In the aftermath of last week’s Mumbai massacres, it is hard to imagine that there is anything as pernicious as these jihadists who murdered with such cruelty. But there is. Their multicultural apologists, who enable them to continue to kill by preventing their victims from fighting back, are just as evil.
The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts throughout the world, were motivated to kill by their adherence to totalitarian Islam, which calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of all other non-Muslims.
The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists.
Multiculturalists assert that Westerners — or, in the case of India, Hindus — are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners. Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, for example, hinted that Indian Hindus had it coming.
“One of the untold stories of India,” he wrote Nov. 29, “is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last 10 years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted.”
Then too, the multicultural media suppressed the fact that the jihadists were targeting Jews. Outside of Israel, it took the media nearly two days to report that the Chabad House had even been taken over by the jihadists. And once they did report it, they made every effort to downplay the significance of the jihadists’ decision to send a team off the beaten path simply to butcher Jews.
For example, two days into the hostage drama, the New York Times opined, “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
Likewise, the jihadists had their identity obscured. For almost an entire day, major news networks in the West suppressed the fact that the murderers were Muslim jihadists, claiming, oddly, that they could also be Hindu terrorists.
Once the jig was up on their attempts to hide the identities of the perpetrators and their victims alike, the multiculturalists started blaming the victims. For instance, on Nov. 30, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum attacking Indian Hindus.
After blithely dismissing the atrocities, Nussbaum focused her ire against India’s Hindus, writing that the perpetrators were “probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir.” Recalling the gruesome and apparently state-sanctioned violence against Muslims in India’s Gujarat state in 2002, Nussbaum cast the jihadists as nothing more than victims of a Hindu terror state victimizing Muslims for no reason since the 1930s.
Nussbaum’s essay was a patent example of selective multicultural memory. She apparently forgot about the Islamic conquests of India from the seventh through the 16th centuries in which India’s Buddhists were wiped out and 70 million to 80 million Hindus were slaughtered by Muslim overlords. She also forgot about the thousands of Indian Hindus who have been murdered by jihadists since the 1990s.
Nussbaum condemned an imaginary double standard that she claimed labels all Muslims as terrorists and gives Hindus a free ride in subjugating them. Of course, thanks to multiculturalists like Nussbaum, the double standard we suffer from is the exact opposite of what she described: Muslim terrorists, we are told, are victims of persecution and represent a teensy-tiny fraction of Muslims.
On the other hand, all non-Muslims involved in even marginally violent activities against Muslims are murderers, fanatics, extremists. Moreover, they are representative of their non-Muslim societies.
The attacks in Mumbai and the multiculturalists’ rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger.
The second truth is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them. Multiculturalists cannot accept the fact that the jihadists are waging war against the West without disavowing multiculturalism itself. And since they will not disavow what has become their religion, they will never be convinced that they must stop defending jihadists.
Caroline Glick is the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, where a longer version of this column previously appeared.