First off, my heart goes out to the people of India. The world’s largest democracy surely deserves peace and happiness for it’s citizens.
All the details arn’t out, but there were three explosions in New Delhi marketplaces. The two marketplaces that they know were affected were packed with people preparing for Diwali. It was the equivelent of setting up bombs in shopping malls just before Christmas.
Do you think this will change anything?
On one hand, terror attacks are nothing new in India.
On the other hand, the last attack fo this nature was perpetrated by a terrorist group backed by Pakistan. Theres not really a lot they can do about Pakistan short of all-out war. But the world is a little more sensitive to terror attacks nowday, and the US might have to publically notice that their buddy Pakistan (who says they are deeply saddened or some other bullshit) is doing some pretty bad stuff. On the other hand, nobody really wants to do anything that would tip the scales towards war (or build allegiences that would come in to play if there was a full-scale India-Pakistan war.) There is also India’s tenative attempts to reach out to China to consider- could we see a world where India is allied with China and the US is allied with Pakistan?
Or will we start seeing ties between terrorism in the East and terrorism in the West. We seem to think of terror against brown people as something different as terror against white people, but a lot of or problems are the same.
We shall see. As far as I know, the popularity of the socially conservative Hindu-fundamentalist party (BJP) has been waning, but terror attacks may bring it back in to the spotlight. 10% of India is Muslim and a lot of Indians are no more happy about that than we would be if 10% of America were Muslim. More power to the BJP would cause more flare-ups from various seperatist movements (who resent the very Northern power base of the BJP.)
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Or will we start seeing ties between terrorism in the East and terrorism in the West. We seem to think of terror against brown people as something different as terror against white people, but a lot of or problems are the same.
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I’d beg to differ with this statement, actually. It’s not so much that we see terror against brown people as different from terror against white people. It’s that, unless it serves the current government’s purposes, we tend to see terror against Americans as different from terror against non-Americans.
If you’ll remember, as far as the general public was concerned, the IRA bombings through a couple of decades weren’t really that big a deal. We were “saddened”, I’m sure (at the same time as we were contributing money to the IRA in a huge number of American bars and pubs with a large Irish-heritage patronage), but we didn’t start getting all verklempt about things like that until we got hit.
This needs to be acknowledged. Many Hindus feel that Muslims have a righteous/go-do-it streak to them, whereas these Hindus perceive themselves as having a ‘live and let live, within limits’ attitude. Doesn’t help that sometimes fireworks are heard from Muslim colonies (in Mumbai) when Pakistan wins a cricket match against India.
The impression I’ve got is that the bombings in London and Madrid were a part of our “war on terror”. The signified what we are fighting against. But we consider terrorist action in Asia- be it India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, etc. to be some other problem. More of a local problem. Not really our problem. There has been little mention that these organizations are the same, stem from the same causes, and have the same global goal.
And, well, we sell arms to Pakistan. Would our government ever sell arms to a country perpetuating acts of terror in the West?
I’m sorry, my phrasing of that was inflamitory. Mostly I want to know if we will ever start seeing terror in the East as being in the same sphere as terror in the west.
The reason London and Madrid are a part of “the war on terror” is becuase they were acts by organizations with a global agenda. (Although I thought the Madrid one was eventually linked to Basque seperatists). Terrorism in India, Indonesia, Israel, Russia/Chechneya et. al. is done by organizations with local agendas. As such the U.S. doesn’t particularly care unless it begins to affect their interests.
Entirely incorrect. The government at the time tried to hang the attacks on ETA, a Basque separatist terror group, but was almost immediately shown to be ‘misinformed’ (IOW lying to throw the heat off their highly unpopular involvement in the Iraq war), and this was the major reason they were subsequently voted out of office, despite a comfy majority before the attacks.
I’ll add to the OP my sympathy for the hundreds killed in southern Thailand, in daily terror attacks that are woefully unreported outside SEA.
Well, don’t forget that the election of the new government was widely painted over here as Spain running like a coward from the War on Terror because of a couple of little bombs. I don’t think I ever heard it reported over here that the incumbent government was voted out because of them lying about who was responsible for the bombings.
Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure it was one of the reasons. But whether the major reason was that or the threat of more bombings by Islamic terrorists is still an open question. And one that we may never know the answer to.