Mumbai terror attacks

Click on the link to the UK Guardian.

Also from Bracepundit.com, a timeline.

The question is being asked whether the terrorists are al Qaida. The question is irrelevant and shows that the questioners is trapped in an outmoded mindset. From NR Online:

A feature of this morning's coverage is the standard and increasingly less relevant questions that come up whenever we see global jihadist attacks: (a) Is this an al Qaeda operation? and (b) Are these just home-grown terrorists animated by local issues?

When he guest-hosted Hannity & Colmes last night, Rich had a very edifying couple of segments with Mark Steyn and Richard Miniter. Mark made the excellent point about the reluctance to come to grip with the fact that these attacks on iconic targets, which we're now seeing in Mumbai/Bombay but of course have seen elsewhere, are fueled by an ideology. That's exactly right. The obsession over whether al Qaeda or its endless jumble of affiliates pulled off the operation is a misguided attempt to mimimize the challenge. The bin Laden network is not unimportant, but it is tapping into something that is much bigger than itself.

It's become fashionable for pundits to confine the threat of radical Islam to a relative fringe of disgruntled takfiris and rationalize that if we could only eliminate them all would be well. But that fringe represents only a strain of the virus.

In July 2007, our intelligence community released findings of a National Intelligence Estimate that indicated jihadist ideology had become so extensively propagated in the West that the mediating influence of terrorist organizations like al Qaeda was no longer essential in order for radical cells to spring up and interconnect. Naturally, these local operatives are spurred, in part, by local and regional issues. But, though the mainstream press recoils from this reality, such local issues are fitted to an ideological framework that is global, hegemonic, and more about the ultimate triumph of fundamentalist Islam than, say, a Palestinian state, Kashmir, Danish cartoons, economic inequality, or whatever this week's complaint is.

The jihad, moreover, is about much more than terrorism. Terrorism is one method of extortion, but is far from the only one — though it makes other methods in what Robert Spencer aptly calls the "Stealth Jihad" far more successful.

The question implies that somehow al Qaida is handing out uniforms, ID cards and diplomas to graduates from "The Bin Laden Terrorist Academy." The war we are in is a distributed war in which the common denominator is Islamic Jihad. The MSM has as much trouble getting its mind around it as they have coming to grips with the Internet. It is outside their matrix, outside their template and they are desperately trying to fit it into a pattern with which they are familiar.

Mark Steyn comments:

Homegrown Terror Or International Jihad?

False choice. The answer is: Homegrown terror in the service of international jihad. Clearly, India has had a Muslim problem to one degree or another in the 60 years since partition, but increasingly those locally driven grievances have been absorbed within the global pan-Islamic ideology. What strikes you, as the dust clears in Bombay, is that one assault provided an umbrella for manifestations of almost every strain of Muslim grievance.

Bad timing?

Bollywood actor Imraan Khan poses at the premiere of "The President is Coming" in Mumbai November 26, 2008. The film is directed by Kunaal Roy Kapur and stars Konkona Sen Sharma. Picture taken November 26,