Saturday Stories

A pretty picture to introduce some ugly news spotted while reading the British press on a cloudy Saturday morning.

Undelivered: Neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night... only political beliefs can stop the UK mail, as Britain's postal union workers decide not to distribute BNP election leaflets:

The Communication Workers Union says that Royal Mail is breaking a “conscience clause” agreed four years ago that allows staff to refuse to deliver literature they find offensive.
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"...The clause says members don’t have to deliver material if they feel threatened or if it is against their personal beliefs."
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One postman working in the Fishponds area of Bristol, said that his route bordered two ethnic-minority areas and it was “concerning” to be made to deliver inflammatory material.
He told the Western Daily Press: “We are being forced by management to give out the BNP material even though it’s against my beliefs — everyone knows what they stand for.
“We are being made to dish out this rubbish. I’ve read the BNP literature and although there isn’t anything racist or fascist on it, it does say ‘No to immigration’.”

Menace: A perennial danger is finally being addressed, as British school uniforms dispense with... ties:

Concerns over accidental strangling, playground games in which pupils yank each others' ties and fears that ties might catch fire in science lessons have seen the classroom institution fall victim to its clip-on cousin.
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Clip-ons have also been credited with improving pupils' behaviour at Arthur Terry School, in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.
Head Christopher Stone said: 'It's a mess when you walk around town and you see children with their buttons undone and their ties all over the place. Both attendance and behaviour had improved since the ties were brought in.'

Guilty: Great Britain's grim statistics in their war on terror: Out of 1,471 suspects detained in counter-terrorism operations, only 521 - just over a third - were charged with a crime. Of these, 340 were accused of terror-related offences, with 196 later being found guilty in court.
Fortunately they can add one more to their guilty column:

A man was convicted Friday of involvement in firebombing a London publisher behind "The Jewel of Medina", a controversial book about the child bride of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
Minicab driver Abbas Taj, 31, drove two men to the offices of Gibson Square publishers last September who poured diesel through the letter box and set it alight.
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"These men planned to carry out arson as a violent reaction and protest against the publishing of a book," said John McDowall, head of counter terrorism command at London's Metropolitan Police, after the trial.
"They did not care whether anybody would be killed or injured when they poured diesel through the letterbox and set fire to it.
"Photographs, tapes and documents found at their homes showed the violent mindset of this trio of arsonists."

Priorities: North Wales tells its police to focus law enforcement manpower towards dog owners who don't clean up after their dogs and people who litter on the street, instead of actual criminals:

Police in North Wales, where serious crime has rocketed year-on-year, have this week been told they need to “up the number” of people they stop for littering offences.
PC Richard Eccles, the General Secretary of the North Wales Police Federation, said: “Police officers act as litter-spotters but because they cannot issue the fines they have to detain the offender and wait for the PCSO to arrive. They feel like idiots.”
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“We should be more focused on more serious crime like burglaries, violent crimes and theft rather than being tasked with offences more suitably dealt with by the local council,” he said.
Compared with the same period last year, violent crime in North Wales has increased by 18 per cent, burglaries have risen by nearly 8 per cent and robberies have rocketed by an astonishing 115 per cent.

Surprise: I find myself reading the British press every morning, despite an almost daily oath to include it less frequently in my news reading; it's just too depressing and infuriating to be consumed in such regular doses. Fortunately, I have an ocean between me and these dispirIting stories; I can't imagine what it's like when this upside-down world is the one right outside your front door. Is this new poll, therefore, really all that shocking:

British people, long known for their pragmatism and "stiff upper-lip," have surprisingly come out on top in a poll to find the angriest nation in Europe, it was revealed Friday.
The survey, commissioned for comedy channel Gold, found that Brits on average get angry four times a day, while the supposedly hot-headed Italians only admit to 3.5 bouts of fury over the same period.

India Assam Bombings: Whose Blood Is On The Street

"I looked back, ran to the shop and found my brother lying in a pool of blood. He was dead among seven others."

The aftermath of the October 30 serial bombings in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam brings with it stories from survivors, victims and families of those blown to bits by islamist terrorists. Of the thirteen explosions, one took the life of 32-year old Ajay Das on the eve of finalizing his wedding date:

His grieving family said Titon, as Ajay was fondly called, had dropped out of school at a tender age to help his father and elder brother in their family business in Kokrajhar town. After years of hard work, the Das family had just begun to lead a comfortable life and was planning to marry off Titon. But Thursday's terror attack dashed all their hopes.

Parents of younger children were panic-stricken when their frantic calls to elementary schools went unanswered; were their children safe? Had schools been targeted? Would they be? After the first bomb went off in Ganeshguri at 11:15 am, no parent could know how many more would explode before school was set to send students home later in the afternoon.

"With cellphone networks jammed, I was getting desperate with every passing minute," said Sonali Burman, mother of a kindergarten student. "I called up the school, but the lines were clogged."

...
Sudhin Paul, a businessman, was terror struck when he learnt that an explosion had rocked Panbazaar area — his daughter studies in a school there.
"My wife was the first to react. She took my scooter and rushed to the school," he said. School and college authorities were desperate to keep campuses free from the tension and chaos outside.

As police and other emergency responders arrived to offer assistance to the survivors of the 13 bombs that went off over a 45-minute period, they faced a crowd that unleashed all their pent up frustrations with their government's inability to keep them safe:

[A]ngry protesters hurled bricks and stones at policemen, screaming against the administration's security failure. "We want justice. The Tarun Gogoi government has failed to protect us," the crowd shouted every time they rushed in to confront the police.

"Why not? We have lost our near and dear ones," a young engineering student from Lichubagan area said. The blast had killed six persons from his locality.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the mobs. The smell of the gas, however, was not strong enough to cover the stench of burnt flesh that lingered in the area. Pieces of human flesh covered with flies still lay littered in the area.

As the days go on we'll learn more tragic details about the men and women, the children and the aged, whose lives were cut short from timed bombs hidden in automobiles, motorcycles, bikes and rickshaws, bombs hidden by monsters masquerading as civilized human beings.

As yet, circumstances make it difficult for the media to report such biographical details to any great degree:

Some victims were charred to death in their vehicles, and clouds of black smoke towered over Guwahati as the streets filled with the screams of the injured and the dying.

Many of the dead were literally torn apart and vehicles in the target zone were turned to charred heaps of metal.

More Bombings In India; 77 Dead

More carnage in India, as several bombs went off Thursday across the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, killing 66 people outright, with another 11 dying from their wounds during the night. Indian media place the total number of wounded at a ghastly 450.

13 explosions rocked the districts of Guwahati, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and Barpeta. Six bombs were set off in Guwahati alone, causing so many casualties that hospital driveways "turned slushy with blood as a stream of victims were brought in."

The descriptions of the aftermath of the bombings sound like reports from a battlefield... which, in a sense, they are:

Black smoke billowed from the deputy commissioner's office housing the district courts, which bore the brunt of the attacks in Guwahati, as vehicles, including a number of cars, turned into mangled heaps of metal. ...

"Bodies of the many of the dead were charred beyond recognition. The blast sites were stewn with severed limbs and blood of the victims.

India has seen many terrorist bombings this year alone (64 blasts in the last six months), but this week's explosions were followed by an ominous response from the citizens of the cities under attack: they vented their frustration in a riot:

People poured into the streets of Guwahati immediately after the blasts inspite of the curfew, and attacked policemen shouting slogans against the administration for ‘‘failing to protect the city’’. Several fire engines and police vehicles were burned. Police, who were themselves left shell-shocked by the blasts, struggled to rein in the mobs. They had to fire in the air at some places to disperse the crowds.

A television station received a message from a group calling itself the "Islamic Security Force-Indian Mujahideen (ISF-IM)" on Friday, bragging about their successful slaughter, while warning of future slaughters to come:

"We, ISF-IM, take the responsibility of yesterday blast. We warn all of Assam and India for situation like this in future. We thank all our holy members and partners. AAamin" .

Godspeed to the grieving families of India... when will these massacres end??

For reports on some of the other recent attacks in India, please read our previous posts on India's war on terror:

The early September bombings in Delhi, and the email from hell taking responsibility for the destruction, as well as the price paid in blood for the butcher's bill.

Then there were the bombings in late September in Delhi, smaller in scale but no less horrible.

9-Year Old Terror Bombing Victim Killed For His Kindness

Two deaths and over twenty wounded: the latest butcher's bill from today's bomb attack in India. Once again, India's capital city of Delhi was targeted for terror, this time on a much smaller scale than the last horrific attack two weeks ago.

The bomb exploded at a crowded flower market at Mehrauli, south Delhi, early Saturday afternoon:

Mukesh Hans, owner of a paint and hardware shop that was right next to where the blast happened, was sitting in his shop at 2 pm. "There was a deafening sound and everything became dark. I came out and saw complete chaos with injured people on the street and blood everywhere. There were at least 12 persons being sent to the hospital by the local people. As I stepped out I also saw the body of a girl who was in her schooldress,'' he said.

For one family, the bombing brought about the epitome of terror; imagine their hopeless despair upon hearing that their child could have lived if only he had been raised to be as heartless as the demons whose bomb took his life:

According to eyewitnesses, the electronic goods market was packed with shoppers when a black Pulsar motorbike went through the narrow lane intent on its deadly business. It had two helmeted riders, who dropped the polythene bag with its deadly payload in the middle of the road, in front of a shop, Anisha Electronics.

Out on an errand, the nine-year-old boy, Santosh, thought the men had unknowingly dropped the bag. In a heartbreaking act of kindness to strangers, Santosh rushed to pick it up, running after them as he shouted for them to stop. It was then that white smoke began to pour out of the bag. The little boy dropped it, but too late to save his own life.

The young child was in the market in the first place because he was running an errand for his older brother:

... "My brother's head exploded with the bomb. The poor child didn't even have a chance because the explosion took place right next to him." Bumbum, a rickshaw-puller by day, runs an omelette-and-tea stall at night. He had sent Santosh to Sarai market to pick up a crate of eggs for the evening's business. "Before he left, we were joking about how many eggs he could carry, and within minutes, we heard he had died," said a sobbing Bumbum.
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Rekha Devi, his grandmother could not even speak — she just howled and beat her chest. "My poor child, he did not deserve to die like this. May God take care of his soul."

How does a family get over an event such as this? I guess you never really "get over it" at all, you just commit to renewing the love you have for those who remain, and one day enough new affection can arrive to raise you out of the living death that is a life lived without hope.

Easier said than done... which is why it pays to strive to find each and any example of sacrificial love, however small, that falls within your orbit. Sometimes, the reasons to renew our hope can be found in the very shadow of the evil that caused our despair in the first place, such as the courageous passersby who helped the blast victims:

Standing in blood-stained clothes, some of them even waited till after the police reached to see if their assistance was still required and then, just quietly walked away.

... [While the rest of the people ran away from the spot fearing the possibility of another blast, having a fresh memory of the recent series in Karol Bagh and Connaught Place, [Tilak Raj and Sanjay Sherawat] ran towards the centre of all action and helped the local shopkeepers in moving the bodies.
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"The scene was horrific. Initially, we thought around three to four dead bodies were lying around, but the police is saying only one child died. There was blood all around and we got plenty on our clothes as we carried the injured to the vehicles. The local shopkeepers acted immediately and got their cars ready. We then drove the injured to the hospital,'' said Sherawat.

Godspeed to the good people of India in their time of grief.

Echoes From Delhi Terror Bombings

Aftershocks continue to last week's terror bombings in India's capital city Delhi. The five bombs took the lives of almost 30 individuals, some of whose stories we blogged about here. The grisly handiwork of the savages belonging to the Indian Mujahedeen have left almost a hundred others injured, as the islamists' devil's brew of ammonium nitrate, gun powder, ball bearings and nails has shattered lives irrespective of economic, religious or ethnic backgrounds.

This week the Indian press has been introducing its readers to some of the tragic stories of the targeted citizens of Delhi. "For some survivors of Saturday's blasts, perhaps the last sound they clearly heard was that of the bomb going off":

Take 27-year-old Avdesh Sahaney, a parking attendant on Barakhamba Road, who has lost most of the hearing in his left ear. Sahaney's eardrum was perforated as a result of the blasts.

"I had gone to drink water at one of the pavement stalls when the blast occurred. I remember a loud sound, after which I lost consciousness. I came back to my senses in the hospital," he says.

Doctors treating Sahaney are keeping him under observation, hoping his ear heals on its own. "If not, we will have to operate," said Dr Sidhu, head of ENT and additional MS at RML hospital. "This is a common condition in most blast cases. The velocity with which the air hits the eardrum can cause serious - sometimes irreversible - damage," he adds.

Another victim, 26-year-old Renu also suffered blast-induced hearing loss but the doctors are optimistic about her recovery. Hearing loss is one of the most common ailments to afflict blast victims. As the condition of patients at RML stabilizes, the ENT department screens them in the audio room for possible hearing disorders, informs Dr Sidhu.

The Indian government has pledged compensation up to 500,000 rupees [$21,000 Cdn dollars..?] for the terror attack's many victims, but the likelyhood of people actually getting the money is another story:

Most people would treat it as another mundane affair. Yet, it's a simple bank account which has emerged as a major stumbling block for the hapless residents of Gali number 42 in Beadonpura.

They have already lost 11 people in Saturday's bomb blasts and as the realisation seeps in that life must go on, their efforts to get the Rs 5 lakh compensation money, which was announced within hours of the blasts, are hit by the lack of a bank account. ...
There is more to the problem. Even to open a new bank account these people — most of them daily wage earners — would need to furnish a number of documents like residence proof etc, which again nearly all of them do not possess.
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The handful of families who have some valid documents have been handed account payee checks. Says Ram Singh, a relative of Ganga Prasad who died, "I have no clue what to do with this piece of paper now. We do not have a bank account. Can you help us encash this?"

Unfortunately, Delhi residents are still waiting for the compensation they were promised by Indian politicians from the last terror bombing that struck Delhi back on August 29, 2005; the two explosions that day murdered 62 people and injured a further 210 others. Some of the victims of the 2005 islamist bombs were witnesses to the second attack last weekend:

Reliving the horror of 2005 Diwali blasts and the subsequent tale of government insensitivity to his pains, Vinod Poddar, who lost his right leg, said: "A compensation of Rs 1 lakh doesn't come anywhere near what I need. Those who survive need more assistance as we have to live with the disability forever." He had tears in his eyes when he saw pictures of victims being taken to hospitals on Saturday. Poddar's daughter Diksha, who is in Class IX, was also seriously injured and has to undergo more surgery. ...

Many 29/10 victims say they are yet to fully come to terms with the tragedy. "I still feel scared even sitting at home. I couldn't sleep for days after returning from Safdarjung hospital. Blast victims need counselling," says George Mathew, a businessman.

The preening politicians are being criticized for using the slaughter as a backdrop for photo ops:

...[A]ngry residents blocked traffic on the road. Said an angry Banwari Devi: "It's been for three days that we have been waiting for some relief from the government. Yet, the administration has no qualms to make profits from the same parking lot that on Saturday altered our lives."

Added Kanhaiya, another protester: "We have complained innumerable times about the lack of security in the market and unaccounted vehicles being parked here. Yet, even today, no extra security has been put in place."

Meanwhile, the victims refused to entertain the stream of political leaders who visited the street. "They are here only to play divisive politics. They are not really concerned about our well-being. If they really cared, they would have brought food and other relief," said Prakash, Simran's maternal uncle.
...

At the local level, Delhi law enforcement has had to wrestle with deciding on the lesser of evils in a city that produces over 5,000 tons of garbage a day:

Delhi police have solved the problem of how to prevent terror attacks. They have turned all the public garbage bins upside down and tied them together in pairs so that they are completely unusable, even by terrorists.

Which means Delhi’s streets are now a stinking mess, with polythene bags, stale food, wrappers and plastic bottles scattered all across them.

... All the bins had been overturned today at Central Park in Connaught Place and Barakhamba Road, their rotting contents emptied just under them. Fresh waste lay strewn all around, with tourists busy clicking the bins and garbage on their cellphone cameras.

“I went to the Janpath market yesterday. The twin garbage bins in the middle of the market have been turned upside down and the litter is scattered everywhere. The stench is terrible,” student Sanjay Singh said. ...

Frustration with governmental inefficiency in combating the islamist terror threat is mounting. The state of affairs is positively scandalous:

Security measures have failed to deliver. It’s shocking that most closed-circuit cameras installed in sensitive areas do not work. Intelligence gathering is in a mess. Clearly, a focused and coordinated approach to matters of security is missing.

And it sounds like things will have to get much worse before they begin to get better..:

Political scientist Imtiaz Ahmed also feels that while the Indian state is pretty strong, its willingness to take effective measures against terrorism has been weak. "The state's overall attitude towards incidents such as the Saturday Delhi bomb blasts is that it does not seriously affect the country's integrity or security. True, it jeopardizes public security. But then the outlook is: we can live with it. In fact, rather than act against it, the state is simply hoping that terrorism will subside. Management of terrorism is not a very high priority in the state's scheme of things."

Meanwhile life goes on, and from the echoes of suffering an occasional cry of joy rings out with rare good news:

On Friday, she knew her husband had work in Karol Bagh and would not be back till Saturday evening. The blasts followed, and then no word from Mukesh Kumar.

A frantic Rani went from hospital to hospital, searching for her husband and fearing the worst.

What she did not know was that 36-year-old Mukesh, after completing his work, decided to stay back at a friend's place so that he could shop for his daughter's birthday. But then changed plans and went to a relative's house in Nangloi.

Rani's misery ended on Monday night, when Mukesh called to say he was alive and well.

"I had gone to Karol Bagh and from there I left for Nangloi on Saturday morning and stayed over at a relative's house as I wasn't well. My phone fell on the road and stopped working..."

Rani, however, was unapologetic. "He saw his picture in the news channels and papers and got angry with me. But I am just happy that he came back," she said.

Putting Faces On Numbers In Delhi Bombings

The numbers vary from source to source; as the calendar moves along the numbers will change ever more. But some things will not change: the five bombs (out of the nine planted) that tore through busy Delhi markets and parks during weekend religious festivals made no differentiation between men and women, young and old, rich and poor. For many families, loved ones went out to fulfill some mundane chore, or a lark at the park, and then never came home.

It's easy to just think in terms of numbers; how many attacks, how many casualties from the attacks. But these numbers represent lives. These people have names, faces, and stories.

Here are some of the stories of those in the wrong place at the wrong time, suffering at the hands of people who are now said to be putting Mumbai in the crosshairs of their next homicidal attack.
It’s likely that 25-year old Kamlesh will never forget this day of death. The terror bombings claimed no less than 10 members of her family: her husband Ashok, 30, his brothers Harichand, 35, Archant 50, Ganga Kishen, 40, their wives Saroj, 30, Rama, 40, and children Kusum, 2 and Raju, 4.

Sometimes it's the lack of any news at all that causes the most despair. This seems to be the case for the wife and brother of 25-year old Raju:

[He] was standing outside his house in Karol Bagh when the bomb went off. Since then, no one has seen him.
His grief-stricken wife Yashoda has now been hospitalised, Raju's brother Shyam told IANS.
"The police say they have no information about my brother and that we ourselves should visit every hospital to check out."

One young man was blown to bits for having decided to do a favor for his beloved mother:

Subroto Mondal's wish to buy a new mobile phone for his mother proved fatal for the young man, as he perished in the blast at New Delhi's Gaffar Market minutes after he bought it Saturday.
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"When he came here the last time, his mother told him she had lost her mobile. Then he promised her that he will get her a new set. Yesterday (Saturday) he bought the new instrument to fulfil his promise. But god is indeed cruel," said his brother-in-law Haren Hazra.

Gloom descended at Subroto's residence and the village Sunday as the news of his death came like a bolt from the blue.

"It never crossed our minds that he could be among the victims. Because he did not live in that area. So, when one of his cousins called up from Delhi Sunday morning to give the news we found it difficult to believe,' Hazra said, as Subroto's parents looked inconsolable.

"He was a very good boy, We all loved him," said a neighbour, wiping her tears.

I can't imagine the guilt that the mother must now feel... nor can I easily put myself in the place of young Shishir Jain:

It was a birthday party that 21-year-old Shishir Jain will never forget. While he was busy clicking photographs of friends during his classmate's birthday celebrations at the Central Park here Saturday evening, a bomb explosion left him critically injured.

"We were having fun at the Central Park and Shishir asked for a final group photo before we leave for the hostel. As he moved back to focus the camera, a blast took place leaving him injured," Shishir's friend Prashant told IANS.

Shishir, a mechanical engineering student at the Jamia Millia Islamia, suffered injuries as a splinter from an exploding bomb pierced his spinal cord. Some of his friends too received minor injuries.

How haunted will his life be for him, if he ever gets out of the hospital?

Finally, the tragic news awaiting an expectant mother, who now has lost the father of her second child:

Till Saturday, Balbir Singh had the ideal family: two sons, a daughter-in-law expecting her second child in a week's time, a four-year-old grandchild and a younger son who had got married just six months ago. On Sunday though, Singh looked like a shell as he waited to claim the body of his elder son Tejinder at the LNJP mortuary.

Standing alone in a corner, Singh seemed to be divorced from the rest of relatives waiting to claim Tejinder's body as the police asked for details. Said Sunny, Singh's nephew, "My bhabhi is expected to deliver next week. We haven't told her about Tejinder yet. How can we, when even uncle is still to get over the shock?"...

For 36-year-old Tejinder, one of the first victims of the Ghaffar Market blast, the day had started routinely. "My cousin works in an electronics shop and was on the way to another shop with his friend when the bombs exploded. He and his friend, Manmeet, were both taken to Jeevan Mala hospital, where he was declared dead in only a few hours. His condition was so bad that doctors told us that survival was not possible. His face and torso were badly injured, and both his arms were broken," added Sunny. Tejinder's friend Manmeet fared better, and is being treated for severe head injuries in the same hospital, he added.

The immediate concern for the family though is breaking the news to Tejinder's wife. "We don't want to jeopardise her health by breaking the news right now," said Pankaj, a neighbour.

Even after all this bad news, dare I end on a positive note. As many of these terrible stories as there are, the number of them would have been higher still, were it not for the alert initiative and public spirit of two quick-thinking heroes:

Located at the bottom of the urban social pyramid, ragpickers are the smelly boys in tattered clothes whom everyone quickly passes by. Even street dogs, sub-consciously aware of their lowly status and often confusing them for thieves, chase them in shabby bylanes.

On Monday, one such ragpicker and a roadside vendor will be treated as heroes. Reason: their timely action saved dozens of lives in the Saturday bomb blast. Ragpicker Krishna and cloth seller Kundan detected live bombs and alerted the police.

Police point out that if the live bombs had not been detected in time, the death toll from the blasts would have been close to 100. ...

[For our other posts on the Delhi bombings, see
Another Terror Attack In India, and
Delhi Terrorists' Email From Hell.]

Delhi Terrorists' Email From Hell: "An Eye For An Eye..."

“An eye for an eye...”, boasted the subject heading in the fateful 13-page email received by India news media agencies, an email strongly suspected of being sent by the bomb-maker himself, claiming credit and justification for the latest terror bombings of markets and parks throughout the Indian capital city of Delhi. The body count from that act of "vengeance" stands today at 30 dead and a hundred wounded.

Portions of the email are appearing piecemeal in the Indian press. The message, expressed over and over again, is revenge:

"Eye for An Eye, The Dust Will Never Settle Down"… "To dreadfully terrorise you this time, by the Will and Help of Almighty Allah, we are about to devastate your very first metropolitan centre, your most strategic ‘hindutva hub, your green zone -- yes! It's your own capital".
…
“With this message, we once again declare that our intense, accurate and successive attacks like the one you will see exactly 5 minutes from now, Inshallah, will continue to punish you even before your earlier wounds have healed.”
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"This accurately planned deadly strike is just another reaction to all those pre-and post-26 July harassments imposed by your ATS and police on the innocent Muslims."
...
"Your oppression will always be revenged Inshallah though after years to come. Never assume that we have forgotten the demolition of Babri Masjid and by Allah we can never forget it! It is that grave mistake of yours which will make you taste humiliation for generations to come."

The suspected author is Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi, a 32-year old computer whiz-kid from Mumbai diffidently referred to as the "teckie jihadi" by the Indian press, a knick-name partially earned through the complex steps he takes to hide his tracks whenever he posts messages such as this latest hateful screed.

Abdul Subhan is said to be the bomb-making expert as well as the criminal mastermind behind several of the terror bombings that have ripped India in recent times. So far scattered "footsoldiers" from his group, the Indian Mujahideen, have been caught but the leader remains at large.

The lengthy email itself is sparingly quoted; most of the media is instead providing a summary of its contents:

The latest email from Abdul Subhan, who uses his alias "al-Arbi", which has the theme of revenge running through it, reads similar to the previous ones in many ways -- references to scriptures to justify the attack on non-believers, warnings of more attacks against those behind "injustice and oppression" inflicted upon Muslims all over the country, boasts of capacity and reach to strike anywhere and warnings to cops, media and judiciary.
…
…[T]here is no let-up in the effort to intimidate the cops, the media and the judiciary by warning them of retaliation. If anything, the warnings have become more ominous. There is no regret either for the previous atrocities, with the IM even threatening to repeat the barbarity it committed by attacking hospitals in Ahmedabad.
Yet, it is different in some crucial ways. To begin with, in comparison to the emails that preceded the blasts in courts in towns of UP, Jaipur and Ahmedabad, the latest one is thin on references to scriptures -- a factor which could be attributed to the imprisonment of Mufti Bashar, the Azamgarh cleric who provided the religious input for the drafts sent by Subhan till he was arrested for Ahemdabad blasts.

Reading the rage-filled words of this message from hell makes me feel like I’ve fallen down a hole so deep there’s no longer any light getting through. It’s the same spiritual void we can all fall into if we lose sight of the moral difference between justice and vengeance… And with the frequency of their barbaric attacks against us, it’s a pit that we are increasingly likely to topple into.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… we’ve all heard the expression over the years. But rarely do we ever see it in its proper context; it isn’t supposed to be a prodding to bear a grudge over past crimes, it was supposed to teach us to restrain our natural urge to indulge in cruelty, by restricting our options regarding how we are to act towards those who do us harm. Through temperance of our natural capacity for evil we were supposed to arrive at a balanced and disciplined form of deferred retaliation, called justice, a different concept than vengeance. Deferring cruelty is no easy matter, even with trivial offenses made against us; it’s all the more challenging a task when we see our friends and neighbors maimed and blown to bits by unrepentant psychopaths, as just happened in Delhi.

Anyone who’s ever carried a grudge knows the awful truth: revenge doesn’t fill the hole, it doesn’t reassemble what’s been broken, it doesn’t return what’s been taken… it just makes bad situations worse. Revenge is an idea based on a lie, a presumption that there can be such a thing as "pure" victory. The folly that is human experience includes the paradox that in victory there is somehow defeat; we don’t need classic Greek history to teach us of Pyrrhic Victories, each of us can probably look within their own lives to find examples of how winning turned out to include losing. What’s harder to observe is the equal truth that defeat can contain triumph.

In gaining there can be loss, while in giving away there can be gains… isn’t this the whole idea behind sacrificial love?

When we are told to “Love Our Neighbor”, this guiding principle is not meant to replace the Ten Commandments, granting license for murder, pillage and violence to be committed against us. It is meant to moderate how we respond to the eternal flaws of human character that plague us century after century. Do we really win by becoming indistinguishable from those whose barbaric behavior wounds us so deeply, spiritually as well as physically? As an absolute, we could kill them all and be done with it, but what shadow would shroud such a victorious achievement, what price would be paid by such a dark triumph? To save our skins we must not sacrifice our souls… for giving in to the animal half of our inner nature, the part of us attuned to the material world around us, this surrender is surely more “humiliating” than to turn our backs on our other, spiritual, half, the part of our nature demanding we raise ourselves up to the light whenever we inevitably fall into our individual pits of anger and despair.

The fall itself is not humiliating; it is really what we choose to do once in the pit, that shames us... and can ultimately place such weights upon us that we remain condemned to lurk there, in the darkest of nights.

It’s a fitting irony that the perpetrator of these vengeful attacks worships a moon as the sign summarizing his understanding of his belief system. The light of the moon is reflected light, needing something much grander than itself in order to shine. Honesty and self-awareness of its smallness would reconcile it to accept a secondary but still supportive role; yet if it succumbs to vanity it will strive to eclipse the light of its larger neighbor… and through such petty actions, its small size is made all the more apparent.

I pray that he, and others in similar holes, may one day see The Light.

Another Terror Attack In India

More awful news... at least 20 people have been killed, and almost a hundred more injured, in a series of five bombings in Delhi, India. Given the grim anniversary that hangs over us this week, one can't resist making comparisons between our situation in North America and that of India.

The US has not suffered a terrorist attack since 9/11. India, however, has lost 1,193 people since that date to islamist terror attacks. (Not counting the terrorism inflicted by other religious groups...)

This latest horror seems to have been committed by a group calling themselves the Indian Mujahideen, which is said to be a front for the "Students Islamic Movement of India" (SIMI).

SIMI took responsibility for the nine explosions in Jaipur last May, as well as the sixteen bombs set off in Ahmedabad later in July. The islamic group was also implicated in a similar attack that saw nine bombs rip through Bangalore the same week as the Ahmedabad slaughter.

I have many friends working in India, and since the carnage of the bombings in Mumbai back in 2006 I've despatched so many emails at the news of each latest attack when I've seen them in the headlines, it's getting to the point that they now proactively email me every month or so, essentially to reassure me that they weren't killed in the latest massacre.

We "talk" about the public mood over there, and what is being done about the ongoing bloodshed. The answer remains the same: not much. They always point with a resigned helplessness to the general inefficiency of a government riddled with corruption and other problems. "We just learn to get used to it", as one friend put it in her last letter to me... an attitude echoed in the Indian media's own reporting of this latest islamic attack: "It has become nauseatingly familiar...."

The Wall Street Journal account of this week's bombings in Delhi goes into specific detail about the additional challenges that exist in stopping these bloody attacks:

Indian police, however, have had severe difficulties in bringing successful cases against alleged SIMI members in part because confessions to police in India aren't admissible in court as they are in many other countries. Indian intelligence gathering rarely is of a quality that passes evidentiary scrutiny in court. And witnesses for the prosecution frequently renege on their testimony because of the time -- often more than a decade -- it takes for cases to be heard.

Because of that reality, this is what happened this week in Delhi:

The first blast took place at Ghaffar Market at 6.10 pm. Soon after that, two explosions rocked Connaught Place, one at Barakambha Road near Gopaldas Building at 6.30 pm and the other near the Metro station at the Central Park at 6.31 pm. Almost simultaneously, a blast hit M-block market in Greater Kailash-I near McDonald's and seven minutes later another bomb went off near Prince Pan Corner in the same market.

In the shadow of such a long trail of monstrous evil, the search for any light of hope seems futile. Maybe we should settle for the consolation that not all the bombs planted in this vile scheme went off as planned. Three of them were located, somehow, and defused... including one secreted at the Children's Park at India Gate, here:

Try as I might, I just cannot imagine the mind of a man that would delight in setting off bombs in a place like that. And maybe a similar failure of imagination can supply the initiative India seems to struggle for, that we all struggle for: the will to renew their collective efforts to do what is necessary to truly live in peace, not the false peace of the willfully blind, but the tragic peace of the adult who summons the patient discipline to honestly perceive what is really going on before their very eyes.

We must not let ourselves become apathetic to slaughter, lest we become no different than those who have declared war on us.

Godspeed to the families of India, may they find the resolve to see themselves through their latest nightmare, and live to see better days.

No New Year's Fireworks For Brussels

The Terror Threat hanging over Belgium since December 21st has cost Belgians their traditional New Year's fireworks celebration in Brussels: it is canceled. No exhilarating light show will now ring in the New Year for Belgium's capital city... a sad symbol of the decline of Western Europe, falling ever deeper into darkness and despair.

A spokesperson for Freddy Thielemans, infamous socialist mayor of Brussels, explained that "The goal is not to create panic or to barricade the entire city, but we do not want to take any unnecessary risks..." Better that the entire nation be deprived of their inspiring New Year's Eve tradition, than 14 suspected islamist terrorists remain behind bars. All this due to "insufficient evidence".

A Belgian news outlet, "La Derniere Heure", did some investigating on the reasons for the arrests and quick release of the suspects, and were able to identify three incredible pieces of the puzzle, offering some important context to the legal rorschach test followed by Belgian authorities on this case... a context that had been missing in most of the coverage of the story to date.
What follows is my loose translation of their report, "The Terrorists' Plan":

It all started, a few months ago, with a plan to free [Nizar] Trabelsi. In the middle of the month of December, however, the deal changed. Investigators learned that the plan had evolved. No longer was it a question of a prison break but of an attack.

"You know, it's always hard to predict if the threats will be carried out or not. If we act too soon, we risk not having enough evidence. If we act too late, we risk having dozens of deaths", confided one investigator.

Therefore Friday December 21st, anti-terror police led a series of searches and arrested 14 people. These were released the following day... because of insufficient evidence and also due no doubt to the suspects' explanations. The telephone conversations and emails.... it was all a joke. And yet...:

One: in one of the conversations, the suspects talked of staking out the subway ["metro"] while making reference to the London bombings (four explosions striking the city's public transportation, leaving 56 dead and 700 wounded). They wanted to test the efficiency of the police by placing small bombs in the trash bins.

Two: Naima, the wife of Nizar Trabelsi, confirmed that her daughter, who is studying chemistry, was ready to make bombs.

Three: Naima's son clearly told his step-father, Trabelsi, that he wished to become a "kamikaze". [Their word; not clear by the report if that is a direct quote or not]

A few days ago, the Belgian news site 7sur7 offered a short biography of Malika el-Aroud, one of the 14 suspects who were arrested and released due to "insufficient evidence".

"Widow of Mahmoud assassin arrested":

Malika el-Aroud is 48 years old, a belgian of afghan origin, widow of Abdessater Dahmane, one of the two assassins who killed anti-taleban Norther Alliance warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud in a suicide bombing on Sept 9 2001.

She was acquitted in 2003 by the Brussels criminal court that was investigating a network channeling jihadi candidates for Afghanistan. She left for Switzerland at the side of her newest husband, she had been judged in June of this year in Geneva for supporting islamic terrorism on internet websites. She had received six months of a suspended sentence "for support of a terrorist organization and complicity in representations of violence."

According to the charges, her husband, Moez Garsallaoui, a 39 year-old Tunisian living in Switzerland, had created and maintained several different websites used by terrorist organizations, al-qaida among them. These sites mostly spread formulas for building explosives, according to the charges. His wife Malika, "thanks to her notoriety within the islamic world, offered a legitimacy to the criminal efforts of her husband", the case maintained.

Terror Threat Hangs Over Belgian Christmas

More translated news on the possible Belgian Christmas Terror Plot. Here I summarize a long article at Le Soir, "Christmas Under Heavy Surveillance In Brussels":

Newly sworn in Belgium Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt announced to the national press late last week that the government possessed “information leading us to believe that a terrorist attack might be in the planning stages in the nation of Belgium”.

Lieve Pellens, spokesperson for federal investigators, is quoted in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir: “It all stems from an projected escape attempt by terrorist Nizar Trabelsi, charged in June 2004 to ten years in prison. We had obtained information mentioning this attempt. An investigation had been opened and had confirmed the hypothesis whereby the prisoner’s entourage were going to make use of arms and explosives to get him out of Lantin [prison]… If the individuals following radical islam are ready to make use of explosives and heavy weapons for a jaibreak, they must be capable of preparing a [terrorist] attack.” … “the particular investigative techniques – including telephone monitoring – put in effect to stop the prison break enabled us to establish that Trebelsi’s entourage had intended on perpetrating an attempt”.

“We know a good number of them [the terrorist’s circle of friends]. Some appeared during Trabelsi’s trial in 2004."

The principal individual among the suspects is Malika, from MolenBeek, widow of Abdesatar Dahmane, one of the assassins who blew himself up while “interviewing” Afghan anti-taleban warlord Massoud, back on sept 9, 2001. Malika has since created a support network for Nizar Trabelsi and his friends. She even organizes collections for financing their escape. In June her and her new husband, Tunisian Moez Garsallaou, were found guilty in Switzerland of supporting islamist terrorist groups.

Acording to Jaak Raes, general director of the Interior’s crisis center, “In Brussels, a police presence will be placed in the subway, in Christmas villages, on the Grand-Place and everywhere that a crowd will gather. Measures similar to those taken during a European summit. Other more discreet measures will also be taken”.

The extra security is planned to remain in place until the 2^nd of January, but may be prolongued if the situation calls for it.

Moral Fog

When do moral ends justify immoral means? What is the Right Thing to do?

This is the subtext of the current dispute that has shaken the growing alliance standing against the creeping islamization of the western world.

At what price, victory? At what cost, strength? At what sacrifice, allies?

To vainly attempt a summary of the "blog wars" dispute to date: a rupture emerged among allies in the wake of the counter-jihad conference held in Brussels this past October. The dividing fires were sparked by the contention that certain groups participating at the conference, notably the European political parties Vlaams Belang (“Flemish Interests”) of Flanders/Belgium and the SD (Sweden Democrats) of Sweden, have at their core a narrowly pro-white, rather than broadly pro-west, leaning; and that their past actions discredit them sufficiently to deny them a welcome place alongside those standing up for the preservation of western freedoms and values, today.

Charles Johnson, of the prominent US-based anti-jidadi blog Little Green Footballs, is leading the prosecutorial charge against these European groups. Gates of Vienna, with its more European focus, might be said to be serving as their defense counsel. Back and forth go the allegations and subsequent clarifications.

I think the only area of agreement remaining might be to admit how complicated a story this is to follow. What is a conscientious person to think? Are these European parties racist in their anti-immigration policies? Are they nationalistic to the point where they can be accurately described as neo-nazi in their stridency, denying even the possibility of assimilation, and change?

The answer is: it depends. It depends on your personal definitions of "racist", "nationalist", and "neo-nazi"; it depends on whether you believe people can change or moderate their views over time; and it depends on whether you accept that actions speak louder than words.

If we study this complicated story too narrowly, we can easily come to the wrong conclusions, and if nothing else the detailed context required to make an informed opinion reminds us not to presume a jump into instant expertise, just because we may have read one single source’s account on the issue. (A fault I confess I see in myself, and work to overcome)

After spending an obsessive, preposterous, amount of time researching the controversy, I come away with only the obvious perspective that since nobody is perfect, the issue becomes a measurement of what it means for someone to be “good enough” to enter into an alliance with them.

What is the character of our allies? Do judgments on character even matter, when the stakes are so high?

These are the two questions being batted around, but the important one, the one that establishes our right to victory, is the second one, as far as I’m concerned. Character matters.

It establishes our merit, it renews our strength, it sanctifies our sacrifice.

It is not only important to strive to Do The Right Thing, it is surely the whole point of the struggle, it is why the West’s current struggle against the unholy alliance of the far left and islamist fundamentalists is a struggle worth undertaking.

Our opponents find no problem in aligning themselves with forces which, in an honest accounting, they should be seeing instead as an irreconcilable enemy. To their side, clearly, ends do justify means. It is a characteristic moral compromise for them. It is the dark secret of the political left’s history, that they have repeatedly justified unconscionable crimes against humanity, because these were seen as in service towards such irrefutably “noble” ends; the professed nobility in the absolute end is then used to cleanse the conscience of any odious individual step taken towards it. Pillage, starve, kill, no sin stains their soul or stays their hand, as long as it is seen as helping bring about a “paradise” on earth. (A fair reading of history is that every group has done this to some degree, the left merely being the more recently guilty of the highest body counts resulting from their immoral behavior.)

Moral justification for immorality is horrible when the left does it, because it is horrible in itself, not merely because it is the left doing it. If we decry the tactic when our opponents use it, how dare we defend it when we do it? That’s the kind of tribal thinking which, surely, Western civilization is trying to overcome in this current clash against civilization.

Can we afford to be absolutely moral, at all times, in all occasions? As I grow older, I realize: No. There is a tipping point, tragically, at which short-term needs may outweigh long-term standards, and we settle for pragmatism. This compromise counts for nothing, however, if it is not based on a moral foundation, following a moral compass as it navigates through a moral fog. At such ethical setbacks we need to remember our moral foundation more than ever, to ensure we atone for our temporary fallen standards. Means ennoble ends. If a starving man steals bread, should he later come by the money for it he better go back and pay for what he stole. Otherwise, maybe the right thing to do would have been to go on starving.

Have we reached that tipping point in our defense of our precious western civilization? Maybe that’s what the debate should be focusing on: have we reached the point where, in order to defeat the enemy, we must become no different than the enemy we fight? Must we adopt tribal attitudes to morality, and lump people indifferently into categories, announcing that anyone in one group is identical to everyone in that group? When we do it to them, is that to be pronounced okay; it is only when they do it to us that we can object? That is what our civilization's self-declared enemies believe; are we to look to them now for our moral example?

As distasteful as the argument raging in the anti-jihadi blogosphere has become, it is a vital and timely reminder of our moral duty to retain a civility worth preserving, to remember the distance our civilization has traveled, as we have risen so far above the moral stain of our earlier tribalism, foolishly dividing the world into an "us" and a "them", forgiving any trespass we commit against the "other", and seeing them as cursed for not being born as one of "us".

We are not good because of what we are, we are good because of **how we are** what we are. We are defined by our choice of actions, our attempt to find the lesser of evils, and our heartfelt atonement for when we stray from the right path. Our cause is ennobled only so long as we continue our ongoing search for what it means to live an increasingly Good life... to progress.

We should, therefore, be prepared to hold out our hands to potential allies, hopeful that interaction will surely bring about more positive change in them than would the isolation of quarantine. Maybe the erstwhile ties to the VB and SD will, eventually, be revealed as improper; if that proves to be true we can admit sincere error of judgment, and move on. For we do not believe in permanent defilement; that we leave to our current enemies. We believe in a second chance, in repentance... in progress.
If we honestly believe in the righteousness of our values, we will continue to live by them, and by doing so, perhaps persuade less-than-perfect allies to change for the better... holding them, in fact, to the self-same standards we hold for ourselves.

So that together, the Righteousness of our Covenant may send a guiding light to pierce through the fog of uncertainty that has seemingly fallen, like a curtain, around us.

9-11: falling towers

This is the first time since the fateful attack in 2001 that September 11 has landed once again on a Tuesday. I thought it might be useful to write about what that day was like for each of us, personally, partly to help us each carry forward a more accurate memory of that day, as well as helping us understand how we may have been changed by it.

For my wife and I, the memory of the attack on Tuesday Sept 11 is paired with an awful memory from Monday Sept 10th. That was a day of personal tragedy, as it was the day that we lost our baby, a day that seemed to last forever; we didn’t get home from the hospital until well after midnight on that Monday evening. There didn’t seem to be any great hurry to get to bed, any great need to get up again at any point the following morning. There was just a focus on the present, each holding the other, to remind ourselves of what we still had. I had already arranged, before I rushed home early Monday afternoon, to be able to take the Tuesday off, so that our plan was to simply make it through the following day without too much anguish. One day at a time until wounds were healed, life would go on, in new ways… Or so we kept telling ourselves as we drifted into the escape of a welcome slumber.

Our sleep was interrupted by an unexpected phone call, which turned out to be from my mother-in-law. She knew that we didn’t have television, and had guessed, correctly, that we wouldn’t be aware of what had been going on that morning, in New York City.
The phone was on my wife’s side of the bed that day so she took the call; after an ominous silence, she told me, in the very quiet and monotone voice that she uses when things are seriously wrong, to turn on the radio, that the United States was under attack.

In those days the radio was set to 770 KTTH from Seattle, and we heard Peter Jennings, through an ABC news feed, describing the aftermath of the second airplane hitting the World Trade Center. When he started complaining that president Bush was a coward for not manning the anti-aircraft guns himself (or whatever Jennings had in mind as his definition of “presidential courage”), we had our fill of him and switched to a local Vancouver radio station for the rest of the morning, and the week. The programming seemed to be less anti-American than usual, and certainly less anti-American than the American mainstream media station I had left behind.

My wife kept wanting to know: why? I kept wanting to know: what next? To this day I feel a moment of trepidation when I wake up in the morning and reach for the radio; what has happened since I went to sleep? That terrible week back in 2001, every time I turned on the radio there seemed to be a fresh horror to deal with. It was with great relief, several days after Sept 11, that I could turn on the radio and hear a genuine commercial. Then, as today, if I turn on the radio in the morning and hear the sound of commercials, it causes a wave of reassurance to sweep over me; if life is uneventful enough to allow for commercials then life goes on indeed.

I remember being worried by the potential scope of the attacks… I expected that the attacks would be going on all day, all week, like the Blitz in World War II. It didn’t seem sensible that there would only be a single blow, however large its scope… what could be gained by that, except a punishing retaliation?

I had read newspapers and news magazines for years, in addition to a constant diet of radio programming, inheriting my father's nose for news. (also inhering my father's aversion for television) I had come to think of myself as reasonably well-informed about the world around me... suddenly I wondered why I could be so surprised, why seemingly we could all be so surprised by the existence of this parallel world that lurked in the shadows of the one described to us by the Official Storytellers of the media.
I realized, not for the first or last time in my life, that I was foolishly ignorant, not wisely informed. I needed to re-evaluate everything that I took for granted to be true, and re-educate myself about how things really were. Islam no longer seemed the exotic and colourful theology I thought it to be, obviously there was something dangerous and deadly going on of which I was completely unaware. I remember a video surfacing of bin laden hoping that his strikes against us would spark a curiosity about islam. Well, he was certainly right about that: we could not afford to not be curious any more.
My tower of personal ignorance was knocked to the ground that terrible day. I had to rebuild my world view all over again, from scratch.

That Tuesday was mostly spent on the phone with family, as there was need to update them about the grim news concerning the baby, because of pre-established travel plans that would now have to be cancelled. I remember how talking about it all in the shadow of the attack made the loss feel as if it happened years before, rather than mere hours. It also made our nightmare easy to talk about; there didn’t seem to be much justification in feeling sorry for ourselves on a day when so many others were mourning far worse tragedies than our own.

Before Sept 10th I knew that there was a risk that we'd lose the baby, but since that wasn't the result I wanted I refused to consider it. Sept 11th was a shock of similar kind; before that fateful day I felt western civilization to be an imperishable triumph, an unassailable fortress of splendor, destined to stand without my having to do much to sustain it. I didn't feel in any way responsible for adding to its continuity; I would just live, like a parasite I guess, off the accomplishments of others before me, and around me. The attacks had come to make me see all too clearly how these accumulated blessings may be lost as suddenly as our baby had been.

My towering ingratitude for the blessings of western civilization was therefore also knocked to the ground that awful day. I learned how to become deeply appreciative for all the bounty that we live with, all the opportunities we possess to keep adding to the majesty of our citadel of liberty, one capable of a progress as infinite as humanity itself. And I came to feel the sudden weight of the obligation I had lived with, but refused to see: to act in ways that may safeguard this legacy for another generation, and beyond.

Today, as on that day, I felt determined to pick myself up when life knocks us down and continue to build a life worth living... that this is in fact the very meaning of life: to rise up again, when there is every incentive to lay where one had fallen.
To choose the Hope of the rise, not the Terror of the fall.
I began to see the religious faith I had long abandoned, in those terms, as the crutch to help us in our glorious climb upward and onward. The despicable selfishness that had so long weighed me down, fell away as I began to know an attachment to something far greater than myself. Though blind to them before I could now see the expectations placed upon me, not all that different from the weighty sense of responsibility I felt on the happy day I was told I would soon be a father: somebody you don't yet know is counting on you to become the best possible version of yourself.

Of all the memories I have of the falling of all the towers that day, I remember feeling entrusted to live a Good life, Sept 11 establishing yet again the inescapable truth that one person can make a difference… for good or evil.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper on September 11

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is visiting "down under", in Australia. He has addressed the Australian Parliament, and has this to say on islam's war on the West:

...
September 11, 2001, was truly a day that shook the world.
Six years on, the horrific images from that morning still evoke anger, sorrow and – as intended – terror.
The buildings may have been American, but the targets were every one of us: every country and every person who chooses tolerance over hatred, pluralism over extremism, democracy over tyranny.
We have been struck again and again in London, Madrid, India and many other places, including, of course, Bali.
Canadians mourned your losses, and we redoubled our resolve to stand with you, because two dozen of our citizens died in New York on 9-11. And seventy Canadian soldiers and one of our diplomats have fallen in Afghanistan – as well as a Canadian carpenter, murdered by the Taliban after he built a school for the children of a remote Afghan village.
So both our countries have been bloodied by terror.
And both of us are doing our part to confront and defeat it.
In Afghanistan and elsewhere, both our countries are committed to working together, As Prime Minister Howard said in his address to our Parliament last year “not only for the betterment of Australia and Canada, but for the betterment of all the peoples of the world.”
This cause is noble and necessary. Because, as 9-11 showed, if we abandon our fellow human beings to lives of poverty, brutality and ignorance, in today’s global village their misery will eventually and inevitably become our own.
...