Nov 27 2008
Indian Forces Battle Islamic Militants at Jewish Center in Mumbai, Attacks Throughout City Have Left 119 Dead So Far
If you thought things couldn’t get worse in Mumbai, well…they’re worse.
According to Fox News, black-clad commandos and sharpshooters from India’s security forces conducted an assault earlier today on a Jewish center in the city in an effort to smoke out Islamic militants encamped inside the five-story building with possible hostages.
This episode is only the latest in a string of tragedies that began on Wednesday when suspected Muslim terrorists unleashed a wave of attacks across
India’s commercial center. So far, at least 119 people have died and 288 have been wounded, state officials say.
According to Mumbai police and other local sources, Western tourists and diplomats have been the chief target of the terrorists, although scores of Indians have lost their lives because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“The well-coordinated strikes by small bands of gunmen starting Wednesday night left the city shell-shocked,” Fox News reports, “but the sporadic gunfire and explosions at the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels dwindled overnight, indicating the siege might be winding down.”
The assault on the Jewish Center, which houses the headquarters of an ultra-orthodox Jewish outreach group called Chabad Lubavitch, began at the crack of dawn after six trucks of soldiers were sent to the area to surround the building.
According to Fox News, “Snipers stationed in buildings opposite the center began the attack, with sustained fire on the building as at least nine commandos lowered themselves by rope onto the roof from a circling Indian air force helicopter.”
If this tragedy, in which many more Indians lost their lives than the targeted Westerners, doesn’t open Muslims’ eyes as to the ethical bankruptcy of the terrorists’ methods as opposed to the supposed “peacefulness” of their religion, nothing will.
These people are nothing more than thugs, and do not deserve the protection of their religious theocracy. tThey are NOT religious extremists, they are thugs hiding behind religion as a shield.
Normal Muslims should be ashamed they have not tossed these evil men out of their community.
“Normal Muslims should be ashamed they have not tossed these evil men out of their community.”
Why don’t they? Admittedly, i know little, if anything, about the Muslim community. I’ve heard the Koran is really a peaceful text but i can’t confirm it because I can’t read it in the original Arabic. Is their silence a result of fear?
“Why don’t they?”
If I knew that, I’d be a rich man, or working in Washington. (NOT both!!)
The Koran is like the bible in that one can find just about whatever justification you want, it is so poorly written. The language is archaic, unclear, and often contradictory. There are passages that give people the justification for claiming that Islam is a religion of peace, just as there are passages that justify anti-Semitism and warfare against non-muslims.
There are passages that pronounce the death penalty for apostates, adulterers and infidels alike.
There may be plenty of peaceful passages, but the ones that aren’t are as bloodthirsty as any in the bible.
Fact is, one can justify one’s beliefs in Islam as peaceful or bloodthirsty, whatever one’s predilections may be.
That is why it is imperative for muslims that want their religion to be known as peaceful to take steps to eliminate those that threaten that image, both the thugs and the imams that teach the radicalism.
I don’t know Arabic, but then, I don’t know Hebrew or Greek, either. So I can’t read any of the ancient writings in their original form. That is why I, like billions of other humans, must depend upon the scholars to adequately translate them for me. It is also why religion is uniquely suited for manipulation.
The RCC originally only allowed the bible to be written in latin. It was a control measure, for as soon as sufficient lay people, in the persons of educated nobility, became able to read it, the close controls on translating it to local languages were loosened.
The idea was that as long as only the priesthood could read it, the rest of us were held to the priestly interpretations, and could not do so for ourselves. Once that control failed, they fell back on translations that said what they wanted them to say.
Many seminary educated clerics could tell you about the many places where the bible has been changed, but they sure won’t put it into a sermon!
Go read “Misquoting Jesus”, by Bart Ehrman (http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060738170), it tells a fascinating story of the many ways the bible has been changed, sometimes blatantly for doctrinal purposes.
The Koran, I am sure, is probably similar, altho I’ve heard muslims deny it. It was dictated by a man who was already illiterate, and while it therefor has the advantage of being “written” by one man, that man was no scholar, and had not real knowledge of how to write a book. I’d be amazed if it hadn’t been cleaned up by somebody before it was openly “canonized”, or whatever the muslims would call it.
It, too, is an attempt to write a holy book that would use the sacred to control whole populations of ignorant people by claiming to be in control of their chances at an afterlife. After all, Mohammed had over two hundred years of Christian example to go by!! All he had to do was adapt it to the Arab culture. He already had the Christian example of anti-semitism as a template, and he could then use religion as a method of wiping out the Jewish people as a rival for land and influence in north Africa. It also helped him to establish intolerant xenophobia as an institutional imperative. (As in muslims cannot be charged interest on loans, but they enthusiastically charged christians usurious rates)
To be honest, I really do not see the larger muslim community cleaning up their act, as that xenophobia is too entrenched.
Wow, for someone who doesn’t like religion, you seem to know alot about it! Cheers!
It’s a dying shame that, for whatever reason, more Muslims aren’t coming out and condemning these heinous acts. Say what you want about Catholicism, but i am pretty sure that if Catholics were doing this sort of thing in the name of God, the Vatican would be going after these monsters and the Holy Father Pope Benedict the XVI would temporarily abandon his vow of nonviolence and strangle them personally.
And you’re right about people using religion to justify whatever fancy enters their noggins. That’s probably why so many people like religion. It’s all things to all people!
When i was in school, i took 3 semesters of Arabic and met many Muslim students and most of them seemed like normal, even cool, people. Yet, they didn’t seem too eager to condemn the extremists but instead criticized America. Too bad.
Thanks for making my point.
There is NOTHING like religion to foster hatred, intolerance and violence. Hell, even the Hindu, to whom all life is supposed to be scared, will kill in its name!
I was raised as a Christian, albeit in a liberal sect, First Christian Church. Says a lot.
D’oh! I meant SACRED. Dumb keyboard can’t spell…
“Say what you want about Catholicism, but i am pretty sure that if Catholics were doing this sort of thing in the name of God, the Vatican would be going after these monsters and the Holy Father Pope Benedict the XVI would temporarily abandon his vow of nonviolence and strangle them personally.”
Wouldn’t that be a news flash! Certainly, the Vatican would condemn those acts, they routinely condemn violent acts all the time, regardless of who perpetrates them. I do doubt that the current Pope would get personally involved, tho. But that is at least 95% politics. The Vatican is a country, and as such is part of that international political scene. For their real feelings, read the papal bulls, doctrinal writings, etc. There are certainly enough doctrinal excuses of past excesses that skirt the edge of modern propriety to make me wonder if they would truly feel like condemning Catholic violence against those they would consider enemies of the Church.
But that is mere speculation of mine, and I don’t necessarily allege any such thing for real.
What I DO allege is that the RCC’s real reason for existing, fortunately long past its historical usefulness, was as a major means of controlling a far flung population of as much of the ancient world that they could manage, which originally encompassed the Roman Empire of Constantine. Not that the Church doesn’t still make use of that control to gather as much political influence around the world that they can - it is certainly lucrative enough. Church executives, Cardinals, Bishops & the Pope, after all, are representatives, not of their birth countries, but of the RCC - the Vatican. The Pope is treated as a head of state in his visits. All of these major church players are treated as royalty; their physical needs are paid for by the church, their travel is paid, they are wined and dined by major politicians where ever they may be. Within the hierarchy of the church, their word is law.
I’d say that that is motive enough, if one is part of the inner circle, to maintain that fiction, regardless of what the real history may be.
“I do doubt that the current Pope would get personally involved, tho.”
Uh, yeah, that was a joke. The only person i can see the Holy Father throttling is Dan Brown.
“There is NOTHING like religion to foster hatred, intolerance and violence.”
To be fair, secular atheism does much the same thing, as we have seen with communist countries.
“First Christian Church”
Wow, there’s an original name!
“To be fair, secular atheism does much the same thing, as we have seen with communist countries.”
Biggest buncha crud ever. Communism never had anything to do with atheism.
Please look at this site, which has a very good essay on why your statement is wrong:
http://www.makingmyway.org/?p=36#comment-40
R, thanks for the article. Very insightful. Whether or not atheism was the core (and it doesn’t appear to be the case here), those commies and nat’s socialists were messed up.
Yes, they were messed up. They even misread Marx’s own words.
“Religion is the opiate of the people” is what he is quoted as saying, but that was not an attack on religion. It was part of an analysis that it was religion’s rules and promises that kept the people calm and under control!
Instead of persecuting religion, they should have subverted it for their own purposes, but they instead saw religion as a rival for the loyalty of the people, which Stalin could not abide. In later years, both the Soviets and the Chinese Communists did use religion as a sort of opiate, controlling it for their own use.
Just curious R, but what made you hate religion so much? Most people i know who think like you do came from strict religious and fundamentalist families. but you say you were raised in a liberal Christian church. What gives?
I know you don’t mean it that way, but you make it sound like the Christian accusatory question, “Why do you hate god so much?”.
I don’t hate religion. I hate what it has done, and continues to do, to our society and our civilization.
It starts out at childhood and teaches us to lie, cheat and steal.
As an organization, it was designed to oppress the masses by controlling them from birth to the grave, and in their minds, beyond the grave. It has, in that role, stolen untold amounts of money, property and labor through the extortion of the promise and threat of heaven and hell from the mass numbers of past and current generations that were and are uneducated enough to accept their mumbo jumbo at face value.
It has built itself (in the person of the RCC, but there are others as well) an empire of wealthy proportions, rich lifestyles, and political influence using that extorted money, and has not given back more than a token in return.
Through its teachings, the christian religion (but no, it wasn’t alone in this) has opposed science and its advantages, technical progress and the real life advantages it offers, up to and including contraceptives, condoms and vaccines that would improve the lives of people in third world countries across the globe.
The Judaic religions, all three of them, foster hatred, intolerance and violence that persists to this day. The entire “Middle East” problem is at its roots, religious in nature, as that territory is claimed in some form or another as holy to all three. All three have fostered terrorism through the killings of innocent lives for political reasons.
All this through the evil of a form of child abuse, which is the insidiousness of indoctrinating their children to believe their twisted clap trap before they have the ability to think on their own.
Any thinking, able adult with the native ability to examine the evidence, which wholly consists of each religions’ holy writings, should be able to see through the superstitious nonsense to the confidence game it really is.
Do I need to go on?
I don’t hate god - how can I hate something that doesn’t exist?
I don’t hate religion, but I hate everything it has done and is doing to people that are crippled from birth by their parents’ indoctrination, going all the way back to probably Constantine, and from that to the Jewish priesthood that almost literally enslaved those people.
Is that enough reason?
Now as to your question about my background.
Yes, I was raised in the First Christian Church, which is an offshoot of the First Church of Christ. I don’t know the differences, something about music and communion, I think. Never understood it and never cared.
Yes, I too had the thought that the name was kind of presumptuous! And from a young age, too!
I never had these kinds of thoughts until after I became an atheist and was able to look at christianity with open eyes no longer clouded by the twisted outlook of my childhood. And that was just in the last couple of years.
My sister and her side of the family do not know how I feel, tho my wife and kids do. That could be an issue someday, as my sister’s side are all fundies. Southern Baptist fundies, no less.
Your question seems to betray a feeling that the liberals aren’t too bad, and in some ways, by some measures, perhaps they aren’t. Many of them accept gays, reject some very literal interpretations of the bible, and so forth.
But think about it for a moment.
I know slippery slopes are intellectually suspect, but if one begins to question things that one reads in the bible as being not quite right, or just plain wrong enough to dump from one’s theology, then what the hell makes one think that ANYTHING written therein is right? Once the source comes into question through suspect information, ALL of that source’s information is automatically suspect, or should be.
Liberal christians are what I would equate to fellow travelers. They may think that they are intellectually superior to the fundies, but in reality, their acceptance of the basis for the entire religion gives aid and comfort to that movement by swelling the numbers the fundies can call christian. This gives the fundies the comfort of numbers, and the courage that comes with that comfort. It is as damaging to society as if they were fundies too.
And my opposition to religion comes from the consequences of that damage, which is wholly preventable.
I have a question for you R, if you don’t believe in God, where do you think we go when we die? I’m interested in knowing. As I”m not religious, i have no idea myself.
Just because one in atheistic, does NOT mean that spiritualism isn’t part of the picture. Sam Harris constantly speaks of the spiritualistic side of humanity, and I have known others that felt the same way.
People are spiritual, it has to be faced. It is why we fall for religious mumbo jumbo in the first place - its easier than thinking for ourselves!
Short answer - I don’t know. At times, I can see how there just isn’t anything there - others, well, if ghosts were just hoaxes, they’d be easy to disprove, wouldn’t they? I’ve seen people debunk specific ghostly hoaxes, but never an overall proof that there are NO ghosts.
And if there ARE ghosts, then, obviously, there IS some sort of afterlife, huh?
No, I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but like I said, I’ve never seen them completely debunked, either.
I do think that there is some sort of afterlife. Why or what is something I have speculated about since my de-conversion without much success. I do NOT believe in a god of any sort, so the thought that some afterlife has some bureaucratic organization running it is ridiculous, of course, as I reject any biblical notions completely.
But could there be some natural higher plane of existence? Sure there could. But until we invent some kind of sensor that can tell us something about it, or even that it exists, that is just speculation, based upon centuries of stories, myth and pure guess about ghosts, mediums, hauntings and mostly wishful thinking.
Me? I want proof before I lay any money out on anything, much less allow someone else to try to rule my life based upon a con job.
I believe that when we die, we go to Candyland if we were good, or Midland, TX, if we were bad.
I don’t know, Midland isn’t so bad.
Now, being forced to drive through Alice Tx and their speed traps for an eternity would certainly be a good substitute for the christian hell!
“Now, being forced to drive through Alice Tx and their speed traps for an eternity would certainly be a good substitute for the christian hell!”
LOL!