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Friday, November 28, 2008 12:00 AM

Mumbai, the NYT's revisionism, and lessons not learned

The Times' Editorial Page blames the Bush administration for "blessing" the military coup against Hugo Chavez without mentioning that it did the same. Why does that matter?

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  • Saturday, November 29, 2008 08:42 PM

    @Holly McLachlan

    Not comparable unless you think the Wal-Mart stampede was instigated by well organized provocateurs from a right wing nutcase organization that on the days when they're being kind, resembles the Ku Klux Klan. Remember the post I put up earlier when I referred to following Narendra Modi off the violence cliff? Remember what organization I affiliated him with? Wasn't it the RSS? He's one of the politicians that the articles by sysprog are referring to, a member of the BJP. Where L.K. Advani showed some restraint, he didn't. And, he is the man most responsible for the riots in Gujarat you are citing, why the police just stood around and watched the killings when they weren't doing the killings themselves, and he was re-elected as chief minister of the province by a large margin after it was known what had really happened there.

    My point in the comparison was that the Indians had every provocation to go nuts on the captured terrorist. In America, he'd have been lucky not to have been shot on the way down to the jailhouse. And I am not naive enough to think they weren't rough on him at all, but he showed up in court with fewer marks than would be expected if they'd been all torture and "enhanced interrogation". And America wants to comment on, and wag their fingers at, and warn against, any knee jerk actions by the Indians, but the Indians, unlike the Americans, interrogated without a black site and a personality decomposition, not to mention a lot of beatings and forced stress positions, and they managed to arraign a terrorist who had done horrendous things in court, unlike the Americans. Because they showed some restraint, this time.

    I had detected a lot of condescension in the American reports on what was happening in Mumbai, and I think, given the circumstances, there is nothing to condescend about. The Indians, so far, have conducted themselves quite well on this go round, and the Americans and the Brits and the Israelis have no cause for such condescension.

    If they had acted like the Israelis, they'd have brought in attack helicopters and killed all the captives and hostages and burnt the buildings to the ground as their means. If they'd acted like the British, they'd have heard the report that the terrorists had backpacks, and gone and shot everyone in Mumbai that had a backpack. And if they were to have acted like Americans, with all evidence pointing to a terrorist group based in Pakistan, India would now be planning an invasion of Finland.

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