Sin City Mumbai
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
--Happy Christmas, John Lennon
In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets
— for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai.
Now these young Muslim men murdered people
in front of their families
--Suketu Mehta
Terror made me cruel
--Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
______________
Ghandi's words apply across the board.
This is just an observation on the recent bombings in Mumbai. While it is unclear exactly who is responsible, what is clear are the targets -- Americans and Brits, and members of a Jewish center, who were killed execution-style.
One theory voiced by a guest editorialist at the New York Times offered that Mumbai represents everything offensive to strict Muslims: it is the New Babylon pandering to affluent tourists, and it is Bollywood -- "Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness (What They Hate About Mumbai.) Taking this reasonable interpretation, one could understand the rationale behind a religious fundamentalist's offense, if not their murderous actions.
But why the Lubavitcher Chabad House?
The Lubavitchers are to Judaism what radical Islam is to its more assimilated members. They are ultraconservative, standing out even as odd relics in America, with the men in their peyot and heavy overcoats and covered heads, and women also in modest dress and head coverings who live in traditional family ways. The keep apart from "corrupt" society, like the Mennonites or the Amish, and reject modern society much as the radical Muslims do.
If the bombers are fundamentalist Muslims opposing corrupt society, their logical allies were they to cross the religious spectrum would be the very people they executed at the Jewish center. While I can suspend my disgust for a moment to see the Muslim rationale against modernity's corruption I cannot understand their lack of fellow-feeling with another fundamentalist religious group which also rejects such societal degradation, if that is indeed their cause célèbre.
I guess anti-Semitism always trumps any other concern.
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
--Happy Christmas, John Lennon
In 1993, Hindu mobs burned people alive in the streets
— for the crime of being Muslim in Mumbai.
Now these young Muslim men murdered people
in front of their families
--Suketu Mehta
Terror made me cruel
--Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
______________
Ghandi's words apply across the board.
This is just an observation on the recent bombings in Mumbai. While it is unclear exactly who is responsible, what is clear are the targets -- Americans and Brits, and members of a Jewish center, who were killed execution-style.
One theory voiced by a guest editorialist at the New York Times offered that Mumbai represents everything offensive to strict Muslims: it is the New Babylon pandering to affluent tourists, and it is Bollywood -- "Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness (What They Hate About Mumbai.) Taking this reasonable interpretation, one could understand the rationale behind a religious fundamentalist's offense, if not their murderous actions.
But why the Lubavitcher Chabad House?
The Lubavitchers are to Judaism what radical Islam is to its more assimilated members. They are ultraconservative, standing out even as odd relics in America, with the men in their peyot and heavy overcoats and covered heads, and women also in modest dress and head coverings who live in traditional family ways. The keep apart from "corrupt" society, like the Mennonites or the Amish, and reject modern society much as the radical Muslims do.
If the bombers are fundamentalist Muslims opposing corrupt society, their logical allies were they to cross the religious spectrum would be the very people they executed at the Jewish center. While I can suspend my disgust for a moment to see the Muslim rationale against modernity's corruption I cannot understand their lack of fellow-feeling with another fundamentalist religious group which also rejects such societal degradation, if that is indeed their cause célèbre.
I guess anti-Semitism always trumps any other concern.
Labels: anti-semitism, lubavitchers attacked in mumbai, mumbai attack on Chabad house, mumbai bombing, radical muslims attack radical jews
posted by Lisa at 7:09 PM
7 Comments:
religious fundamentalist extremists are absolutists. for them there is only one religion.... one way.
absolutists from another religion gets no points because they are absolute about the wrong religions.
India has some raging Hindus as well..... as a matter of fact, the comparatively secular government will be worrying about a Hindu extremist backlash.
those who are Liberal and secular get no points either, because even if they are devoutly religious, they believe somehow in a live-and-let-live theosophy were people of faith can live side by side.
the Liberal Democratic tradition of the West is very much an enemy of the Islamic extremist militant.
tolerance is not a value to a religious extremist.
ghost dansing,
So basically, brute hatred trumps any ideological or societal brotherhood. So any voiced beefs against societal corruption are a scam, covering up the more entrenched basal hatred of The Other (every other.)
i think there are identifiable psychosocial substratum that are parallel regardless of religious and even political affiliation.
the violent extremist phenomenon always seems to have at its core a very high degree of rigid intolerance.... there are a few other hallmarks as well, and even western nations steeped in the Liberal thought which sprang from the European enlightenment have approximately 20-25% of given populations that exhibit rigid authoritarian bent.
interestingly, the Jewish faith can be seen as having a considerable impact on the development of Liberal governmental concepts and even secular values..... i've read where their very existence as a diaspora in foreign cultures led to this outlook and influence.
the notion that various religions should be allowed and treated equally under the law along with various political, ethnic and cultural value systems is actually quite radical; not found in the primordial human soup which is historically much more "live-and-let-die".
interestingly, there is the paradox of the Weimar Republic in Germany.....
some rejected Liberalism as a viable political philosophy because the Liberal democratic Weimar Republic was unable to guard against the emergence of the Nazis, the War and the Holocaust.
some rejected Liberalism and concepts of tolerance embracing various, sometimes tacit, forms of fascism.
the Neoconservative ideology that recently emerged as dominant in this recent Republican administration has as its lineage such critiques of Liberalism....
see Leo Strauss....
ghost dansing,
Given the 20-25% of rising authoritarian bent, but that is not synonymous with "violent extremism."
Yes, it is in Judaic law that we find some of the roots of our Western concepts of "mercy" and justice. Live and Let live is a radical idea, yet one can see the roots in Judaism, with the concept of tzedakah and any of the other numerous proscriptions to "heal the world". Of course, their numbers are small, and things seem pretty riven right now.
Perhaps it is the human impulse to have a scapegoat, and the Jews are small in number and successful out of all proportion to that.
As for the Weimar Republic and liberalism, there is much to say on that matter. As for their wishing to "guard against Nazism," I don't know that was one of their driving impulses. Surely Adolph could have been happily co-opted into their happy perversions. Unfortunately, they swung too wide of his stern mien.
The roots of neocon ideology deserves its own essay.
i guess i should have said sub-strati or said "there is an identifiable psychosocial substratum"......
mixing plural and singular Enlish and Latin? oh well.... it's all poetry or BS depending on how you look at it....
anyway..... authoritarian personalities/groups do not necessarily become violent extremists. i think the cultural environment is a determining factor, at least with respect to magnitude.
in America, regardless what the so called "christian right" says, the foundational culture is Liberal, secular and Democratic. it is not a "Christian" Nation.
that said, i would say there are excellent parallels between the psychosocial makeup of the American Evangelical, Fundamentalist/Dominionist "christian" and the extremist Islamic subculture in the Middle East and South-Southwest Asia.
while they may protest that they are not killing or bombing anybody, i would say that is more a function of the overall culture.
place these people in the context of a "Christian" Nation that nurtures and develops their resentments and animosities similar to the Wahabist Saudi government and Salafist strains in Pakistan, and we would have a population ready to wage Christian "Holy War"..... the differential lies in the secular culture vice cultures actively exploiting a rigid ideological strain (yes, a culture is like a petri dish).
when you engage one from the so called "christian right", you will also find that they are more than willing to cast the conflict with islamic extremists as an existential conflict with Islam.
the greater American culture doesn't "Jihad" or Holy War against anybody..... we really don't care if a person practices the Muslim religion as long as it doesn't involve lighting-off explosives, and of course, as long as our Corporations can practice "free trade" around the globe.
not sure i followed your comment on Weimar.... not sure who "they" are in that context. i was referring to an anti-Liberal backlash amongst some intellectuals because of Weimar's failures.
this is a phenomenon in which certain thinking abandons Liberalism in the face of fascism or communism (same thing in implementation) in a way that Freud would call "identification with the aggressor".
in order to combat or guard against fascism, they tacitly become fascists.
we see it with Leo Strauss and popular literary/philosophical figures like Ayn Rand.
we see it with the reactionary Neocons.....
ghost dansing,
Our Christian fundie wingnuts are every bit as whacked as theirs, and ours do feel we are on a Holy Crusade, too.
Dear god, the Revelationsists do feel we are on our way to Armageddon, and all of this madness has to come down in the ME in order for them to get their glorified bodies and ascend to the Elysian Fields.
They're Israel's pals, only in that Israel must be there in order to be destroyed. It's writ in The Book, y'know? And all of these people are insane.
That was my main point. I am not naive, and know that there are many considerations, and on and on. . . But on the rawest level, if what what claims is a radical desire to go back to some untainted past time, how hypocritical NOT to ally with others who share your stated desire.
People tend to be shameless hypocrites, in favor of their own advancement ("more-for-me"), and anti-Semitism uber-alles. That's all.
Why attack another extremist group? Because they make a perfect enemy. Institutions need a cause or an enemy in order to survive. Enemies work best, because then you are not simply killing in the name of your preferred vision of society, you are killing in the name of defense. The wars we are seeing are perpetuated by mutual animosities and a sort of symbiosis. Without extremist jews touting the horror of Islam, extremist muslims would not have a rationale for their strikes. Without extremist islam, extremist christians would have no rationale for their attempts to reform society. No al-Qaeda without US militarism, no Israeli expansion without palestinian terrorism, etc. etc. These group rely on eachother. The last thing they want is to be ignored, or even worse, respected. Institutions grow on fear.
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