Mumbai Massacre Of Chabad House: A Continuing Chain

David Aaronovitch of The Times ponders why the Chabad house was attacked, the Jews inside tortured and murdered:

Poverty is bad. You can see the reasons for warfare in Kashmir, for riots in Hyderabad and for Maoist uprisings in the deep rural areas of India. But why kill the rabbi? Why invade the small headquarters of a small outreach sect of a small religion, which far from being even a big symbol of anything, you would almost certainly need a detailed map and inside knowledge even to find?

From what has been learnt from the one surviving attacker, the baby-faced and variously pre-named Mr Kasab, his group came largely from the rural southern Punjab in Pakistan. It is therefore unlikely that any of them had even encountered a Jew, or knew anyone else who had.

This sets the attack on the Chabad House apart from the massacre at Merkaz HaRav Kook back in March--there the terrorist who attacked and killed the students knew about the Jews he murdered. It also is different from the Hebron massacre in 1929, where the 67 Jews were murdered by an Arab mob who had been living peacefully with their Jewish neighbors.

Instead, Aaronovitch points to another Muslim attack on Jews:

It reminded me of the 2003 Istanbul bombings when - post Iraq war - specifically British and American targets were augmented, for some reason, by the blowing up of the synagogues belonging to the much diminished Jewish population of that great city.

According to Wikipedia:

On November 15, 2003, two trucks carrying bombs slammed into the Bet Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey and exploded. The explosions devastated the synagogues and killed twenty-seven people, most of them Turkish Muslims, and injured more than 300 others. Six Jews were among the dead.

These attacks on Jews in Turkey and India had nothing to do with personal familiarity andpersonal hatred of Jews. It is instead a sign of the growing potency of Islamist fundamentalist hatred that is only going to grow and become more confident in its attacks.

And splitting up Israel and Jerusalem for the sake of a Palestinian terrorist state is not going to affect it one bit.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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