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.