A friend sent me this e-mail message:
The murder at the Chabad house in India struck home as my daughters have visited many Chabad houses (including Mumbai) for Friday night meals and other occasions. I take exception to the media reports describing the Chabad house as only an ultra Orthodox Jewish Center.
True the people who run it are religious but they welcome all people to their events, Jewish or not. My daughters have taken their non Jewish friends because they meet interesting people from all over the world there. I believe it was singled out precisely because because it is a Jewish place of peace and outreach.
And as Dennis Prager says along the same lines [h/t to Eva]:
Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India’s major city devote so much of its efforts -- 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 -- to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?
... From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity.
For the Islamists, ... the destruction of the Jews -- and since 1948, the Jewish state -- is central to their worldview.
If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.
With all the Pakistani Islamists’ hatred of Hindus, they did not attack one Hindu temple in India’s major city.
With all their hatred of Christian infidels, the terrorists did not seek out one of the 700,000 Christians in Mumbai.
To reinforce my point, imagine a Basque separatist terrorist organization attacking Madrid. Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous. But no one seems to find it odd that that Pakistani Muslim terrorists who hate India and want it to give up control of Indian Kashmir would send two of its 10 terrorists to kill perhaps the only rabbi in Mumbai. As Newsweek reported during the siege, “Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors.” Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.
They are right.
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