“murderers” not “martyrs”
By pm317 on February 20, 2009 at 5:15 PM in Current Affairs
My very first blog post on NQ was about Indian Muslims and how they reacted to the horrible Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008. In it I reported how an Indian Muslim Organization was refusing to bury the terrorists. Tom Friedman at NYT wrote this in his Op-Ed on Tuesday:
There are nine bodies — all of them young men — that have been lying in a Mumbai hospital morgue since Nov. 29. They may be stranded there for a while because no local Muslim charity is willing to bury them in its cemetery. This is good news.
The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 — India’s 9/11 — gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews. It was killing for killing’s sake. They didn’t even bother to leave a note.
All nine are still in the morgue because the leadership of India’s Muslim community has called them by their real name — “murderers” not “martyrs” — and is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai, the 7.5-acre Bada Kabrastan graveyard, run by the Muslim Jama Masjid Trust.
“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, told The Times of London.
Eventually, one assumes, they will have to be buried, but the Mumbai Muslims remain defiant.
“Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam,” explained M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. “Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is ‘fasad.’ Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the … terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery.”
[May be now that Pakistan has accepted responsibility for the Mumbai attacks and acknowledged that the terrorists came from Pakistan's soil, those bodies should be shipped to Pakistan.]
Friedman goes on to say:
The only effective way to stop this [Extolling or excusing suicide militants as “martyrs”] trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.
That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.
While one Muslim community reacts responsibly calling these terrorists for what they are, murderers, there are troubling developments in other Islamic countries. It appears that Taliban and their pals Al Queda have now been given territory, a safe haven if you will by Pakistan in the Swat valley and they are already establishing Sharia law there.
I am no foreign policy expert but I did make this observation on my last post on this topic:
What did we accomplish from the 2001-2002 incursion into Afghanistan? It appears to me that the Taliban and Al Qaeda just got relocated with all expenses paid by the Pakistan Army and its Intelligence unit.
Bush’s incoherent Pakistan policy and taking his eyes off the ball from Afghanistan to invade Iraq come at a huge price, not the least of which is the dire political conditions in Pakistan. This is what one Times of India (TOI) article is reporting on the US reaction to Pakistan’s deal with Taliban:
The Obama administration’s yet to be formulated policy on Pakistan and Afghanistan is already being tested after Islamabad’s defiant move to make another peace deal with the Taliban amid mounting US concern and frustration.
Both US and NATO officials have expressed disquiet about the latest ”peace” deal in Swat, the kind which they say has in the past given Taliban and Al Qaeda elements space and time to regroup in Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.
US response to the rebellious Pakistani move has been muted given the upcoming review of Washington’s Af-Pak policy, but on a four-country Asia visit to China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made no secret of American unease.
Washington is studying the agreement and trying to understand the Pakistani government’s ”intention and the actual agreed-upon language,” Clinton told reporters on Tuesday in Tokyo, the first stop.
However, she added that ”activity by the extremist elements in Pakistan poses a direct threat to the government of Pakistan as well as to the security of the United States, Afghanistan and a number of other nations not only in the immediate region.”
But where Pakistan is concerned one has to wonder if it is not capitalizing on the lull and change of guard in the US trying to shock everybody into compliance by their latest move to call truce with Taliban militants and giving up Swat region to them. It remains to be seen what their real agenda is. The article in TOI goes on to give us a clue to Pakistan’s behavior:
Pakistan’s move comes amid a massive trust deficit between Washington and Islamabad, and just days ahead of a visit here by the country’s army chief Pervez Kiyani, who was once seen as a hand-picked U.S ally, but is now regarded as a two-faced patron of terror, much the way his predecessor Pervez Musharraf is now being characterised.
Both Musharraf and Kiyani, and indeed the Pakistani military, have been exposed as duplicitous in a recent book called ”The Inheritance” by New York Times reporter David Sanger in which he cites U.S intelligence phone taps that show Pakistani military’s double-dealing.
In one telling excerpt, Sanger describes a telephone-tap transcript passed to Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence in May 2008, in which Kiyani is heard referring to the warlord terrorist Jalaluddin Haqqani as ”a strategic asset.” Washington later intercepted calls from Pakistani military units to Haqqani, warning him of an impending military operation designed to prove to the US that Islamabad was tackling the militant threat.
”They must have dialled 1-800-HAQQANI” a source tells Sanger. “]It was something like, ‘Hey, we’re going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram’’’ The intercept was apparently the clue that led the CIA to uncover evidence of collusion between ISI and Haqqani in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul — an act that would put Kiyani in the dock.
When it comes to war on terror, Pakistan is having its cake and eating it too. I hope US can implement smart policies calling Pakistan’s game to its face. This is what Richard Holbrooke said in one interview:
“We are troubled and confused in the sense about what happened in Swat, because it is not an encouraging trend,” Richard Holbrooke, the Special US Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan told the PBS news channel in an interview.
Having just returned from South Asia wherein he met leaders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, Holbrooke said the Pakistanis are shocked at the fall of the picturesque Swat, which is after all a resort they all went to for vacations.
“So we have a situation in the area which is very serious. This is what we inherited,” he said.
This is for the first time that an administration official has spoken clearly against the peace deal between the Taliban and the Pakistan government.
A South Asia expert sums up US reaction thus far as lacking.
Observing the Obama administration has reacted cautiously to this news, Curtis said this sends a signal of weakness in the region precisely at the time the US needs to demonstrate resolve against the forces of extremism and terrorism.
“Washington’s prevarication on the take-over of the Swat Valley by pro-Taliban forces undermines US policy in the region and raises the critical question of why the US would send troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, while standing by as Islamist extremists gain ground in neighboring Pakistan,” Curtis said.
When it comes to terrorists, like Friedman says the key to peace is in the hands of much of the international Muslim community itself. But when it comes to deceptive State actors like Pakistan, what should the US and other countries do?
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