...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

India’s failed modus operendi: India tried to opt out of the War Against Violent Jihadis (a more accurate name for the War on Terror), but as Arthur Herman writes on the NRO site, the violent jihadis keep opting India back in:

…Islamic terrorists don’t want justice or respect for their beliefs, or restoration of some imaginary homeland. They want violence and death. The duty of every government is to make sure that terrorists get them before they can deal them out. Pakistanis will never know peace, or peace with their neighbors in Afghanistan and India, until they finally and ruthlessly root out the terrorists in their midst.

The same goes for India. That was the second illusion that died in Mumbai: that democratic nations can somehow opt out of the war on terror. India has largely operated on that assumption since 2001, even though it is home to the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia, and wedged between two neighbors — Pakistan and Bangladesh — where Islamic terrorist groups operate in relative freedom.

The media here and in India seem to have forgotten that this was not the first round of mass death in Mumbai. Bombings rocked the city back in the summer of 2005, killing more than 200, followed by bloody attacks on Jaipur and India’s high-tech capital, Bangalore, earlier this year.

In spite of this, India’s record on counterterrorism is abysmal, almost deliberately so. The government in New Delhi steadfastly maintains a wall of separation between law-enforcement agencies like the one that used to separate the FBI and CIA before the Patriot Act, and keeps counterterrorist units underfunded and undermanned. It has repeatedly given way to the demands of Islamic radical groups and fundamentalist lobbyists in the name of “cultural sensitivity.” India was the first non-Islamic country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses back in 1988.

India has no preventive detention laws; no laws to protect the identity of anti-terrorist witnesses; and no laws to allow domestic wiretapping without court order. In 2004, the new Congress Party government revoked India’s version of the Patriot Act, even as the Indian media was loudly condemning the U.S. for “torture” at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

In short, the Indian government has waged the war on terror in much the same way that liberals and many Democrats have been urging the U.S. to carry it out. The result is that more than 4,000 Indians have died in attacks since 2004 — more than any other nation in the war on terror besides Iraq…

You can try to ignore the hard jihad all you want. Sooner or later, it’s going to blow up in your face (and Jews and others will die a horrible death).

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:00 | link | comments

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