More on the massacre at the Taj

The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel was built on a slight, when Jamsetji Tata was turned away from Watson's Hotel because he was not a white man. Last Wednesday the four Pakistani murderers who entered the hotel's ornate lobby were also motivated by a slight, but theirs was a burning, murderous sense of grievance. Their motives were pathetic - envy and resentment - masquerading as religious fire.

They murdered indiscriminately. They killed staff members and guests, Indians and foreigners, men and women, young and old, Muslim and Hindu. They killed at least 200 people at last count. Two of the gunmen started the killing at the nearby Leopold Cafe (where my wife and I dined last year, on the advice of our Qantas crew, while staying at the magnificent Taj Mahal Palace) before jogging the short distance to the hotel to join two other gunmen inside the hotel.

When it was all over, police did not just recover grenades, AK-47 rifles, pistols and mobile phones but, according to Indian reports, two bags of RDX high explosives, enough to do to the Taj hotel what had been done to another landmark hotel, the Marriott, in Pakistan's capital, just three months ago. And this is important to remember. This latest Mumbai massacre was not a de facto act of war by Pakistan against India. Pakistan has suffered more death and mayhem than India at the hands of the psychotics and sexual perverts who call themselves Islamic jihadists.

The attack on the Taj had many similarities to the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad on September 20, when a truck filled with explosives and driven by a suicide bomber detonated in front of the hotel. The bomb killed 54, injured at least 266, and left a gaping hole in the front of the most prestigious hotel in the capital. Most of those murdered were locals, that is, Muslims....

It was no accident that all or most of the murderers were Pakistani, not Indian Muslims. Ever since India and Pakistan were partitioned by the British government in 1947, Pakistan has fallen further behind its great rival. While India has maintained 60 years of relatively stable, pluralist democracy and has recently emerged as an economic powerhouse, Pakistan's per capita wealth ranks a dismal 166th among the world's nations. Pakistan's politics has gone through 20 national emergencies in the past 60 years. Members of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain were responsible for the co-ordinated mass murders on the London Underground on July 7, 2005, and have been involved in numerous terrorist plots in Britain.

More here

Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here