“Terror in Mumbai” Shown on CNN

I was sitting on the new red steps at Times Square.  It was my final stop in a brief afternoon visit to New York City.  One of the advantages of living near Philadelphia is that you are very close to cities like New York, Baltimore and Washington D.C.  I do not visit these cities as often as I should.  Yesterday was different.  I decided to do the hour and half drive from my house to 48^th street.  I then took my friends and family to the top of the Rockefeller Center (“top of the rock” as they say in NYC).  The temperature was below zero but the sky was clear and the views were spectacular as the sun was beginning to set.

Anytime you go to the top of the Rockefeller Center or the Empire State Building and look at downtown Manhattan you feel something is missing. That something is the World Trade Center (for those who have not been to NYC midtown Manhattan is where the Rockefeller Center and Empire State Buildings are.  There is quite a distance between midtown and downtown and it can take up to 45 minutes to travel by car).  The two WTC buildings (Twin Towers) dominated downtown Manhattan skyline.

I did get a chance to go to the top of the WTC once in the mid nineties and I shudder every time I look at downtown.  I think about 09/11 and what was going on in the minds of those innocent people who were standing at the top of the Twin Towers as the building itself was burning and going down.  Many jumped to their deaths from the top of the building.

Times Square itself looked different than what it did a few months ago.  Many areas in Times Square is now pedestrian only (NYC is now trying to duplicate what many European cities did decades ago by making crowded and historic areas pedestrian only).  There is also a new “red stairs” at Times Square.  It is a stair that is actually built on top of the TKTS discount Broadway ticket booth.

I was sitting on the red stairs when the CNN billboard suddenly flashed a sign that said “Terror in Mumbai”.  I initially thought that there was another attack in Mumbai.  But they were actually advertising a show by that name which they subsequently showed on TV nationwide at 8 PM yesterday.  They will repeat it at 8 PM today as well for those who missed it yesterday.  This show was actually shown on HBO (a premium cable channel) on November 19^th.

The show itself was riveting.  The program showed actual footage of the incidents, images captured on CCTV, interviews with police, locations which were attacked and most importantly the tapped phone conversations between the terrorists and their controllers in Pakistan and also video of an interview with Kasab minutes after he was captured.  There are now reports that indicate that one of the controllers that the terrorists were talking to was David Headley (the American who was captured in Chicago a few months ago).  Fareed Zakaria (journalist, author and host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS) is the narrator for the show.

The numerous phone conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan was the highlight of the show for me.  The conversations were mainly in Urdu (I can follow Hindi a little bit but CNN provided English translations for the most part).  Some things are clear from the conversations.  The terrorists are from Pakistan and the handlers they were talking to were in Pakistan.  Most of the terrorists were people from rural Pakistan who were ready to do this for the money (it is clear that the families of these terrorists believed that people in their villages who were Jihadists were having a much better standard of living than the rest of them).  All of them went through a three month training program in Pakistan (the terrorists who were chosen for these attacks did not know each other but were put in touch with each other only weeks before the attack).

One month before the attacks the terrorists where shown actual video of all the places they attacked.  So it is clear that there was advanced scouting.  Kasab claimed that his uncle was paid about 200,000 (I am assuming that it was in Pakistani currency).  So the cost of this operation including the scouting and the money paid to the terrorists easily runs over 25 Lakh Rupees which is a significant amount in South Asia.  It is easy to make the connection that there are very wealthy backers for these operations.

Although many innocent Muslims were killed during the attacks some Muslims including a couple from Turkey were spared once the terrorists knew they were Muslims.  One of the final points I took away from the CNN story was that although these people were cold blooded killers in many cases they still had a lot of difficulty killing.  It took many phone calls and warnings from their handlers in Pakistan to convince the killers to actually fire the gun on many occasions.  The controllers were calm and completely focused on killing in the name of Allah and Islam (this they repeated again and again to their “brothers” who were doing the killing).

After the 90 minute program ended, I was sitting and thinking to myself when or how will this all end.  Pakistan is not going to move away from using Islamic fundamentalism as a tool of war anytime soon.  This has been a very successful weapon for them.  There are always going to be poor people in Pakistan and the select few who are willing to exploit this situation (26/11 was executed by the poor but 09/11 was executed by many who were middle or upper middle class).  So there is no pattern or common thread other than the fact that their controllers and leaders were driven by their hatred for non-Muslims and in their belief that they were somehow the victims in all this.

Of course they all believe that they are going to heaven.  This probably offers a clue to a possible solution.  May be we should educate everyone to enjoy our brief stay on this earth and not worry about this mythical concept called heaven.  As a non-believer I know that there is no such thing as heaven.  As the Belinda Carlisle song goes  – “true heaven is a place on earth”.

Related posts:

1. And The Violence Caused Such Silence
2. Ajmal Amir Kasab & Faisal Shahzad
3. Who Benefits From Proselytizing?
4. Australia Should Be Allowed to Play Cricket in Mumbai
5. Is India or America Better At Tackling Terrorism?

Tags: CNN, Islam, Manhattan, Mumbai, Muslim, New York City, Philadelphia, Rockefeller Center, Terror, Times Square

Category: Culture & Religion