Jihad Terror in Mumbai: Concordant Hatred of Hindus and Jews (Part 1)

Sixty hours of jihadist terror depradations throughout India’s financial capital, Mumbai—during which nearly  200 innocent victims were murdered, and 300 wounded—apparently ceased this Saturday, November 29, when Indian commandos slew the last three gunmen inside a luxury hotel, while it was still ablaze. Mainstream media coverage of these rampaging, cold-blooded murderous acts of jihad terrorism—perpetrated by a self-professed “mujahideen” organization (i.e., “The Deccan Mujahideen”)—consistently ignored the clear ideological linkage to Islam. Simply put, “mujahideen” are Muslim jihadists, “holy warriors,” because there is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad, despite present day apologetics.

The root of the word jihad, appears 40 times in the Koran and in subsequent Islamic understanding to both Muslim luminaries—from the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam, to ordinary people—meant and means “he fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like.” As described by the seminal mid-19^th century Arabic lexicographer E.W Lane, “Jihad came to be used by the Muslims to signify wag[ing] war, against unbelievers.” A contemporary definition, relevant to both modern jihadism and its shock troop “mujahideen”—was provided at the Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research at Al Azhar University, Cairo—Islam’s most important religious educational institution—in 1968, by Muhammad al-Sobki:

…the words Al Jihad, Al Mojahadah, or even “striving against enemies” are equivalents and they do not mean especially fighting with the atheists…they mean fighting in the general sense…

Contemporary validation of the central principle of jihad terrorism—rooted in the Koran—(for example, verses 8:12, 8:60, and 33:26)—i.e., to terrorize the enemies of the Muslims as a prelude to their conquest—has been provided in the mainstream Pakistani text on jihad warfare by Brigadier S.K. Malik, originally published in Lahore, in 1979. Malik’s treatise was endorsed in a laudatory Foreword to the book by his patron, then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq, as well as a more extended Preface by Allah Buksh K. Brohi, a former Advocate-General of Pakistan. This text—widely studied in Islamic countries, and available in English, Urdu, and Arabic—has been recovered from the bodies of slain jihadists in Kashmir. Brigadier Malik emphasizes how instilling terror is essential to waging successful jihad campaigns:

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him…

“Jihad,” the Koranic concept of total strategy…[d]emands the preparation and application of total national power and military instrument is one of its elements. As a component of the total strategy, the military strategy aims at striking terror into the hearts of the enemy from the preparatory stage of war…Under ideal conditions, Jihad can produce a direct decision and force its will upon the enemy. Where that does not happen, military strategy should take over and aim at producing the decision from the military stage. Should that chance be missed, terror should be struck into the enemy during the actual fighting.

…the Book [Koran] does not visualize war being waged with “kid gloves.” It gives us a distinctive concept of total war. It wants both, the nation and the individual, to be at war “in toto,” that is, with all their spiritual, moral, and physical resources. The Holy Koran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test of utmost preparation lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of the enemies.

The Islamic correctness of most mainstream media outlets—which refused to consider such ideological motivations, rooted in jihad—did not apply, however to Hindus, or Jews—targeted infidel victims of the attacks. Blithely ignoring obvious Islamic and Muslim connections—credit taken for the attacks by a mujahideen organization; or testimony from a Turkish Muslim couple briefly apprehended, and then released unharmed by the jihadists because, “…[w]hen the (Muezzinoglus) said they were Muslims, their captors told them that they would not be harmed”—some media (at Fox; NPR) even voiced their own “speculations” about the possible culpability of “Hindu extremists,” an absurd calumny, stated in full paranoid transference mode by the Muslim Brotherhood:

A photograph published in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.

Yet these same media offered no speculation about Islamic Jew hatred as an obvious potential motivation for the transparently selective attack on Mumbai’s Chabad House—a focal point symbol of the miniscule Jewish community of 5000 (or 0.03%) in a city of some 15 million inhabitants. More egregiously, this neglect of any hateful Islamic motivations for the targeted murder of such innocent Jews—including a young Lubavitcher Rabbi and his wife—was accompanied by consistently dehumanizing and demeaning references to these victims as “Ultra-Orthodox,” and their entirely false characterization as “missionaries.”

This current Jewish tragedy within a much larger non-Muslim, primarily Hindu tragedy, reminded me of the Indian Sufi “inspiration” for The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Ahmad Sirhindi. Nearing completion of my first book compendium, The Legacy of Jihad, in early 2005, specifically the section about jihad on the Indian subcontinent, I came across a remarkable comment by the Indian Sufi theologian Sirhindi (d. 1624). Typical of the mainstream Muslim clerics of his era, Sirhindi was viscerally opposed to the reforms which characterized the latter ecumenical phase of Akbar’s 16^th century reign (when Akbar became almost a Muslim-Hindu syncretist), particularly the abolition of the humiliating jizya (Koranic poll tax, as per Koran 9:29) upon the subjugated infidel Hindus. In the midst of an anti-Hindu tract Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, Sirhindi observes,

Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.

The biographical information I could glean about Sirhindi provided, among other things, no evidence he was ever in direct contact with Jews, so his very hateful remark suggested to me that the attitudes it reflected must have a theological basis in Islam—contra the prevailing, widely accepted “wisdom” that Islam, unlike Christianity was devoid of such theological Antisemitism.  Having originally intended to introduce, edit, and compile a broader compendium on dhimmitude in follow-up to The Legacy of Jihad, this stunning observation inspired me instead to change course and focus on the interplay between Islamic Antisemitism, and the intimately related phenomenon of jihad imposed dhimmitude for Jews, specifically.

Of course Jew-hatred was merely a sidelight to Sirhindi’s hatemongering Islamic “ethos.” He was an intensely anti-Hindu bigot, as revealed by these words:

Cow-sacrifice in India is the noblest of Islamic practices. The kafirs [Hindus] may probably agree to pay jizya but they shall never concede to cow-sacrifice…The real purpose in levying jizya on them [Hindus] is to humiliate then to such an extent that, on account of fear of jizya , they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur. They should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It in intended to hold them under contempt and to uphold the honor and might of Islam…