Tom Friedman, he of “The World is Flat” fame, admonishes the people and religious leaders of Pakistan for the lack of a stronger response to the Mumbai attacks and I largely agree with his view point. [NYT]
If the Muslim leaders in Pakistan could launch large scale rallies to protest cartoons in a Danish newspaper, they could surely protest the mass murders of innocent civilians in neighboring India, reasons Friedman.
In one powerful sentence, Friedman drives home the point of what would happen had the situation been reversed.
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
Friedman seems to grasp what most reasonable people with any iota of understanding of the situation in South Asia know: that Pakistan has a weak Central government and a rogue Intelligence agency. By now it has been established that at least one attacker, if not all 10 of them came via Pakistan and/or are Pakistani nationals. While there is no evidence of their involvement with the government or other services, Friedman finds the very fact that these gunmen came from Pakistan disturbing and calls on the people and Muslim leaders in Pakistan to launch mass protests against such attacks on India.
Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.
Powerful words indeed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the border in India, Muslim leaders sent out a powerful message, one that was more likely to deter such future killings under the names of Islam, they refused burial to the bodies of the 9 dead gunmen. [Reuters]
Thoughts? Opinions?
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