Mumbai: Why Were Israelis Singled Out For Torture And Death? (Update)

The spin is on. Some in the media already take the approach that disenfranchised Muslims are striking back against discrimination, as Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek claims:

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 ten years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted. There's enough alienation out there that there are locals who can be drawn in to plots. That tends to be a pattern, from Madrid to Casablanca to Bali—some hard-core jihadis who indoctrinate alienated locals they can seduce.

What's also new and different about this was that it involved suicide attackers. There have been planted bombs in the past. But this is a different level than we've seen in India.

Time magazine takes the same approach--the Muslim terrorists are acting out of a profound sense of injustice:

The disembodied voice was chilling in its rage. A gunman, holed up in the Oberoi Trident hotel in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), where some 40 people had been taken hostage, told an Indian news channel that the attacks were revenge for the persecution of Muslims in India. "We love this as our country, but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?" he asked via telephone. No answer came. But then he probably wasn't expecting one.

The roots of Muslim rage run deep in India, nourished by a long-held sense of injustice over what many Indian Muslims believe is institutionalized discrimination against the country's largest minority group.

Neither of the 2 articles mentions Israelis, Jews, or the Chabad House. As far as Time and Newsweek are concerned, this was all about India and the suffering of Muslims. But if that were really true, why were there Israeli hostages--and why were Israelis tortured especially viciously before being murdered:

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Corroborating the doctors' claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. "During his interrogation, [the sole terrorist captured alive] Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis," an IB source said.

It is also said that the Israeli hostages were killed on the first day as keeping them hostage for too long would have focused too much international attention. "They also might have feared the chances of Israeli security agencies taking over the operations at the Nariman House," he reasoned.

Apparently there was the 'public' face of the attacks for garnering national attention--allegedly to highlight the plight of Indian Muslims, while there was other business to be taken care of behind the scenes.

To call the men who carried out the attack anything but terrorists is to ignore the facts.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon detects a pattern in the willingness by the media to ignore evil when it is staring you Jews in the face:

The Times of India and other sources are reporting the terrorists did thorough reconnaissance of the Mumbai Chabad Center in advance of their action, apparently staying there disguised as Malaysian students, no doubt under the good offices of the Holzbergs. Somebody should tell the New York Times who, as of this writing, is still reporting the Jewish center as an “unlikely target.” In fact, at first the Times seemed to disbelieve the center could have been a target at all. But that’s no surprise. They have missed Jewish target stories, even the most important ones, in the past:

The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front-page stories, and most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities.” In only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims.

Nor did the story lead the paper, appearing in the right-hand column reserved for the day’s most important news – not even when the concentration camps were liberated at the end of the war. In addition, the Times intermittently and timidly editorialized about the extermination of the Jews, and the paper rarely highlighted it in either the Week in Review or the magazine section. [bold mine]

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Nariman and Mumbai.