That article just linked seems rather unsubstantiated, but if it does contain even a fraction of truth within it, then it makes me want to slap these Al-Qaida muppets around the face with a wet fish even more than I had wanted to do so previously.

Currently reading up on the Middle East tensions, it’s just disgusting, like a jaded return to the past..Iraq was vietnam 2.0 and now MORE middle east conflict is occuring, why can’t we human beings all just get along? It’s like a stupid street brawl with 3 people refusing to listen to each other, as they slag each other off…..When will the ‘international’ community intervene?

Back to the original point you made. The bits you quoted do not read as you suggested it does. Not to me.

As for Lenin’s contribution – I fear you are unfair to suggest that he is talking about anything other than how the state is likely to react and how it will impact various groups in India.

As I read it – he says that all sections of Mumbai society were under attack – but now the danger is for the muslims, possibly both from communal rioting as well as further strictures from the State. Probably across India.

As for Kashmir he does not draw a distinction between Congress and BJP policies and action.

Links with Israel – well he says what he says. Either he is factually wrong, or misunderstands the situation.

[Avoiding another thread hijacking].

I too would like to see expressions of sympathy from everyone, but if you accept Nyrone then its not a strong reason to be so anti-Lenin. (At least on the points Nyrone did cover).

A man claiming to represent al-Qaida in Kashmir said the terror network had set up a wing in Kashmir and appealed to Indian Muslims to take up jihad, an Indian news agency reported Thursday. An official said the government said it was taking the claim ‘’very seriously.’’ The man, who identified himself as Abu al-Hadeed, told Kashmir’s Current News Service that ‘’who so ever has carried out the attacks in Bombay we express our gratitude and happiness.’’

As word of the announcement spread, a senior intelligence official in Kashmir said the call had been placed from a local landline phone that authorities were trying to trace. ‘’Our immediate effort is to locate the caller and ascertain the authenticity of the claim,’’ said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media. ‘’The government is taking it very seriously.’’ It was impossible to independently verify the caller’s identity and if he actually represents a new wing of al-Qaida.

The Bombay train bombings on Tuesday killed at least 200 people and injured more than 700. Kashmiri militants are being investigated for the attack, although two main rebel groups have denied responsibility. There have been allegations that Islamic militants fighting to wrest predominantly Muslim Kashmir from India have ties to al-Qaida, but Thursday’s statement is the first time Osama bin Laden’s network has claimed to have spread to the Indian territory. ‘’We appeal to Muslims in India to fight for freedom and Islam and choose jihad as their way to achieve freedom and establishing Islamic ways,’’ al-Hadeed was quoted as saying. He added the Bombay bombings ‘’are a reaction to what is happening to the minorities, especially Muslims in India.’’

Actually, El Cid, my first four years of school were in Spanish as I grew up in Venezuela. But having left the country when I was 10 years old, I have had little opportunity to speak the language. So thank you for correcting me.

My parents speak Portuguese though. And I guess you know all the swear words in that language, so no lessons for you.

Punjabis pronounce it “bhainchod”, Hindis “Bhainchud”, Marathis,Gujarathis pronounce it “bhenchud” while Bhopalis expand it to “bhain ke lavde”!

madarchod,machod
chutia

thats it boy 2 at a time.

P.S Sunny, stop reading those idiots (Lenin and Mishra).

No? I read it differently and I dare say many other others who might not have the SWP blinkers would read it like it was written.

But if you or anyone else has doubts, let’s go to Comrade Lenin’s for a closer look (though it makes me feel like I stepped into a mumbai gutter).

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Mumbai bombings. posted by lenin

Unlike many such events, the reports from Mumbai weren’t exaggerated. If anything, they were understated – the BBC didn’t make it their top headline until the deaths were officially thought to be into three figures, while initial reports said that the number of explosions was two, then three, five, six, eventually seven. Deaths were initially assumed, but not quantified, then said to be in the low tens, then the dozens, then 130, then 180. Now it is thought that 200 have died. When the scale of atrocity was finally extraordinary enough to top the headlines (and look how strangely fast has been its relegation back into the fragmentary, chaotic, pot pourri of racist media reporting about Over There), the usual template for dealing with these things was accessed with glib facility: We Sympathise, We Stand Firm, They Hate Our Democracy, Whodunnit, Is it Al Qaeda, They Hate Our Freedom, They Hate Secularism etc etc. We will, supposing there is much more heard of this, have to hear from various hacks that Mumbai is unbeaten, and that India’s political leadership has vowed to stand firm. There was the suggestion that it might be groups fighting for independence for Kashmir, or ‘Al Qaeda’. It is certainly a tactic redolent of those used by the latter, but I don’t feel like speculating for ages only to insult you with the conclusion that “I dunno”. The Indian state would certainly like to blame Kashmiris and increase its repression there.

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He wouldn’t like to speculate who the perpetrators may be but it is a CERTAINTY though that the dastardly Indian state will use this incident to step up its oppression in kashmir.

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One thing that is very obvious is that the coverage has shown little concern with the people who live and work in Mumbai, but then it never does. Neither the Indian government nor its wealthy elite are particularly interested either. The fact that it is India’s financial capital is much noted, but nothing will be said about the slums where almost fifty per cent of the city’s population lives and the fact that the death rate there is fifty per cent higher than elsewhere – forty per cent of total mortality in Mumbai’s slums is attributable to infections and parasitic diseases resulting from water contamination and lousy sanitation. People are literally dying in their tens of thousands every year simply because of the state’s capitalist development policies in which: water costs 4000% more than usual because they have to get it from vendors rather than having it piped in; half the population has no toilet; the vast restaurant and food service economy is supported by a huge pool of child labour; local power has been usurped by ‘urban development authorities’ whose remit is to plug the city’s wealthy elite into the global cyber-community; World Bank schemes supposedly designed to help the city’s poor have poured state money into improving the property of the middle and upper classes. Mumbai is suffering, like everywhere else in India, from a ruthless process of wealth transfer (sometimes known as ‘liberalisation’) ordered by the IMF and implemented by the government. This is why the IMF was among the targets at the World Social Forum in the city in 2004.

And what of the trains? There is a reason, apart from the number and size of the blasts, why so many were killed. One thing that everyone in my workplace commented on when hearing the news (there are lots of people with relatives in India, both Hindu and Muslim) was that the trains in Mumbai are absolutely stuffed to the rafters, with people transported in conditions that would raise considerable protest if applied to animals. Mumbai’s Western Railway, targeted by the attackers, has been the scene of satyagrahis only this year because of the preposterous, crushing overcrowding on the trains, and the company’s decision to cut back on rolling stock. Predictably, the police repressed these. These packed trains were an easy target for whoever wanted to bomb them.
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Yep like Comrade Lenin gives a damn though. Nyrone said pretty much the same thing in his posts here – and I largely agreed with him while I feel like kneeing the twat, Lenin,, in his gonads. Wonder what is the difference? Nyrone cares but Lenin is just an opportunistic wanker. Look carefully – is there ONE word of sympathy, of human feeling for the people who were murdered?
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It is platitudinous but necessary to mention that of course Muslims were among those targeted. 17% of the city’s population is Muslim. There are real fears that these attacks could be used to spark a wave of communal violence as was the result when the city was bombed in 1993. Indian Muslims, for their part, have been giving blood to the wounded victims of these attacks. So much is to be expected.
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Fair enough, though it was not only muslims killed. But I doubt that Lenin would care that much for muslims if he did not perceive them to be on his side of the political line. Hey! What no lefty hindus or christians to eulogise over?
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Also worth noting is that India’s Muslim electorate has swung sharply to more left-wing parties in recent years – a radicalisation strongly rooted in the success of the World Social Forum, which gave expression to the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements. The politics of unity and working class struggle have been supplanting those of accomodation through the Congress party. (Historically, anti-colonial Muslims were often prominently involved in the communist party in its foundation, partly preferring it to the Hindu iconography that sometimes dominated the Congress party).
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Congress’ Hindu iconography drove muslims in droves to the Communist party! Fiction.But the subtext is that hindus are religious rightwingers, even the so called congress seculars.

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Something will be done about that. As Ellis Sharp notes, the Hindu-supremacist tradition of nationalist-religious bigotry associated with the BJP also happens to be the most hawkish, pro-Zionist, pro-imperialist force in India.
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Hindutvas are many things but they are not pro-zionist or pro-imperialist, not by a long shot. These neo-stalinists simply don’t have a clue what they are talking about but what’s new?

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It is easy enough to imagine how they and their political allies might try to use these attacks to resuscitate their support and break the rising tide of militancy by scapegoating Muslims. At the same time, the Congress party has betrayed supporters by pushing through more IMF-inspired ‘reforms’, sought nuclear and military collaboration with Bush and consolidated relations with Israel. India’s ambassador recently told an Israeli audience that their two countries were “heirs to great and ancient civilisations”.
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That’s right. All those on the trains were zionist lackeys of an irredeemably corrupt state. The Israeli angle must be brought into every explanation of great evil.
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Congress has been as repressive in Kashmir as their reactionary predecessors, and precisely as fervent in the military build-up against Pakistan. The reaction to these attacks from the External Affairs Minister has been to demand that Pakistan ‘dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism’, which closely mirrors the reaction of the BJP to the 2001 attacks on the Indian parliament building. All indications are that the Congress government will pursue the same dogged path, while using the situation to bring errant Muslims back into line.
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poor Pakistan , attacked needlessly by those goondas from India. Where’re Dawood Ibrahim and a few other mass murderers living in impunity, one might venture to ask? One shouldn’t! One should just accept that it is all a conspiracy to keep ‘muslims’ in ‘line’.

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Who knows, perhaps some ‘moderates’ will be selected to go to their communities and ‘root out this evil’. And then capital can resume at an increased pace the exploitation of Indian labour, while the state continues to holds its population under the threat of thermonuclear megadeath. The fact that this is how states almost always respond to terrorist attacks tells you how concerned they are for the population, and for those who died.
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I fear that if someone like Pankaj Mishra wrote this in a NYT op=ed, some of us would naturally jump to the conclusion the Indian govt planted those 8 bombs, every single one of them.

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Oh, and good news for investors: Mumbai’s stock market shrugged off the attacks and market pros are upbeat.

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Stalinist black humour. Ha ha.

Fucker.

India has not put itself in the firing line in my thinking as far as the War on Terror is concerned. And it is dangerous to presume that people are saying that.

Again it does not imply what you say. I read it to say that India should not be tempted or coerced into joining a ‘misguided’ strategy emanating from the Bush Whitehouse.

At first level, we still don’t know who orchestrated the attacks and why, so it’s premature to say “exactly” why India became a target. Second, and this is what really irks me, is to say that being a willing partner in the “war of terror”, or having close ties with America, is somehow a justification to become a target. In other words, the article seems to imply that India was asking for it.

Don’t you feel that it is phrases of this sort which shift responsibility away from the actual killers to those deemed to have offended them?

Just as we don’t want a rise in communalist killings, we cannot possibly want a military conflict between India and Pakistan. Or do we?

Leave it to those sections of the Brit-left that still get hard-ons for fascists.

What about Roger Howard’s moronic article in CiF? Should India Invade Britain?

Or this from the SWP?

Bombings in Mumbai, India 12 July 2006
Statement from the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) on yesterday’s bomb attacks on Mumbai on 11 July 2006

…

“The Indian government of Manmohan Singh will doubtless pledge itself to fight against the terrorists who have committed this atrocity with increased resolve. But if what results from this pledge is a greater threat of military conflict with Pakistan, more repression in Kashmir, and an increased willingness of the Indian state to be a partner in the “war on terror”, it would serve only to compound the tragedy of the bombings. It is exactly these actions that have meant India has become a target…”

Alex Callinicos, International Secretary, Socialist Workers Party
Chris Harman, editor International Socialism journal
Chris Nineham, Central Committee, Socialist Workers Party
Yuri Prasad, editor Socialist Review

“seeing all these cock-and-bull stories about collective unity spilling out from eager broadcast journalists on the scene is hard to swallow, when I know that just around the corner are millions of people who are well and truly FUCKED day after day after day, where’s there story? I’ll tell you where…nowhere, because it’s just too godamn hard to report a story that turns the world’s biggest democracy into a deeply selfish segregational society, it’s too hard to report a story that accuses the top brass of the country for repeatedly failing the people it sickiningly pretends to care about when a camera is swung in their face. They don’t truly care.”

Nyrone, you said it.

So much for getting capital gain out of these attrocities, or accusing Pakistanis of directing those attacks.

That was totally uncalled for, El Cid. You must think that because I am Indian and I criticise Pakistan (in this case, neglecting education of it society), then what I am really saying is that Pakistanis are terrorists. Really.

“To this day I don’t really get on as well as I used to with a mate who chose the day after 7/7 to pin it all on Bliar and the Iraq war. It works both ways.”

People get emotional and say things in the heat of the moment. Others just have different opinions about things. None of which seem good enough reasons to ruin a friendship. So it works for some.