A Perfect Terrorist

A chilling profile of David Headley (the guy who scouted the targets of 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai) by ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella. About an hour or so, over at PBS Video.

Charles Kurzman: Where are all the Islamic terrorists?

... In the fields of Middle East and Islamic studies, bad news is good for business. The more that non-Muslims fear Islam, the more security threats are hyped, the more attention my colleagues and I get. Journalists want insights from "Islam experts" and "Middle East specialists," regardless of how remote our area of research is from the day's news. Universities are hiring—there were more than 40 tenure-track jobs last year in Middle East and Islamic studies. Federal research grants are plentiful, especially from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

It all points to an inescapable conclusion: Martin Kramer was right. A decade ago, just after 9/11, he accused scholars of profiting from the Islamist violence that their political correctness prevented them from taking seriously: "How many resources within the university could they command if their phones stopped ringing and their deans did not see and hear them quoted in the national newspapers and on public radio? And how would enrollments hold up if Muslim movements failed to hit the headlines?"

Read it all at the Chronicle.

Links: bin Laden edition

1. Noam Chomsky in Guernica: My reaction to Osama bin Laden's death.

   We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

   ... [And] the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

2. Lawrence Wright in New Yorker: The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan.

3. NYTimes report on Bin Laden's Diminished Life in a Shrunken World.

4. Felix Salmon: The Hermetic and Arrogant New York Times. [He has an awesome picture -- from this analysis -- of the Twitter network that helped spread the news of Osama bin Laden's death.]

Biggest News of the Day

Al Qaeda chief Bin Laden was killed by American troops in Abottabad [a couple of hours from Islamabad], Pakistan. [see also Nick Kristof's early reaction]. The Pakistan connection seems to me to be the biggest part of the news.

From President Obama's address:

Over the years, I've repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we've done. But it's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.

Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts. They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Burqa diktat at Aliah University

Yet another Is This Legal? news, this time from West Bengal's Aliah University:

For the past three months, 24-year-old Sirin Middya has not been able to hold her classes at West Bengal’s first Muslim university. While the guidelines at Aliah University in Kolkata don’t stipulate the same, the students’ union has demanded that Middya can teach but only in burqa.

Middya was appointed a guest lecturer at the university in March this year and got the union “diktat” in the second week of April. “I was told that I would not be allowed to attend college if I did not agree to come in a burqa. The University Grants Commission does not prescribe any such dress code and even the university does not have a dress code. But the most unfortunate part is that students are forcing us to wear burqa,” Middya told The Indian Express.

Thanks to Jai for the pointer; his comment appeared in a post on Martha Nussbaum's rebuttal of arguments trotted out to support a burqa ban in France.

Attack on a professor in Kerala

Prof. T.J. Joseph was attacked by a bunch of thugs, allegedly because of a provocative question in his exam caused offence. In that barbaric attack, they chopped off the professor's right hand.

Police have arrested a couple of people belonging to a radical Islamist outfit.

The story is scary in itself; but Dilip poses some questions that are even scarier:

What I do not understand about the news:

• Why the college management "apologised".

• Why the Kerala government saw fit to issue "instruction" that the professor should be suspended.

• Why the college followed the government's instruction and suspended him.

• Why the police lodged a case against the professor.

Clearly "freedom of expression", especially its value in an educational institution, is a foreign phrase to all these people.

P.Z. Myers has a link-filled post on Atrocity in Kerala. See also Josh Newtonn's post: The chopped arm & the dissent of structure; and the editorial in Deccan Herald: Barbaric Act.

Dangerous Dissertation?

Invariably, ... they suggest his work be classified. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?" he said. "They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree." For academics, there always has been the imperative to publish or perish. In Gorman's case, there's a new concern: publish and perish.

Doesn't it sound very much like the blurb on a racy, blockbuster thriller? It's from Laura Blumenfeld's WaPo story on a PhD thesis whose publication would pose a serious threat to national security. [Addendum: Should have noted that this story is from July 2003; see the comment from nihalparkar].

Riot Contractor

Pramod Muthalik? Red faced?

Yes, a sting did achieve what the Pink Chaddis and the Black Paint could not.

Read the exposé by Pushp Sharma in Tehelka:

Sri Ram Sene members ... are also cynical lumpen that can be bought for a price. “Contract rioting” — thugs being handed out contracts or money to create riots — no longer needs to be a matter of mere speculation. TEHELKA’s investigation shows it is an alarming reality. Vandalism can be purchased; ‘cultural nationalism’ can go on sale. It’s all kosher in the “business” of outrage.

To expose this aspect of the Sri Ram Sene, a TEHELKA journalist posing as an artist met Pramod Muthalik, the president of the Sri Ram Sene, with a proposal. Using the rationale that all controversy is good publicity, he asked Muthalik if the Sri Ram Sene would orchestrate a pre-paid, pre-meditated attack on his painting exhibition so that the resulting furore would spark public interest, catapult him to fame and help sell his paintings both in India and abroad by attracting higher bids at art auctions. (Never mind that the supposed paintings this furore might help sell evoked Hindu- Muslim amity, particularly Hindu-Muslim marriages — a phenomenon the Sene abhors.) In return, Muthalik and the Sene would regain the national stature they had achieved during the Mangalore pub attack, besides pocketing the agreed upon fee. Far from rejecting this proposal with horror and outrage, Muthalik readily connected the TEHELKA reporter to one Sene member after another — down a food chain that exposed a disturbingly entrenched criminal mindset, which is confident of fixing the system to abet it.

The Kasab Verdict

Kasab should be allowed to live -- in prison, for life.

That's the unanimous verdict in the blogs I read: Dilip D'Souza (at a blog whose name appears apt here, "Death Ends Fun"), Vinod George Joseph (Winnowed), and V. Venkatesan (Law and Other Things).

At Have You Heard, Ayeshea Perera offers what I think is a compelling reason (this is also Joseph's reason):

I believe that by killing Kasab you are making him a martyr – and then in some sordid twisted way, he wins. Kasab was sent here on a suicide mission. It was just his bad luck and sheer circumstance that saw him captured alive. He came to Mumabi fully prepared to die – to become a martyr. But by keeping him alive and in prison, he has been denied this ‘final glory’.

In the midst of all this sordidness, The Daily Tamasha manages to keep its funny neurons alive: Nation Shocked As Suhel Seth Has ‘No Comments’ On Kasab Verdict. [In case you need a refresher course on Suhel Seth, read this post by Girish Shahane].

QOTD: The Kasab Verdict Edition

Two quotes taken from news stories on the death sentence.

1. When you’re part of a mob ... , you lose your frontal lobe.
   -- Vivek Benegal, a NIMHANS psychologist and one of the experts commenting on the post-verdict frenzy.

2. He told one of the doctors he was shattered that Pakistan had not come to his aid and that the Lashkar-e-Toiba had not done anything to free him as he had expected ... He has been reading a book on the betrayal of Tipu Sultan by his own people.
   -- An unnamed jail official

And, finally, a quote from T.K. Arun's ToI column:

The fight against terror is not just against bearded men hiding in caves. It is also a battle between different levels of civilisation, whose quintessential difference comes out in how each values human life, not just that of the innocent and the incidental, but even of a convicted criminal like Ajmal Kasab. To put him away for good, sparing his life, would, in fact, be a most forceful strike by India, with all its imperfections as a democracy, against the common enemy of humanity today.

Deadly faculty meeting at UAlabama

Among the dead are three faculty members, including the Chairperson [via Madhusudan Katti].

From the first link:

Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said.

The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again.

Enough of BJP ...

... so how about libertarians -- especially the anarcho kind? [Hat tip: Dani Rodrik who has a great quote from an academic paper about Robert Nozick and the Sopranos]

If you wish to dig further, there's always Crooked Timber, and from the comments section there, this UnNews story.

Shiv Visvanathan to L.K. Advani: "What is the genocidal quotient of your speeches?"

Visvanathan has a lot more to say. Here:

let me address the central issue of Gujarat and the violence of 2002. Let us begin with a simple fact that violence began from your constituency. The dead bodies from the Godhra carnage were paraded here, triggering not a ritual of mourning but an orgy of the most obscene violence our country has witnessed in recent times. Yet you spoke as if a balance of murder is the only sense of justice you have. When you can mourn for Kashmir and what happened to the Pandits there, what prevents you from acknowledging a moral responsibility for what happened in your constituency or are you saying that ethnic cleansing is a permitted and legitimate form of political hygiene? Today, the evidence before the Nanavati Commission and the investigations of the SIT team show that your party has been deeply involved in rioting, violence and genocide. Your attitude seems to suggest that majoritarianism exhausts the democratic imagination, that violence is an acceptable tactic for enforcing majoritarianism. Your close colleague and our current CM seems to suggest that it is part of the logic of development.

Violence negates politics and a party that banalises violence eventually exhausts its own political imagination. One wonders whether the current emptiness of your party is a result of this indifference to the atrocities that so many citizens suffered?...

Ram Puniyani: RSS-BJP -- Father, Son, and Unholy Mission

See also his article from 2005: Is RSS a terrorist organization?

His website has more. Lots more.

From his Tehelka column:

Mr. Advani has been calling Manmohan Singh as the weakest Prime Minister for quite some time. Recently Manmohan Singh, decided to hit back and he reminded the nation about the role of Advani in Kandhar episode, Babri demolition and Gujarat violence. Sonia Gandhi’s response to Advani’s barbs was at deeper level as she called Advani and most of BJP leadership as ‘slave of RSS’ (Bidar, Karnataka 15th April) This jolted the BJP leadership which gave some weakly mumbled response. BJP-RSS relationship was once again brought to the public attention. It became clear that it is really the RSS which through various mechanisms, ideological and organizational, controls the second largest party in the country.

[...]

... [A]t Sindi (Wardha, Maharahtra) in 1954 from March 9 to March 16 a political training camp was organized for 300 pracharaks. The camp was aimed to train national RSS leadership for running the affairs of the country through Jana Sangh. RSS sarsangh chalak (supreme dictator) M.S. Golwalkar in his speech (March 16) elaborated his vision for Jana Sangh, "If we say that we are part of the organization and accept its discipline then selectiveness has no place in life. Do what is told. If told to play kabaddi, play kabaddi; told to hold meeting then meeting…For instance some of our friends were told to go and work for politics that does not mean that they have great interest or inspiration for it… If they are told to withdraw from politics then also there is no objection. Their discretion is just not required."

[...]

One will beg to differ with Sonia Gandhi on one count; slaves normally are just obeying the orders of the masters. Here the BJP, its leadership not only obeys the RSS orders, it has internalized the RSS agenda and its job is to devise different strategies and moves to ensure that RSS agenda of Hindu nation becomes strong. When in power BJP makes ground for infiltration of its siblings (other RSS progeny) to infiltrate in the state apparatus, social work, education and other possible conduits for transforming the state and society in the image of RSS.

One of the best comments on the Varun Gandhi outburst

If Varun Gandhi had said that he would slaughter a chicken instead of Muslims, his mother would have put him behind bars herself, pronto!

Interesting sense of priority we have in this country...

Found at Calcutta Chromosomes.

Links ...

1. Arati Chokshi at I Witness:

   What about the mute by standers? What kind of children are we raising that cannot protest - a wrong doing? any wrong doing? as individually defined? Or, have we so insensitised ourselves by the constant barrage of violence that surrounds our daily lives, in TV, newspapers, wars played out on all stages big and small that veiwing violence is just another opportunity for entertainment? Are we incapable of enrage, anguish, compassion? What are we capable of? Do we talk in our homes, with our sons and daughters - what would they do if this happened - to them, to you? or..were witness to acts of atrocities, violence? Would we advice our children to not get into trouble, not witness, walk away? Or would we say - scream, yell, help, call for help, question, participate? ...

2. Kamran Abbasi at Cricinfo on the terrorist attacks on Sri Lanka cricketers [via Blogbharti]:

   This the darkest day in the history of Pakistan cricket and it occurred in a pleasant suburb of Lahore, a once great city of gardens and tranquility, not far from my own family home in Pakistan.

   This is the end.

3. Discover blog: Worst Science Article Ever? Women “Evolved” to Love Shopping
4. Duff Wilson in NYTimes: Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary:

   Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

   They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

   The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

Breaking news ...

Area Man Travels Back In Time To Kuriya, USSR, On An Important Mission

Farokh Arumugam, a Mumbai area man, has defied all odds to become the first Indian to travel back in time. His flight took off yesterday from an undisclosed location near Mumbai. If his first mission succeeds, he may just be able to rid this world of certain kinds of terrorism forever.

Mr. Arumugam has gone back to the post-Revolution years of 1917-18 to Kuriya, in the former USSR. In a press conference before his historic flight, he said his plans include a lawsuit in the Revolutionary Court of Altai Krai. His lawsuit seeks to force a local area couple to use contraceptive technologies he has brought from the future.

The couple in question are the parents of one Mr. Kalashnikov.

Mr. Arumugam said if his legal maneuvers in Kuriya didn't succeed, he would resort to his Plan B, which he declined to elaborate.

Mr. Arumugam claimed he was inspired by another Mumbai area man, Amit Karkhanis, who has reportedly filed a lawsuit that shares the spirit -- if not the audacity -- of Arumugam's quest to save humanity from itself.

If I had time, I could have developed this story further. For the moment, this will have to do.

The idea about time travel and the teaching of contraception comes from an ancient -- and very, very funny -- Dilbert cartoon, which I'm not able to locate right at this moment.

Links

1. Anjali Deshpande and S.K. Pande: Three days of Mumbai terror reporting:

We support the call for restraint reporting, for terrorism has international and national linkages and is often used to destabilise countries. The initial role of some of the media was to grab the eyeballs rather than ask questions and reflect all facets of life as they unfold without adding to the tension strife and trauma in such situations. In some cases the ethics evolved over the years was thrown into the dustbin. Add to it all the fact, that when some restraint began more than a touch of jingoism took over.

If there is one thing the electronic media helped in particular to do in the last three days was to bolster the confidence of terrorists and to give them a sense of achievement far greater than their action may have provided them.

2. While we're on the disgraceful coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai (particularly by our TV news channels), I should link to the critiques from Sevanti Ninan (in The Hindu) and Harini Calamur (who has a lot more on this issue on her blog).

3. Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar: Dangers of Bushspeak:

Many Indians, while sympathising with the US after 9/11, pointed out that 6,000 feared dead in the World Trade Centre wasn't a big number compared with 50,000 killed over a decade in Kashmir. The US was getting a small dose of the Islamic terrorism that had long devastated Kashmir, and was over-reacting. The US never equated Kashmiri terrorism with war, and always told India to be calm and not bomb terrorist training camps in Pakistan. But when the US itself got a taste of this at home, it went ballistic, declared it was at war with terrorism, and vowed to bomb and kill all those bad guys.

Cooler heads pointed out that "war on terror" was a meaningless phrase. Terror is simply a tactic used by certain groups, and you cannot wage war against a tactic. You can declare war on an enemy country, but not on an NGO (terrorists are exactly that - non-government organizations). When terrorism arises from an ideology or set of grievances, imaginary or otherwise, killing one bunch of ideologues may simply deepen the grievances and create thousands of fresh terrorists.

4. Shashi Tharoor: Time to improve relations between police & minorities:

We in India also need to recognize that if we want under-represented Muslims to compete effectively for police jobs, they need to feel the police is part of them, rather than an external entity. It's clear we need to: actively solicit applications from minorities for the police at all levels (including the Provincial Armed Constabulary and the Central Reserve Police); offer special catch-up courses open only to members of the minority communities that will prepare them for the entrance examinations; at the moment few feel qualified to take the exams, and fewer still pass; and require police officers to work with community organizations, mosques and madrasas to encourage minorities to apply.

In other words, instead of more "reservations", with the resentment that breeds, let us make it easier for minorities to join the police. But let's not stop with recruitment: we also need to focus on the retention and progression of minority officers. ...

5. The tension between India and Pakistan is so intense that the latter gets spooked by a hoax call:

Pakistani officials said Saturday that a bellicose phone call to President Asif Ali Zardari from India, purportedly placed by the Indian foreign minister, prompted Islamabad to put its air force on high alert before concluding the call was a hoax. [...]

Terrorism and politics

After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it has become fashionable to suggest that we should banish -- or, at least, rise above -- politics and seek ways of preventing terrorist attacks, and of minimizing the damage and loss of life if a terrorist attack does get underway.

But it seems to me that any suggestion about what needs to be done is inherently political. Consider the following suggestions/demands/ideas:

1. the ritual resignation of some minister or the other.

2. different kinds of internal security measures -- POTA, for example -- which imply different levels of loss of personal freedom

3. going to war with a nuclear armed neighbour -- "There is only one way to deal with [international terrorism] - the Dubya way!"

4. getting Ratan Tata to be our Prime Minister with NSG commandos running the state's affairs.

Which of these ideas is not political? Even if one couches them in non-partisan rhetoric -- "I don't care who's in power, NDA or UPA.I want action!" -- each of the ideas depends on a certain view of the state, who should run it, what it should do, and at what cost. When each of them comes into conflict with others -- your POTA is my draconian law, after all -- what you have is politics. Gnani puts it even more strongly:

... [T]errorism is not above politics. It is politics by other means.

To come to grips with it and to eventually eliminate it, the practice of politics by proper means needs constant fine tuning and improvement. Decrying all politics and politicians, only helps terrorists and dictators who are the two sides of the same coin. [...]

Let me leave you with some links. And, yes, they are all intensely political:

1. Gnani Sankaran's class-based take on how our media -- especially the TV channels -- are spinning the terrorist attacks. [Update: See also Mukul Kesavan's column.]

2. Biju Mathew asks us to be skeptical about what the media tells us about the attacks. A lot of their stories are based on selective leaks from the police, intelligence agencies and the armed forces; when the leaks are selective, they are likely to be self-serving and/or ass-covering. [See this, this and this]

3. Why did we end up losing top police officials and NSG commandos? Mad Momma wants to know, because "because tomorrow my son might want to join these forces."

* * *

Let me end this post on a not-so-political note with the following links:

1. WSJ has a detailed -- and chilling -- account of how the terrorists did what they did. Here's an equally chilling account from an NSG commando of the fight to liberate the Taj.

2. A daughter recounts the hours and days when her father -- a police official -- was inside one of the hotels fighting the terrorists.

The academic side of Al Quaeda

Lawrence Wright has an article in the New Yorker about the 'transformation' of "Dr. Fadl", an Al Qaeda mastermind. Fadl, we learn, wrote a book in the nineties -- The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge -- that provided "religio-intellectual" legitimacy to that organization's terrorist tactics -- particularly those involving suicide attacks; his current, 'revised' views -- which appeared in Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World (2007) -- have raised serious questions about terrorism as a jihadi tactic. Wright uses Fadl's two books as a backdrop for the kinds of arguments that have been going on among radical jihadists in Egypt (primarily) and elsewhere. Along the way, he also traces the history of some of the (Egypt-based) radical Islamic movements and the personalities -- and personal rivalries -- that shaped them.

When thousand-page books and 200-page rebuttals have a go at each other, the discussion is bound to assume an academic tone, with each side citing religious scholars, sometimes going all the way back to the Prophet himself. Here's Wright writing about Zawahiri's rebuttal to Fadl's second book:

Some of Zawahiri’s commentary may seem comically academic, as in this citation in support of the need for Muslims to prepare for jihad: “Imam Ahmad said: ‘We heard from Harun bin Ma’ruf, citing Abu Wahab, who quoted Amru bin al-Harith citing Abu Ali Tamamah bin Shafi that he heard Uqbah bin Amir saying, “I heard the Prophet say from the pulpit: ‘Against them make ready your strength.’ ” ’ Strength refers to shooting arrows and other projectiles from instruments of war.”

When the discussion takes a decidedly academic turn, (a) it tends to cover all bases, and (b) the underlying issue (in this case, terror) becomes, well, academic. The effect is eerily comical. In the example below, Fadl invokes sanctity of contracts as an argument against the 9/11 attacks, and Zawahiri has a pointed response.

The most original argument in the book and the interview is Fadl’s assertion that the hijackers of 9/11 “betrayed the enemy,” because they had been given U.S. visas, which are a contract of protection. “The followers of bin Laden entered the United States with his knowledge, and on his orders double-crossed its population, killing and destroying,” Fadl continues. “The Prophet—God’s prayer and peace be upon him—said, ‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner up his anus proportionate to his treachery.’ ” ...

When Zawahiri questions the sanctity of a visa, which Fadl equates with a mutual contract of safe passage, he consults an English dictionary and finds in the definition of “visa” no mention of a guarantee of protection. “Even if the contract is based on international agreements, we are not bound by these agreements,” Zawahiri claims, citing two radical clerics who support his view.

Go read the whole thing.

* * *

While we are on this subject, let me point you to the NYRB article titled Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave in which Ahmed Rashid reviews a bunch of books on Al Quaeda.