Of course this has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. The attack on the Chabad centre was an auxilliary action against a small organization that is, presumably there to proselytize among what’s left of India’s Jewish community, which dates back as many as 2,500 years. That the Chabadniks were Israeli citizens was coincidental; they could just as easily have been Americans or Canadians. (For all we know about them, they may be “anti-Zionists” like the Naturei Kuerta or the Satmars.)

Neither was the ostensible selecting of western guests at the two hotels likely to be indicative of the terrorists’ main purpose. My home town of Toronto has a very large South Asian community comprised of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, (who seem to me to be able to live together very peacefully). The growing concensus among them is that the terrorists* in Mumbai are trying to sabotage the negotiations between India and new Pakistani PM, Zardari, because they think he is ceding too much of Kashmir, not to mention wanting to sabotage the improving relations between Zardari’s government and the governments of the India and the US and efforts to defeat the Taliban in the NWTA and Afghanistan.

* the North American media can only seem to call them ‘attackers’ or ‘Islamic militants’, but a Toronto Muslim Indian cabbie had no problem calling them terrorists.