Mumbai: blaming everyone except the shooters

Where else but in The Guardian?

Dalrymple’s portrait of the killers, as well as the sections of Muslim opinion he sees as supporting them, is based on a profound failure to treat them as morally autonomous and equal to himself. They are boiling with rage, they can’t be expected to reason or to have any respect for the lives of bystanders. When it all gets a bit too much, well, it’s the most natural, though regrettable, thing in the world for them to set out on a Jew hunt or mow down commuters in a railway station.

Under no circumstances should we, rational Westerners, seek to apply the same critical standards to the Mumbai murderers and their supporters as we do - haltingly and insufficiently - to our own actions and those of our leaders. What we have to do is understand and empathize with their feelings and, as we can’t expect them to dilute their rage with reason or to seek methods to vindicate their claims that don’t involve hand grenades or AK 47s, we must make ourselves constantly ready to indulge their homicidal tantrums. Above all, we must never, ever treat them as our equals.

It’s a pretty pass that certain elements of liberal cultivated opinion have come to.

No prizes for guessing how Mumbai's Jewish victims were treated:

Mumbai doctors who examined the bodies of the victims of the Muslim terror massacre said the victims were tortured before being slaughtered.

[...]

"Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks," a doctor who performed a post-mortem told the Indian news website Rediff.com.

"It was clear that they were killed on Friday. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at December 1, 2008 08:09 AM