912 YEARS LATER

The all too predictable attack on the polyglot city of Mumbai by Islamic fanatics had fatal results for six Jews. The diversion of terror resources by the killers and their focus on tiny Chabad House seemed strange and odd. After all, in reality this was an old Pakistan/India territorial dispute over Kashmir with a Whabbi Madrasha overlay. For what possible reason would one small Jewish building be given the same status as the Taj Hotel and the main train station, key landmarks of national importance? For a possible answer it might help to go back 912 years to 1096 and the first Crusade of Pope Urban II.

Inspired by a religious reawakening and the loss of Jerusalem, Pope Urban II fomented the Crusades. He deputized Northern Europe’s kings, knights, monks and layman to reclaim by the sword the Holy Land for Christ. However before they even left their native lands, they decided to attack the local Jews, a warm up for the anticipated slaughter of the infidels. In 1096 the crusader army of Count Emicho attacked the Jewish quarter of Mainz, looting and then killing men, woman, and children. (Later, on his way south, he tried this on the Christian Hungarians with fatal results.) Having lived in Rhineland relatively quietly for centuries, the Jews were shocked.

Gottschalk the Monk, another Crusader leader, also diverted his southbound army to plunder and slaughter the Jews of Prague and Bohemia. Even the Christians who lived there were shocked.

Urban II caught the Jews in the vise of a Christian-Muslim war. Today’s Mumbai Jews are caught in a vise of a Hindu-Muslim war. There never seems to be a Jewish community too small to overlook when one is having a larger religious war.

The lesson here has already been studied and learned, but not absorbed. Anytime political powers in charge ignore fanatics who are training for murder, the consequences will be wider than imagined. That goes for the Europeans and Americans who are ignoring Hezbollah right now in Lebanon. How are they different from the Lashkar-E-Taiba fanatics responsible for the Mumbai massacre that Secretary Rice and the world at large is now so loudly condemning? In Lebanon, you have a fanatical religious group of Shiites, armed to the teeth, training and openly planning an attack on a neighboring religious nation.

Incitement, hatred and the recruitment of the poor for the task of killing are exactly the same as in Lashkar-E-Taibi.

So on the edge are India and Pakistan, that just a few gunman arriving by hijacked fishing boat can now trigger the world’s fear that nuclear weapons will be used. So too the Iranian-Lebanon connection could trigger a far wider war than anticipated. With oil prices heading into the thirty dollar a barrel range, Iran may grow desperate enough to have their proxy army Hizzbollah start a war for two reasons. One would be to divert attention from the coming collapse of their tottering subsidized-by-oil economy. If you think the American economy is suffering, Iran’s is ten times worse. There could be more unemployed than employed in the next two years. Secondly, Iran could use the reality of a war in the Mid-East to interdict shipping and oil supplies in a desperate try to jack up the price. If your back is against a wall, you often act poorly.

Jews are always the canaries in the coalmines of hate. Mumbai proved that once more. It’s time once again for the planet’s citizens to make a list of hate-based organizations, be they nations or groups within nations -- with guns, bombs or missiles -- and ask what good can come from this? There are six dead Jewish men and woman, members of a peaceful sect, in a small house, in a distant exotic land. If they were alive, they could give you the answer.