Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.(emphasis added)This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”
So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?
Lots of pundits want to paint last week's attacks as something other than what they really were: Terrorist attacks by "a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, 'backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.'"
They have essentially the same "maximalist" aims as their friends in al-Qaeda--elimination of Islam's "existential" enemies (the United States, UK, India, Israel) and establishment of a global caliphate.
The motivation for these attacks was no more complicated than that.
It's as nose as the Anne on plain's face.
(h/t Scott L.)
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