Terrorism
Face time with the culprits
Steve Coll has an amazing story about traveling in earthquake-stricken Kashmir on the pontoon boats of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is very likely the force behind the Mumbai attacks. The question, Coll suggests, is whether Jamat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar’s “legitimate” charity arm, had advance knowledge as well.
Now that’s what I’m talking about
Given that William Dalrymple has told us the Mumbai attackers were “angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively,” it’s more than refreshing to see The Daily Show make the needed point: that perpetrators of appalling injustice
Mumbai fallout
Having recently reviewed the work of Amitav Ghosh for Democratiya, I find myself haunted once again by this passage: The thickening crust of our awareness is both a sign and a reminder of our unwitting complicity in the evolution of violence: if that which mesmerized us yesterday ceases to interest us today, then it follows that the act which will
Mumbai
This Thanksgiving eve we should send thoughts and prayers to the city of Mumbai (Bombay), which has just been subjected to a savage multi-site terrorist attack. Some people’s idea of bravery includes attacking a hospital for women and children. Patients are being held hostage as I write this. [Update: Stratfor weighs in on the possible geopolitical fallout. Grim, grim, grim.]
Maher looks back
Bill Maher raised the subject of 9/11 on last night’s show, and countered Sarah Palin’s regurgitation of “they hate us for our freedom” with his own “they hate us for our airstrikes.” And there the debate remains frozen, still, seven years later. Although “they hate us for our freedom” is cartoonish and misleading, Islamist militants are in fact declared foes
Remembering
It is September 11 and the McCain campaign has us all ranting about lipstick on a pig. Think about that. Last year, to mark this anniversary, I posted a passage from Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines. I’d like to do so again. — The Shadow Lines is a semifictional account of anti-Muslim communal violence in Calcutta in 1964.
Tiger strike
Thanks to the rise of the amazing and unclassifiable rapper-singer M.I.A., whose father is a senior figure in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), there’s been an unusual amount of talk about this Sri Lankan separatist group in the western music press in recent years. One of the smartest discussions was offered by Robert Christgau in the Village Voice
Remembering
I wasn’t able to work this into my piece on the writings of Amitav Ghosh, but the following passage from his 1988 novel The Shadow Lines stopped me short. It’s not about 9/11, obviously. It’s a semifictional account of anti-Muslim communal violence in Calcutta in 1964. Parallel anti-Hindu riots erupted in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) around the same time;