By Irfan Hussain
Jul 05: ALL too often, natural disasters and human atrocities make only a fleeting impression. We watch fascinated and horrified as TV anchors give us their impressions while images of death and disaster roll across our screens.
But soon, one particular crisis is overtaken by another, and relentlessly, the news cycle moves on.
It is not until one sees and hears the survivors that the magnitude of a disaster really sinks in. This is what I experienced while watching Channel 4’s programme on its Dispatches series. Called Terror in Mumbai, the documentary retraces the steps of the terrorists as they first landed in Mumbai by boat, and then made their way across the city, spreading mayhem over a period of 60 hours.
We were shown clips from CCTV cameras that had captured the killing spree. Casually the killers shot everybody who moved. At the VT railway station, where 52 people died, they massacred a family, and a young boy who survived later recounted who had died: "My father. My mother. My aunt. My uncle. Their two sons. What had we done to them? So many dead. What had they done to the terrorists?" What indeed?
When I wrote a couple of columns expressing sympathy for the victims and condemning the killers and those behind them in Pakistan, I got a flood of angry emails demanding to know the proof that linked the terrorists to Pakistan. Our government was in similar denial. And although it has grudgingly accepted that the controllers and planners of the attack were based in Pakistan, and has even arrested some members of the Laskhar-e-Tayyaba that has morphed into the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, very little progress has been made on punishing those responsible.
http://newageislam.com/horrors-inflicted-in-the-name-of-islam--/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1523
No comments:
Post a Comment