Alyssa Lappen conducted an in-depth interview with me on the heinous Islamic terror attacks on Mumbai one year later.
Part Four: The Conceptual Drivers For Mumbai Alyssa Lappen
On Thanksgiving 2009, as police worldwide continued arresting Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) collaborators and Home Box Office plans to release a film quoting a Pakistani terrorist mastermind the victims, families and others mourned the massive Mumbai terrorist attacks precisely one year earlier on Nov. 26, 2008.
Doubtless few Americans realized that in July 2008 a Chicago Pakistan-born jihadist had posed as Jewish to case LeT's key target, Nariman Chabad House. That David Coleman Headley and his Chicago peers, arrested in a giant October FBI Muslim slaughterhouse raid, planned to bomb Denmark's Jyllands-Posten news offices too.
That they allegedly attempted to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, whose satirical 2005 Mohammed cartoons lent Islamic radicals an excuse to launch worldwide riots actually planned months earlier. Or that Hafiz Masood, while imam Boston's Islamic Center of New England, had raised funds for LeT.
The consuming desire of Mumbai's Muslim attackers to specifically target Jewish people (and Chabad's Nariman House), was exposed Jan. 5, 2009 by reporter Shomendra Sharma in India's daily e-paper, DNA India. The terrorists intended to send "a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue." Imprisoned LeT predator Fahim Ahmed Ansari corroborated the report --- but only 10 months after his Feb. 2008 capture for bombing a Rampur Central Police Reserve training camp --- so as not to jeopardize the terrorists' most secret and important Nariman House attack.
Unlike any mainstream U.S. journalists, AtlasShrugs founder and publisher Pamela Geller ran the story that morning. JihadWatch followed her lead early Jan. 6. Few others reported it at all.
The blackout was particularly shocking, given the clarity of the news: LeT's Pakistani handlers "were clear this operation [Nariman] should not fail under any circumstances," DNA reported. The Taj Mahal, Oberoi and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus targets, however, "were [merely] intended to amplify the effect." After landing their dingy, terrorist leader Ismail Khan again "intensely" briefed the assigned Nariman perpetrators --- Imran Babar (a.k.a. Abu Akasha) and Nasir (a.k.a. Abu Umer) --- personally instructing them what to do. The results were intensely barbaric and bloody. Bodies were horrifically mutilated, and eyes gouged out.
But for Atlas Shrugs, still fewer Americans would know these salient facts.
While appalling, such revelations would hardly surprise those familiar with Islamic theocratic texts. People unfamiliar would be well-advised to consult our generation's preeminent scholar on Islamic antisemitism, Dr. Andrew Bostom. In mid-2008 the Brown University medical professor and renal specialist published probably the most complete collection of Islamic texts, demonstrating the weighty evidence of Islamic Jew-hatred contained throughout foundational Islamic holy books, jurisprudence, and historical accounts --- as propagated by Mohammed himself. (Full disclosure: I happily assisted Dr. Bostom in some aspects of the book's preparations).
Islam's founder of Islam began his anti-Jewish campaigns with his respective 624 and 625 expulsions of the Quaynuqa and Nadir Jewish tribes from Medina. He continued in 627 with the slaughter of all Qurayza Jewish men and enslavement of their women and children. In 628, he besieged and banished the Jews of the Khaybar oasis. On his death bed, Mohammed instructed his heirs to totally ban Jews from Arabia --- a goal consummated in 643 and 644 by Caliph Umar.
Nor does Bostom alone observe essential facts concerning this foundational hatred. Renowned antisemitism Professor Robert Wistrich, too, had previously noted that the Koran contains "...notably harsh passages in which Muhammad brands the Jews as enemies of Islam and depicts them as possessing a malevolent, rebellious spirit." Wistrich cites verses that purport to justify the Jews' "abasement and poverty;" and describe them as "...'laden with God's anger'..." for disobeying Allah. Mohammed instructed Muslims to humiliate Jews, Wistrich observes, "'...because they had disbelieved the signs of God and slain the prophets unrightfully...'" (Sura 2:58/61).
The Koran also claims that both David and Jesus cursed "'...the unbelievers of the Children of Israel...'," (Sura 5:78/82). The penalty for disbelieving God's supposed signs and the miracles of Mohammed, Wistrich notes, was to be transformed into apes and swine (Sura 5:60/65). Moreover, Islamic oral tradition --- the deeds and sayings of Mohammed (hadith) --- claims that the Jews, in accordance with their purportedly perfidious nature, deliberately poisoned Muhammad, causing his painful, protracted death.
Finally, Wistrich notes that the "malevolent, conspiratorial Jews are to blame for the sectarian strife in early Islam, for heresies and deviations that undermined or endangered the unity of the umma (the Muslim nations)..."
Indeed, even modern Muslim clerics often cite these historical Islamic data in statements, judicial texts and charters --- despite frequent attempts to whitewash that history. In June, 2009 at Cairo's Al Azhar university, for example, President Barack Obama described the thousand-year-old institution as "a beacon of Islamic learning" that had "carried the light of learning" throughout the centuries.
Yet, the Islamic paragon of tolerance and nearest Muslim "equivalent to a Pope," Al Azhar grand imam Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi last year apologized for shaking hands with Israeli president Shimon Peres --- in far better keeping with his character than the handshake. As Bostom has often noted, Tantawi genuinely considers Jews "enemies of Allah, and descendants of apes and pigs;" actively supports Islamic "religious law" (his words) suicide bombings to kill Israeli civilians, women and children; and after his 1997 meeting with Israeli chief Rabbi Israel Lau, urged Muslims to meet Jewish "enemies" in order "... to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes...." Moreover, Tantawi derived this hatred directly from the Koran, "more than one-third of which deals with the Jews...," as he readily admits.
Indeed, Tantawi's 1966 Ph.D. Thesis, Banu Isra'il fi al-Qur'an wa al-Sunna [The Children of Israel in the Koran and the Sunna], which Bostom excerpted in English for the first time, states that the Jewish people "were cursed from aforetime and were exiled from his [Allah's] mercy, and miserable wretchedness al-dhullah wal-maskana was decreed as their lot, for horrible punishment became their dominant trait." (p. 391) As hateful a 700-page screed as one is ever likely to read, the dissertation undoubtedly also earned Tantawi his Pope-like Islamic position. It further states,
"[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness... only a minority of the Jews keep their word.... [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not."
As historian David Littman heroically began to note at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Jan. 1989, the Hamas Charter in the same spirit is a genocidal decree. Moreover, (as Bostom has also noted), even before its preamble, the Hamas document opens by quoting the most sacred of all Islamic texts, the Koran chapter 3, v. 110-112:
"You [Muslims] are the best nation that has been brought out for mankind. You command good and forbid evil and believe in Allah. If only the people of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians] had believed, it would have been well for them. Some of them believe, but most of them are iniquitous. They will never be able to do you serious harm, they will only be an annoyance. If they fight you, they will turn their backs and flee, and will not be succored. Humiliation is their lot wherever they may be, except where they are saved from it by a bond with Allah or by a bond with men. They incurred upon themselves Allah's wrath, and wretchedness is their lot, because they denied Allah's signs and wrongfully killed the prophets, and because they disobeyed and transgressed." (Koran, 3:110-112).
Only within the context of the above information can one fully appreciate Right Side News' exclusive fourth and final interview of Atlas, by investigative reporter Alyssa A. Lappen. Since beginning the series in February 2009 (parts I, II and III are here, here and here), Lappen has queried Atlas on her tireless efforts to expose the Muslim wars within the U.S. and Western world --- on free speech, human rights of women, and non-Muslims generally.
In this last segment, Lappen concentrates on the Nov. 28, 2008 Islamic terror attacks in Mumbai, which consolidated in all respects every front in the global Islamic jihad, through its special focus on the Jewish people.
Finally, the full meaning of these attacks has come home to roost in the U.S. --- with the discovery that Pakistan-born, U.S.-based Islamic terrorists were involved in their planning. Indeed, on Tuesday, Nov. 24, even a mainstream newspaper --- in Barack Obama's former Chicago political environs no less --- informed readers of the troubling roles of U.S. terrorists in Mumbai.
Surprisingly, three days earlier on Nov. 21, the ultra-liberal Christian Science Monitor similarly had headlined an article on the "Islamic terror motive" of the Nov. 5 Muslim massacre of 13 people at Ft. Hood. CSM actually emphasized underlying Islamic facts --- albeit while claiming they present an essentially "partisan divide." Still, this too represented vastly improved mainstream reporting, in record time after a jihad strike: For on Nov. 5 and 6, major news networks and newspapers (excepting Fox News and the New York Post) almost universally towed the politically correct line on the second such attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11. They termed U.S. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan a "suspect," "shooter" or "gunman" --- and studiously avoided references to Islam or terrorism.
Since February 2009, Atlas has increasingly received well-merited public recognition for her ardent contributions to protecting U.S. Constitutional rights, including the freedoms of speech, press and assembly --- which inherently assume and include freedom from terror. In May 2009, Atlas began contributing frequently to American Thinker. Since August 2009, she's also often contributed articles at Newsmax, which recently granted her a Newsmax blog.
With this interview, Right Side News and Lappen hope to demonstrate that ultimately, the fervor of Islamic attacks on the Jewish people reflect the fervor of Islamic hatred for all women and non-Muslims --- and the universal freedoms of men and women that the Muslim leaders are determined to replace with Islamic law. But the exposure Atlas provided to the level of hatred expressed at Nariman House, has all the better focused the ordinary eye on the depth of depravity dictating Islamic attacks of all kinds. Thus can mankind help summon a will exceeding that of its foes, a steel will, strong enough to utterly demolish jihad.
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Alyssa A. Lappen: When did you first understand that the Jewish people and Chabad's Nariman House were the focal point of the Mumbai attacks.
Atlas: Most of the details were out there, but not publicized. It wasn't public that Chabad was targeted first --- that according to the LeT central command in this operation, that was the most important. The terrorists had also targeted the Taj Mahal, Oberois and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus. But Chabad was central because of Islamic hatred of Jews. In late December, it came out that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka Holtzberg, were sexually mutilated. I was one of the few to report that.
Then on Jan. 5, Somendra Sharma at the DNA India e-paper reported that the Pakistani fanatics had wanted to send a message to the world. It was central to that operation. Everything besides Chabad was intended to amplify the effect, but they were not the central targets. A senior police official told the DNA on the condition of anonymity. Mohammed Ajmal, also known as Kasab, told them that Chabad House was their primary focus.
AAL: That is truly depraved. So these people murdered at least 166 people in at six locations, just to amplify the message that "any Jews killed were worth 50 times as much as anyone else." It boggles the mind. Why?
Atlas: You need to understand. At this point, U.S. Muslims mention Jews 17 times a day in their daily prayers. Seventeen times a day, they invoke hatred against "those that incur the wrath of God," that is, Jews. Even Jewish leaders in Israel have no idea of Dr. Bostom's seminal work. People do not understand what these [jihadists] are doing. They do not understand.
AAL: You are saying that 17 times a day, Muslims pray to kill Jews?
Atlas: Yes. I'm telling you about the prayers. I found this in researching a separate issue, from conversations with [JihadWatch director] Robert Spencer and Dr. Andrew Bostom. Robert reported that U.S. mosques have tacked on the dua qunoot --- a prayer to destroy Allah's enemies --- to regular daily prayers. That dua qunoot prayer ends with a plea for "torment ... to overtake infidels." And it's been added to every raka'ah, as it is called, the sub unit of Islamic prayers, or salah. So Robert reports that pious U.S. Muslims pray 17 times a day to destroy Allah's enemies, which means Israel. But in this context, it also means Jews.
AAL: So, you're saying that in the context of Mumbai, the terrorists' message was, what, "We are coming to get you?"
Atlas: Yes. That's the message that Jews are supposed to glean from this. This is what they were saying, by targeting a couple who do good work, who provided a force for good in the world. They brutally murdered Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife Rivki and seven other Jews there. And a fact little discussed is that the Rabbi and his wife were sexually mutilated. It wasn't in the mainstream media. The Mumbai Mirror reported this. Their genitalia were mutilated.
When they landed in Mumbai, Ismail Kahn told the two Nariman perpetrators not to allow a single minimal glitch in finding and capturing the Chabad House. They wouldn't even plant a bomb in a taxi to go there --- in case the bomb exploded before they reached the target.
They wanted to make sure Nariman House was destroyed and the people there were destroyed. Period.
The photos of the enormous amount of blood is one indication of how brutal those murders were. Another is the horrific torture sustained by Israeli captives at Nariman House before their murders. I'm pointing out that no one talks about it. Only one line in the Mumbai Mirror discussed the disturbing photos at the Taj Mahal or mentioned that the terrorists sexually assaulted their Jewish victims and then mutilated their genitalia. Some of the other guests were forced to strip, but the Rabbi and his wife were sexually assaulted. And that was from an official who refused to be identified.
AAL: What overarching message do you take from this.
There's a lot more. Go read the whole interview.
