Al-Qaeda Is Already Here

[Dover]

Al-Qaida is already here

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2003
The Times Of India

Some time ago, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman posed the question, why do Muslims join Al-Qaida in so many Arab countries but not in India? The answer, he said, lay in India being a secular democracy.

In autocracies across the Arab world, protest against local oppressors was sublimated into protest against the US, seen as the power propping up the autocrats. This trend was strengthened by the autocrats suppressing any local press criticism of themselves, while tacitly encouraging criticism of the US (even in supposedly pro-US countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt). Thus the autocrats cleverly diverted local protest from themselves to the US, and in the process stoked international terrorism.

But India, said Friedman, was a secular democracy where Muslims could give free vent to their grievances. In this milieu of freedom, not even aggrieved Muslims became terrorists. Similar encomiums have been paid to India by other analysts, and by US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. I am sure this made many Indians feel very good.

Alas, we must reject this as a myth that may have been true at some time, but has ceased to be true after the Gujarat riots last year...>> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=169676

[lcordero]

1. India is a democracy????

Every person that I have talked to has said otherwise.