From India - Warrant against 3 Iranians in Delhi blast case

News out of India of arrest warrants being issued for 3 Iranian men involved in last month's terror attack on the wife of an Israeli envoy.  The Indians are asking Interpol to help locate them.

(To see some good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, read the posted comments following the article.)

The full story is here: Warrant against 3 Iranians in Delhi blast case - The Times of India

alisa flatow terrorism

Mumbai Attack Conviction

The Associated Press reports out of Mumbai,

"An Indian court on Monday convicted a Pakistani man of murder and waging war for his role in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that left 166 people dead in the heart of India's financial capital. Two Indians accused of helping plot the attacks were acquitted."

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab,

"the lone survivor of the attack's 10 gunmen, ... was convicted on nearly all the 86 charges against him, including murder and waging war against India. While an exact total of the convictions was not immediately available, the handful of acquittals appear to have been for relatively minor charges, such as forging an identification card. Sentencing is expected to be Tuesday. He faces a possible death sentence."

It's still hard for this Westerner to understand the motivation behind the attack. The New York Times has many, many articles and reports on the attacks. You can read the archive results, here.

Read the full report on 1010 WINS & AP.

India's Partition of 1947 - Is the world still paying a price?

Anyone familiar with the motion picture Gandhi will recall the plea made by Hindu leaders to their Muslim counterparts for the latter to drop their demand that India be partitioned and thereby create the Muslim state of Pakistan.

The Mumbai attacks, organized from outside India, and a list of many more, are symptomatic of Muslim "disaffection." Identifying that disaffection is easy according to some. Norman Berdichevsky, writing in New English Review, takes a different approach.

A few academics and editorial writers claiming to be scholars and quite a few liberal pundits/observers, have argued that some blame for the recent atrocious acts of terror in Mumbai should be put on India’s Hindus by stressing that the terrorist group of “disaffected Muslims” carrying out the outrage of random murder of civilians was “probably funded from outside India." They believe as Fareed Zakaria stated in Newsweek, that Indian Hindus “had it coming” because "One of the untold stories of India is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last 10 years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted."

He continues,

This view is not just wrong and short-sighted, it is symptomatic of why India has become a major target for terrorism that enjoys widespread support not only in Pakistan but in the wider Muslim world. Hatred of India stems from a psychological need to link India and Israel as guilty in the “injustice” Muslims believe they have suffered and to deflect blame and muddy the waters by shifting responsibility for the Partition of India in 1947 to the Hindus and conjuring up the vision that the Jews and Zionism did precisely this in Palestine in 1948. Nothing is further from the truth.

Berdichevsky explores the similarities and dissimilarities between India and Israel and the partitions that created the modern states. But he does not brook the argument that the creation of modern Israel was foisted on a Muslim population.

The truth of the 1948 partition in Palestine is that the Muslims rejected it totally and any possibility of living in peace alongside a tiny Jewish state. Instead they aided in the invasion of the country by the regular armies of six Arab states plunging their homeland into war and ending as defeated refugees. Had they accepted it, the great majority of Palestinian Arabs would today be enjoying the rights of their own independent homeland without the bloodshed of the last sixty years and a minority of them would be citizens of a much more secure, serene and tolerant Israel, untroubled by the threat of constant renewed warfare and terrorism.

Read the full article A Tale of Two Partitions: India 1947 and Palestine 1948 here.

New Report Links Pakistan to Mumbai Attack

The New York Times is covering the release of a report "compiled by Indian authorities and officially shared Monday with the Pakistani government."

"The information seems designed to achieve at least two Indian objectives. First, it seeks to demonstrate that the attackers were sent from Pakistan. The dossier, a copy of which was provided to the New York Times, contains photographs of materials found on the fishing trawler they took: a bottle of Mountain Dew soda packaged in Karachi; pistols that bore the markings of a gun manufacturer in Peshawar; Pakistani-made items like a matchbox, detergent powder and shaving cream.

Second, the information seeks to rally international support for the Indian effort to press Pakistan on its handling of militants. It contains a list of 26 foreigners killed in the Mumbai attacks, and chronicles India’s efforts in recent years to persuade Pakistan to investigate suspects involved in terror attacks inside India and shut down terror training camps inside Pakistani territory. In its final pages, it demands that Pakistan hand over “conspirators” to face trial in India and comply with its promise to stop terrorist groups from functioning inside its territory. It was shared this week with diplomats from friendly nations; one described it as “comprehensive,” another as “convincing.”

Pakistan and India have not been on the best of terms since Pakistan was created following the grant of independence to India by the British in the late 1940s. Border wars between the two countries have popped up from time to time over the past 60 years. One might say, "OK," so there have been skirmishes along the border, so what?

The "what" is this-- India and Pakistan both possess nuclear weapons. Pakistan has exported its technology to places like Iran. India continued nuclear bomb testing long after it was fashionable to do so. Stable countries? To some, no. Driven by religious fervor and an inferiority complex, Pakistan seeks to reach its place in the sun. India, by sheer population size, dwarfs Pakistan.

Will the report heal the rift between India and Pakistan? No, but it could give the Pakistani government a pretext to crack down on extremist groups and their backers.

Read more here