Couldn’t get the vid translated.

That Ghandi’s Girls article was fascinating. Ghandi did favor a Hindu script over an Islamic script (going for phonetic). The language issue is a bigger factor than people realize so that the terrorist spoke Urdu does hint at your argument for this act as a reflection of deeper issues on the East/West divide.

really good post man, sums up lots of info and history nicely

This whole thing doesn’t smell right. They haven’t arrested even one of these mysterious gunmen/bombers? They don’t even have one corpse to display? I don’t get it. Israel/CIA/right-wing Brahmin fucks, I’m looking in your direction until proven otherwise. Certain people would love an excuse to stir up tensions between India and Pakistan, the later of which apparently needs to be broken up or broken down in the deranged minds of some U.S. officials, and I’m sure there are Indian pols who would love some evil foreign enemies to disguise the fact that a bunch of rich fuck Brahmins work in the high-tech sector while the rest of India drinks sewage. Speaking of sewage, this whole thing reeks. “We’re going to bomb your beloved monuments and kill your innocent civilians until you stop treating us like we’re all a bunch of crazed sectarian butchers,” yeah right.

Hey whatever was the result of that investigation into the bombing at the hotel in Islamabad where a bunch of U.S. Army special forces were staying? I mean, it’s not like the Army grunts could have just left a bomb in their hotel room and set it to go off when they knew Paki government officials would also be staying there, and then set up some lame car bombing to disguise that fact that they were trying to intimidate the Paki government, right? Only crazy Muslims ever bomb anything, right?

Similar points in Tariq Ali’s piece over at Counterpunch

Muchos gracias guys. This almost turned into a “fuck the police” post in lieu of reading zoeblunt’s fantastic blog. Hope it didn’t in the end.

druhempel – his thing with “the young young gals” is interesting because it humanizes him more than anything. I’m quite wary of heroes, and especially people that are set up as father of nations. I’m more concerned about his ideals of setting up a secular republic. I know we’ve all been told that this is the ideal, but I really believe that the population decides the kind of government. We’ve seen the failure of secular republics across the board. Homogeneity can be bloody dangerous.

Noted poet Rabindranath Tagore was a huge supporter of Ghandi’s Congress Party, but even he shied away when he got a real hint of what the man in the dhoti and his chum Nehru were up to. The tragedy of it all was that real parties that represented the real peoples of India were ignored by the Brits as barbarians as the NRI saviour and his lot were made the representatives of this new state-to-be.

bacchus, you know I’ve disagreed with you on a lot of ideas in the past. This time, I’m with you. Firefights in the street, and not a single prisoner or militant corpse. Conveniently, almost no Western deaths. And what the hell – what kind of total monster would destroy a hospital for women and children? Why didn’t they (whoever they were) just complete the job and destroy every orphanage and burn hospital in Mumbai as well? Something in Mumbai smells rotten. This is the mark of someone who wants to incur hate, and even do more damage to their cause than good.

sis- shall have to read soon.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mumbai+OR+bombay+OR+terrorist

Well on Ghandi’s quasi-tantra practice the young girl thing is nothing strange in itself. That’s why Nepal has a tantric goddess as a young girl but once she hits puberty she turns back into a normal person. I say it’s quasi because he wasn’t practicing full-lotus and he was still relying on some sort of physical interaction, with the whole degrading “service” routine. So it was definitely messed up.

do i LOVE that video? LOL. MUUUUUUcho gusto.

are you doubting that India/Pakistan could ever be united under the umbrella of a single regional democracy?

are you comparing that impossible objective to the Mughal Empire? (what it “no longer is”)

and are you saying that the angst of the subcontinent is rooted in a hankering for it?

because :

pffffffffftttttttttttttttttttttttttt. . . .

no. perhaps you are implying that modern India is a reactionary mess because those FN Brits came and gave everyone a deep seated inferiority complex for which they have to overcompensate by pounding the next guy, any guy — as long as they don’t look like you or anyone in your family.

Yeh. That sounds about right.

That must be why they’re sucking up so to the corporate fascist dictatorship.

a failed democracy is the inevitable outcome of incompetent capitalism.

One has to wonder if and how this will be or is connected to the pirates in Somalia…not to mention the reports from witnesses which also seem to indicate that these aren’t actually devout Muslims (beer drinking at a café, Western looking guys at the train station….none of it adds up to it being locals out to get each other even with all the gangsters, police corruption and dirty dealings that are part of Indian culture.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5252177.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

(excerpt)
The investigation into the al-Qaeda-style terror attacks is focusing on a fishing vessel that was found off the city’s coast with a dead body aboard. It is thought that the vessel was used by the terrorists before they climbed aboard a smaller boat to land at Colaba, the tourist area in southern Bombay where the gunmen’s targets are clustered.

The nationality of the dead man found on the boat is unknown, but one theory being pushed by many inside India’s intelligence apparatus is that the boat’s origin was Karachi, in Pakistan.

The gunmen were well trained and well prepared, apparently scouting targets ahead of time and carrying large bags of almonds and dried fruit to keep up their energy.

“It’s obvious they were trained somewhere … Not everyone can handle the AK series of weapons or throw grenades like that,” a senior office of India’s Marine Commando unit told reporters, his face wrapped in a black mask to protect his identity, told reporters today.

“These terrorists were very well informed regarding the layout of the hotel. In no time they vanished and were gone elsewhere. The kept moving around the hotel,” the officer said.

Bags belonging to the terrorists contained hundreds of rounds of ammunition and grenades were recovered. A Mauritian national Id card, apparently that of one of the gunmen, was also found, together with seven credit cards and more than US$1,000 in cash.

Sing it with me – in the Mumbai, all over India, we are the bhaais. We are the…

Maximum respect for Tariq Ali on his article.

But this is a meditated edifice of official India’s political imagination. Its function is to deny that the terrorists could be a homegrown variety, a product of the radicalization of young Indian Muslims who have finally given up on the indigenous political system. To accept this view would imply that the country’s political physicians need to heal themselves.

Yes.

micro – I’m all up for blaming the Brits to the maximum extent permissible. However, I’d say the history of religious intolerance in India began a while before they butted in. India used to be home to Shaivism, Jainism and Buddhism (and not the diluted religions that they are today). All these religions talked about accepting other deities and integrating. Guess who marched in and put an end to that? But yes, the Brits put the artificial cherry and over-sweetened frosting on the cake.

As I said…maybe one day India will be ready for this so-called secular republic.

Fifi – I was just thinking about the pirates and how they’ve coincidentally been getting stronger of late. The hit on Jews is, as with the hospital, serious overkill.

I’ve been talking with friends in Mumbai or from there. A lot are bloody angry. The word “revenge” has been mentioned by nearly all.

India in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyone?

Talking with oldfriend truthterrorist, I realised how bad these guys’ PR must be if they actually meant to hit the hospital or Jewish bloc. These actions were so unnecessary and deliberate.

As bacchus said, or it could be just that convenient. The government now has an excuse, and Pakistan in its radar.

But pirate mercenaries? Perhaps several groups hit at the same time? It’s still on. And they’re well-trained, it seems.

Hostages haven’t been given a chance to tell us who exactly were holding them.

Just a quick note about this Deccan Muj – interesting name. It refers to the Deccan plateau that stretches into Maharashtra (wherein lies Mumbai), Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu. Three of those provinces/states are in what I like to call “the dirty south” of India. I.e. it was the home base of India’s first peoples – the Dravidians. Dravidians slowly grew into Shaivism, not Islam. It was the invading Turks that brought that with them for the first time. I think I’m over-analysing things, but it looks like they got their name wrong, the Deccan Muj.

Britain is rancid with Pakis — there are millions of them and they stink. There are loads of Paki doctors in the NHS with fake medical degrees (they are illiterate but are paid £250,000 a year by the government). If I was a politician all Pakis and Indians in Britain would be shot and burned in pits (along with the jews).

Well the targets make total sense if one is playing to an international audience and wants to turn yet another cosmopolitan, increasingly tolerant and secular city into a war zone and incite intolerance. If one wants war, it’s necessary to destroy the grounds for diplomacy.

Very true. The act makes them look like bad guys on an almost-super-villain level.

There’s a thought that small-scale attacks of this sort in India had been perpetrated by profiteering politicians. But this is something completely different.

There’s also a lot of gangsters in Mumbai, India pretty much runs on bribery and backroom deal-making from what I understand so there are a lot of people who may have an interest in mounting an attack like this. That said, it was clearly designed for an international audience and to get international attention, not for a domestic audience. Though, of course, it will end up hurting local people the most in myriad ways – from economic to purely social interactions.

A friend of mine said “don’t underestimate the power of hate” when it comes to these hospital bombings. I guess with the U.S. and Israel having bombed as many hospitals as they have, it brings on a tit-for-tat mentality.

But yes, this was a global spectacle. And yeah, from the footage so far it’s the poor people of Mumbai that’re paying the price.

But, as the police continue firefights in the streets let me say that it was bound to be some group from some sect that did this.

you mean rather than a bunch of totally unconnected individuals who just all happened to have the same idea at the same time?

I realised how bad these guys’ PR must be if they actually meant to hit the hospital or Jewish bloc. These actions were so unnecessary and deliberate.

As bacchus said, or it could be just that convenient. The government now has an excuse, and Pakistan in its radar.

The Gov’ts of the US and India now have what they wanted – damned convenient, no?

Cui Bono? Not Pakistan nor even Militant Kashmiri Islamics, that’s for sure.

Could be as simple as a third party with the right kind of resources giving the militants said resources.

Wait, that’s not that simple.

I’m still a bit stunned by the pirate connection.

So maybe Palin’s gaffe was just a bit bigger than they said it was.

The International Backers of the Mumbai Attacks

By Les Blough, Editor. Axis of Logic
Nov 26, 2008, 18:18

Factor analysis – Means, Method and Motivation: Powerful western media organisations reinforce their opinions with repetition, linking assaults like these with former “Islamist attacks” and another “terrorist attack”. Their logic and factor analysis use (1) the weapons used, (2) the similarity of past attacks by “Al Queda” and (3) motivation. But of course they never consider the possibility, based on this same factor analysis, that the architects may be the CIA and/or Mossad.

Means: That the most powerful military machine in the world has the means to arm groups like the one who is carrying out the Mumbai attacks requires no apology or defense.

Method: History is replete with examples of U.S./Israeli use of a surrogate to attack their enemies. William John Fox pointed this out in his exemplary analysis, Deliver Us From Chaos: Ten Political Commandments. In 1953 they used domestic terrorism to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, former Prime Minister of Iran. They used the Afghan Mujahideen to attack Russia in the same year of their resistance. The CIA and the U.S. ambassador secretly engineered the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 and “the U.S. encouraged the Israeli-trained Georgian army to invade the disputed enclave of South Ossetia five years later”.

*Motivation:8 The only difference between the factors used by the capitalist media and ours is motivation. Regarding motivation, CNN states “they (Deccan Mujahideen) want to create as much damage and attention to themselves as possible”. CIA/Mossad are masters at destruction, but the last thing they want is bringing attention to themselves. Motivation for the U.S. to take it’s war to Pakistan fits perfectly with these attacks. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama and Joe Biden already declared their intention to take the war to Pakistan and stated with certainty that Obama’s “mettle would be tested” by a major international “incident” in the near future. If the perpetrators want to draw attention to themselves, their method (i.e. killing civilians), simply does not make sense unless one buys the Bush regime’s religion-based simplism that they are simply “evil”. Militant’s fighting for causes such as independence or national sovereignty want least of all, international negative attention or popular hatred. The only thing missing from the corporate media explanation is George W. Bush’s idiotic claim that “the terrorists are jealous of our freedoms”. Using this the corporate media’s methodology, it is entirely reasonable and just as easy to implicate the CIA and Mossad.

Could be as simple as a third party with the right kind of resources giving the militants said resources.

Well trained militants, don’t forget.

Wait, that’s not that simple.

It’s a lot easier than doing it yourself

So maybe Palin’s gaffe was just a bit bigger than they said it was.

What ‘gaffe’?

The Obamessiah said the same thing more or less – and guess what? There already ARE US bombing raids inside Pakistan – saying it out loud makes no difference at this point. The ‘justifications’ have worked so far – so no need to hide it.

There already ARE US bombing raids inside Pakistan

I know, avec drones. Cowards.

It’s odd how the idea of staged incidents doesn’t make as much sense until it hits so close to home. Well, home.

So where do you think this is going? Indian support on the U.S. side versus the Russia-China juggernaut? Wait, I forgot that this is largely for the profits of private armies and corporations. So the U.S. complex with Indian outsourcing versus the Russian crops and Chinese outsourcing?

wow, and i assumed it was all about wahabist armageddonites getting their rocks off and heading for those 72 virgins in the sky…

fuck , how confusing…

5er, here, btw

yo merc…can you pass on more info about that video…that is ridiculous….bombay classic!

So where do you think this is going? Indian support on the U.S. side versus the Russia-China juggernaut? Wait, I forgot that this is largely for the profits of private armies and corporations. So the U.S. complex with Indian outsourcing versus the Russian crops and Chinese outsourcing?

the tactics of the two camps appear to be quite different, don’t you think? As far as I can tell ONE of those sides specialises in false-flags attacks and country-raping in general, while the other side appears to be trying to play within the declared rules.

As far as I can tell poor countries tend to benefit from doing deals with one of those camps, while deals done with the other usually quickly impoverishes any poor country unfortunate enough to sign a contract with them.

Cheers rem. This stands so far differently from anything local boyz in India get up to, including the Kashmiris. I’d need to see a lot more proof before I could point at that party.

Sure charles; always glad to share on Bollywood. It’s a number from a film called Shootout in Lokhandwala. Lovely little piece about what’s known in India as “encounters” – a meeting of minds between the police and “gangsters” that usually ends with few survivors on the latter side. Asks some serious questions about gang violence and police intervention in Mumbai. But, about the vid – it’s kind of an intro to the gang. The half-chorus there asks “Ganpat, bring some liquor”; the rest basically talks about the high life in Mumbai as a gangster. It’s comical since along with proclamations about their power, they specify the kind of drinks they want “a little less soda, a bit more water.”

As far as I can tell poor countries tend to benefit from doing deals with one of those camps, while deals done with the other usually quickly impoverishes any poor country unfortunate enough to sign a contract with them.

Power grab either way. One just seems to be more expansionist than the other. But then again, we remember the Soviet bloc that still jumps when Putin farts.

Hey u. Thanks for this blog. Long time. Hope you enjoying ur new job…

U actually opened my appetite to blog again. I will blog my first trip to Tel Aviv and photos of the mosque, wailing wall and Holy church…..

I am roaming the globe producing tv features, and watching the world melt into the hands of the media…. i am in and out of ur favorite shinny city Dubai all the time, My decaying Egypt, Oil lubricated Kuwait, and politically fumed D.C…..

How is LA treating u?

I meant how is VA treating u? I miss it, lived there in 1998.

Allo repent; you’re back!

The job’s a job; nothing too exciting. I’m hoping to change direction and perhaps go into writing full time. Van is bloody nice though. Nice® people, better times. But I am a Bedouin and the grass is always greener…you know.

I’m glad you’re back man, and hope to see more inside stories from the black lungs of our region.

I know you’re super-incognito, but try and send me an email or something. Just in case Ant forgets to pay the bills or something ;)

And so it begins