Ruttan on Mumbai

From the LA Times:

Mumbai was selected not simply because it was a so-called soft target but because it is a symbol of modernity in the world's most populous democracy. The city the West first knew as Bombay is today the symbol of India's place in the modern world, as the center not only of banking, commerce and a burgeoning high-tech sector but one of the world's great film industries. (It's worth recalling that when the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan, one of the first things it did was to close the cinemas and ban DVDs from Mumbai's Bollywood.)

The places the killers struck -- luxury hotels, a railway station, a hospital for women and children, the Chabad Jewish center -- are all powerfully linked in the popular mind with the modern world. As the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has argued, the jihadis have linked anti-Americanism, anti-British sentiment (the assumption is that London is Washington's lap dog) and anti-Semitic antagonism toward Zionism into a potent new ideology. To the extent it seems to find an increasingly sympathetic hearing in some fashionable sectors of the intellectual West, including the U.S., Levy correctly labels it "the socialism of imbeciles."Like all the totalitarian movements that have come before it, hatred of liberty and Jews is the real foundation of contemporary jihadism, and not the traditions of Islam or its canonical prescriptions.