Silly Little Country

Mumbai

The savagery is unbelievable - not on the scale of 9/11, but hardly untypical of the representatives of Islamism.

During a sleepless night I got the shock of my life, finding the CNN coverage much better than BBC's. While this tone is absent now from the coverage, I found offensive some initial comments suggesting an almost fawning admiration for the organization behind the current attacks.

Now I work in software development, and I know organization, the sort it takes to create something new and useful, and try to get people to appreciate the result sufficiently for my company to recoup its costs. That is what I consider organization to be.

What did this take? Find a bunch of disaffected layabouts, young males looking for murderous excitement and glory. That seems pretty easy these days in the Muslim world. Get some money to support destructive attacks on any modernizing part of the world. Also pretty easy. Get lots of weapons. Really easy! (And largely the fault of that modernizing world.) Choose a bunch of low-security targets to attack. And then, knowing in advance that you are entering a world built on mutual trust and co-operation, exploit all that to inflict violence on an unexpecting and innocent population.

This is not organization of any serious quality. Nor does it require much in the way of character, except for a Jeffrey Dahmer sort of character. (And Dahmer at least fought against his tendencies.) No courage involved. Not much in the way of brains. And what nobility! - to attack the maternity ward of a hospital, a Jewish centre, a cafe, the railway station, and some hotels which were clearly a favorite spot for Mumbai families to stage family events.

One wonders where this will lead.

UPDATE: The minute I post this Barbara Starr on CNN begins to rave about the sophistication of the attacks. WTF? Sophistication is Mozart, is building a gothic cathedral, creating the iPod. Mass destruction is something any of us can do with almost no brains or organization. And yes, this attack is more complicated than wandering into a shopping mall and opening up with an AK-47, but it is not that complicated when you pick targets, as these cowards did, that are essentially dependent on not being secure. It is a lot easier to wreck a civil society than build one.

We are all Indians today.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:34 PM