Mumbai! Mumbai!

How to respond to the Mumbai massacre

Date published: 11/30/2008

OF COURSE Islamic terrorists enjoy attacking Mumbai (for- merly Bombay). It is not only South Asia's New York, a financial colossus, but also its Hollywood, home to a gigantic film industry whose wares saturate not only mostly Hindu India but also Muslim Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Islamicists see a serpent with two heads and bared fangs of modernity that threaten their vision of a pious caliphate in which all heads bow to Mecca.

The progress epitomized by Mumbai--with 18 million people, India's largest city--stems much from its openness, which makes it a target in zealot eyes not only deserving of affliction but also easy to afflict. Thus, a squad of killers armed with automatic rifles and grenades could kill about 200 innocents in a three-day rampage directed against glittering symbols of Mumbai's prosperity--luxury hotels, posh restaurants, a bustling railroad station. This type of hater cares about symbols (see: Twin Towers, Pentagon). But of course there is always time to tweak a plan to kill Jews--apparently why an obscure guesthouse run by a kindly Orthodox rabbi from New York and his Israeli wife was also attacked, and the couple killed.

The attackers especially hunted Americans and Britishers, too, but most of their victims were Indians. The toll also included Germans, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Australians, Britons, Canadians, Thais, Singaporeans, and at least six Americans, including, from the Charlottesville area, a father and his daughter, all of 13. (May God justly reward the killers for their valor.) All of these people were engaged in the business of living, offensive per se to those suckled on cadaverous theology.

At the state level, the response to these 60 hours of horror must be closer cooperation among India, Pakistan, and all other nations to extirpate a common enemy of the sane and decent. The world's private citizens also have a role in ensuring that Mumbai recovers, as New York did, and that evil men with guns do not prevail there or anywhere. As Suketu Mehta, a Mumbai chronicler, writes grandly in The New York Times: "I'm booking flights to Mumbai. I'm going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro."

Oppose death with life. The fanatics can merely kill us; we will bury them.

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Date published: 11/30/2008