indian governments blame neighboring Pakistan or Bangladesh and swiftly arrest members of banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India, SIMI, for attacks on Indian soil .Singing the chorus the United States too accused Lashker e Tayeba.

Condemning this as a beastly act, Indian Muslim leaders demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice while observing that such a massive attack that requires a lot of preparation, material and logistic support, could not take place without the connivance of some high placed power or backer. They urged for all to rise above politics, face this threat in unity and refrain from using it for petty political ends.

They also requested the authorities not to rush to any conclusion as it was routinely done in the past, but to patiently probe taking into account the various local and foreign powers, including foreign intelligence agencies, which may benefit from this chaos and insecurity.

However, this statement failed to draw the attention of Indian and foreign media.

By the time, the only surviving suspect, wearing a red thread around the wrist, a Hindu tradition, was taken into custody the media managed to brainwash people that it was the Muslims who were behind these attacks.

During the past few months, there has been a spate of bomb explosions in different parts of India and the police, as a rule, suspected, arrested, tortured and even killed Muslim youths.On September 29, there was a bomb blast in Malegaon that claimed six lives.

In this connection, five people were detained by the Anti Terrorist Squad ,ATS, in Pune. The detained five included two army officers ,one of them a Major (Retd) Prabhakar Kulkarni , heading the Bhonsala Military School and College run by the Central Hindu Military Education Society, and three Hindu activists -Sadhvi Pradnyasingh Thakur, a so called female saint, Shivnarayansing Kalsangram and Shyam Sahu. They were blamed for a series of deadly bombings in Malegaon in September, which were initially blamed on Muslim militants.

The arrest of especially the female saint Sadhvi, with close links to Hindu extremist forces, alarmed the BJP and other Hindu extremist parties.

Hemant Karkare, Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad ,ATS, chief,was about to disclose these Hindu militants’ involvement in the recent bombings in India and he came under severe criticism by the Hindu extremist forces including the BJP.Indian media reported on November 27 that Hemant Karkare had received death threats days earlier over his plan to unravel the Hindu terrorist cell. The Press Trust of India news agency reportedly received phone calls on November 26 threatening to blow up within days the residence of Karkare known for his discipline and integrity.

The unanswered question is why would the terrorists, if as alleged they were Muslims, kill Karkare who was about to expose Hindu terrorism? The irony is that all three ATS officers, Hemant Karkare, DIG Ashok Kale and encounter specialist Vijay Salazar, were eliminated during last week’s attack on Mumbai.

In another development journalist and human rights activist Amrish Mishra have accused Israel’s secret service agent Mossad and the RSS for the attack on Mumbai. Moreover, they attacked the Taj Hotel, a precious heritage building which reminds the Mogul rule in India which the Hindu extremists, who wanted to wipe out all traces of Islam and Muslims in their drive to set up a Hindu Raj in India, hate.

Describing the attack as grave as the killing of Mahatma Gandhi and the demolition of Babri Masjid, Mishra claimed that the killing of brave ATS officers who could have shown the real face of the saffron terrorism created suspicion. Besides the starting of the firing from Nariman House where substantial numbers of Jews live, showed that this was an anti-national act of terror involving Mossad’s hand, because this kind of attack is just not possible by RSS alone. it was the joint 'effort' of Mossad and RSS.

Mishra clearly saw in the TV that Hemant Karkare was wearing the helmet for the confrontation and was shocked to hear after half an hour that he was killed. After the attack, some miscreants had come on the road with saffron flags chanting anti-Muslim slogans but people drove them out.

Those who are very much in touch with the situation did not seem to believe that these attacks are the handy work of any Muslim terrorist organization because they know the forces behind these attacks.

Talking to TV channels, many pointed out that the number of Jews started to increase at Nariman House arousing suspicion forcing them to lodge a complaint with the police which failed to take any action. They believe that this tragedy could have been averted had the police acted on the complaint. Besides people around the area had stated that, on Wednesday night Jews at Nariman House had purchased and stocked food stuff and even liquor from a local store. It is highly unlikely that a Muslim, let alone a ‘Mujahid’, and especially one politicized enough to carry out such an attack, would consume liquor in normal life, let alone hours before his inevitable ‘martyrdom’.

India is one country, which managed to maintain good relations with Israel ever since its inception while showing a friendly face to the gullible Arab dictators. These ties between Zionist Jews and especially the RSS, bonded together by their inherent hatred towards Muslims, flourished since the two countries established diplomatic ties following the signing of late PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s sham of Oslo Peace Agreement with Israel.

According to Mishra the heroic death of Hemant Karkare has left the BJP-Shiv Sena combine with eggs on their faces. On Friday, Narendra Modi, BJP's poster-boy chief minister and Hindutva mascot, paid lofty tributes to Karkare and other senior cops who lost their lives in the counter attack. However, before his death on duty, Karkare and his colleagues at the ATS were at the receiving end of almost a slanderous attack not only by BJP and Shiv Sena leaders, but also by several Sangh Parivar organizations for the ongoing ATS probe into the Malegaon blasts.

In fact, it is worthy to recall that few months ago there was a deadly attack against the US embassy in the Yemeni Capital Sanaa. As expected Muslims were accused. However, the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh later disclosed that the attack was linked to Israeli intelligence service-Mossad.

Few simple rational questions to think about this attack were;

1. Can anyone in the world remember or worry about the case against Hindu terrorist cell, which was unveiled by Maharashtra's ATS chief Hemant Karkare? Now it is successfully diverted. Isn't it?
2. Where is Karkare now? Wasn't he wiped out from this world by the terrorists at the initial stage of this Drama?
3. Why didn’t Indian forces or any media show a single dead body of terrorist during the first two days?
4. How can the so-called "foreign terrorists" continue to fight for more than two days without worrying about the stock of the weapons? They had been blasting, shooting and setting fires here and there. Did they bring such a large quantity of military hardware?
5. If so, how did they bring such a large quantity of weapons for this attack? Wasn’t it amazing that they had been getting enough weapons just as if somebody was supplying the ammunition stock to continue the attack successfully?

Wouldn’t it any one believe that this kind of barbaric killings can only be done by groups motivated by ultra-racism such as RSS, VHP and the Israeli military?

Explaining the grim situation faced by Indian Muslims Jaipur based human rights activist Kavita Srivastava , President of the Rajasthan chapter of the Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties said;

“Muslims are being readily branded as terrorists, and soon after the blasts large numbers of innocent Muslims were wrongly suspected as terrorists, arrested and interrogated by the police, and many of them were subjected to cruel torture. The police somehow automatically assume that Muslims were responsible for the blasts, without having any proof. Almost a fourth of those who died in the Jaipur blasts were Muslims,although Muslims account for just about a tenth of the city's population.

Anti-Muslim bias in agencies of the state is mounting today. Just one instance of this is how some of the Muslims picked up by the police were asked if they believe in the Quran or in the Indian Constitution, this ridiculous question reflecting the entirely erroneous notion that a religious and observant Muslim somehow is a traitor or a potential traitor to India.

And then there is the media. They simply parrot the police version of any Muslim whom it picks up as a terrorist, and when it is found that this person is innocent and is subsequently let off, the media chooses not to say anything about it. So, in this way, the image of large numbers of Muslims is being deliberately tarnished. Many of them have lost their jobs because of this, and are tainted in society for the rest of their lives although they have nothing to do with terrorism.