Muhammad al-Arabi

Muhammad al-Arabi argues that the clue to the motive for the attack on Mumbai lies in India's increasingly close relations with Israel and its identification with Anglo-American policies in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

At long last, the Mumbai horror show that we have been witnessing on our television screens for the past two days is over. So far, the death toll is 195 people, most of them innocent civilians.

We are still no wiser about the identity or motives of the gunmen responsible for this outrage. Predictably, the Indian government has seized the opportunity to blame Pakistan without having a shred of evidence to back its claim.

This is macabre opportunism at its worst by a government that is more concerned with enriching the super rich than with feeding its people, some of whom resort to eating rats in order to survive.

We do, however, have an idea regarding the possible motives of the Mumbai attackers. As I mentioned in a previous post, the gunmen have given us a clue that links their attacks with the craven Anglo-American policies in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. According to eyewitness reports from the hotels that were attacked in Mumbai, the gunmen singled out British and American passport holders. Not German, French, Italian or Spanish passport holders, but British and American ones. One doesn't have to be a genius to deduce at least part of their motives.

But why India? The answer, in my view, is very simple. Since the early 1990s relations between India and the racist, Zionist entity known as "Israel" have been getting increasingly closer, with defence and intelligence cooperation being at the top of the bilateral agenda. Simultaneously, over the same period India has refocused its foreign policy away from the Russia and the Third World and towards the USA and its British lackey.

So, for discontented Indian Muslims – or Kashmiris or Pakistanis, if there is indeed a Pakistani connection – India is the South Asian symbol of the critical mass of evil accumulated by the US and Britain in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

This really saddens me. For one thing, the targets in Mumbai – innocent civilians – cannot be held responsible for the shortsightedness and stupidity of the Indian government or, in the case of the foreign tourists, for the policies of Israel's puppets in Washington and London.

It also saddens me because, when I think of India, I would like to think of Gandhi, Nehru and the non-aligned movement of the 1960s and 1970s, not racism, Zionism, imperialism and sheer greed.

Unfortunately, it would seem that one outcome of the Mumbai outrage is that India will be driven further into the arms of the devil. However, as the saying goes, "If you dance with the devil, you will get burnt".

Sadly, as we have seen in Mumbai, those who pay the price for recklessness are the innocents.

Muhammad al-Arabi is a social and political blogger based in London, UK. This article originally appeared on his blog, Painful Truths. Redress Information & Analysis does not necessarily endorse all of the content of websites and blogs from which it may occasionally republish articles.

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Source: http://www.redress.cc/global/marabi20081201