The Jew is Not My Enemy (4 page)

As dawn breaks, the Pakistani handlers learn that one of the terrorists, Kasab, has been captured after a shootout with police. Their orders had been clear: “Getting arrested alive is not an option … For your mission to end successfully, you must be killed.”

Now the handlers play the hostage-exchange card. They ask Norma Rabinovitch, one of the two hostages, to call the Israeli consulate in Mumbai and ask them to put pressure on the Indian government to work for her release.

In a breaking voice, Norma tells the Pakistanis she has already made contact with the Israelis: “I was talking to the consulate just a few seconds ago and they have said to leave the line free. They are calling the prime minister and the army from the embassy in India.”

The Pakistani handler patronizes Norma Rabinovitch: “Don’t worry, ma’am, just sit back and relax, and don’t worry, and just wait for them to contact. Okay?” As Rabinovitch sobs, the Pakistani chuckles: “And save your energy for good days. If they contact right now, maybe you’re gonna celebrate your Sabbath with your family.”

He then issues instructions to the terrorists: “The Indian authorities will call you on this number and ask you what you want. Just say, ‘Release our guy and his weapons in our hands within half an hour.’ You must not disclose to them that you have only two hostages. You must say that you will release all the hostages. Tell them, only then will you negotiate with them.”

As the two jihadis and their Pakistani handler await the call from the Indians, Babar Imran uses the dead rabbi’s phone to call up a local TV station and vent his anger at Israel. He pretends he is Indian and sprinkles his Urdu with a few words of Hindi, but his accent fools no one.

After hanging up, Babar waits for the call from the Indian government. But neither the Indians nor the Israelis have taken the bait.

It is now 10 p.m., twenty-four hours after the takeover of Chabad House. Finally the phone rings, but it is his handlers from Pakistan calling. Babar informs them that the Indians have not called. What should he do, he asks.

The handler confers with his superiors sitting in the Pakistan office: “Do you want them to hold on to the hostages or kill them?” A voice in the background says, “Kill them.” The handler gets back on the line with clear instructions to Babar: “Listen to me. Save yourself the hassle and get rid of them [the hostages]. Kill them. You could come under fire at any time now and they may be left behind … Kill them now.”

Babar hesitates. He tells his handler, “Yes, but I do not see any movement from the police. It is all quiet over here.”

One hour later Babar and Nasir have still not executed the two women hostages, and the handler starts to lose patience.

Nine hours after the two women hostages are shot dead, Indian commandos land on the roof of Nariman House and the final battle begins. In his last phone call, Babar asks his handler in Pakistan to pray for him so that he can attain martyrdom. He says he has been hit in the arm and leg. Amidst the din of rapid gunfire, the phone goes dead.

The only Jew to escape the slaughter is Moshe, who turned two the day after his father and mother were killed.

If the Pakistani terrorists had hoped to disrupt Muslim-Jewish relations in India, the reaction of the leaders of the two communities reflects their failure.

Ezra Moses, head of a congregation that is home to many Indian Jews, told the Indian magazine
Tehelka
, “It has never happened on Indian shores that a Jew is attacked.” Another prominent member of the community, Solomon Sopher, said the high school he manages was founded as a Jewish school but now enrolled mostly Muslims. “Jews have been more close to Muslims in India than to people of any other faith,” and this, he said, is what made the attack by Muslims on Nariman [Chabad] House all the more disturbing.

“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called
Muslim,” Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesperson for the Bada Kabrastan graveyard, told
The Times
of London, explaining why Mumbai Muslims were not permitting the terrorists a Muslim burial. Another prominent Indian Muslim leader, columnist M.J. Akbar, agreed: “Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam.… Since the … terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery.”

A year after the attack, the bodies of the nine terrorists lay unclaimed in an Indian morgue, as no Indian Muslim cemetery would agree to bury them. The leadership of India’s Muslim community referred to the dead men as “murderers,” not “martyrs.” (Finally, in April 2010, after the Pakistani government refused to accept the bodies, the terrorists were buried in secret unmarked graves by the Maharashtra state government, in what it said was a “dignified” manner.)

While Indian Muslims were vocal in their denunciation of the jihadis, right-wing Pakistani Islamists claimed that the attack on Mumbai was the work of Israel. Surprisingly – or perhaps not – a large section of Pakistan’s intelligentsia has bought into this conspiracy theory. Self-styled Pakistani security expert Zaid Hamid, interviewed on TV while the attack was unfolding, accused “Western Zionists and Hindu Zionists” of planning the operation. (Hamid, who claims he once fought for the
CIA
-backed mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, is the founder of the Pakistani think tank BrassTacks and is believed to have close links to the Pakistani intelligence service, the
ISI
.) Hamid said, “The Indians have themselves always wanted to orchestrate a 9/11, to create the same drama in which they could include Americans and Israelis. We have no doubt this [attack on Mumbai] was a joint plan by Israelis, Americans, and Indians – in other words, this was a joint plan by Western Zionists and Hindu Zionists; in it Israelis are directly involved, there is involvement of Mossad.”

He further argued that the now iconic image of Kasab with an AK-47 entering the Mumbai railway station indicated that he was a Hindu, not a Muslim. In the picture, Kasab is wearing an orange wristband. “If you look at the images, the terrorist shown firing … with a machine gun in his hand, he has tied in his hand a saffron band of Hindu Zionists. Muslims do not wear this type of band – their faces are like Hindus’, the language in which they are speaking, this language no Pakistani uses.”

In May 2010, Kasab was sentenced to death by a Mumbai court on the charge of waging war against India, and the world would discover that this jihadi operation involved Muslim Pakistanis living in Canada and the United States.

The previous October, U.S. authorities arrested two Muslims – Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a forty-eight-year-old Pakistani-Canadian immigration consultant, and his accomplice David Headley, forty-nine (whose real name was Dawood Sayed Gilani) – on charges that included providing reconnaissance to the Pakistani jihadis who attacked Mumbai. In March, Headley pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his Pakistani-Canadian co-conspirator.

—

In late November 2008, as the ten Pakistani jihadis were killing Jews in Mumbai, on the other side of the world, three African-American converts to Islam and a Haitian Muslim were plotting to blow up New York synagogues.

The four men – James Cromitie, forty-four; David Williams, twenty-eight; Onta Williams, thirty-two; and Laguerre Payen, twenty-seven – had been on the
FBI’S
radar since June, when an undercover agent ran into them at the Masjid Al-Ikhlas mosque in Newburgh, New York, and found them, in the words of prosecutors, “eager to bring death to Jews.”

All four had criminal records; they had entered the prison system as Baptists or Catholics but came out as Muslims, converted in jail
by Islamic chaplains. Somewhere inside the New York correctional system, the men, who had had little interaction with Jews, came to hate them.

The
FBI
states that at an October meeting at a house in Newburgh, the four men discussed Cromitie’s desire to strike a synagogue in the Bronx and military aircraft at the Air National Guard base in Newburgh. Cromitie, aka Abdul Rahman, bragged that blowing up the synagogues would be a “piece of cake.” “I hate those motherf – ers, those f – ing Jewish bastards … I would like to get a synagogue,” Cromitie told a police informant.
¹

After months of planning and acquiring explosives and a Stinger surface-to-air missile, the four men and the informant each declared their willingness to perform jihad. On May 6, they drove to Stamford, Connecticut, to take delivery of the bombs and the Stinger missile. Long before they arrived, though, the
FBI
had disabled both the Stinger and the explosives. After testing one of the detonators for the bombs, they drove the weapons to Newburgh, locked them in a storage container, and celebrated, shouting,
“Allahu akbar!”

Two weeks later, on May 20, they drove to the Bronx with the bombs. At around 9 p.m., after planting the bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple, a Reform synagogue, and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Centre, an Orthodox synagogue, they were about to head to the National Guard base, planning to shoot down military aircraft with their missile while simultaneously detonating the bombs with a cellphone. But just after they had planted the last of the dud bombs, police swooped in and arrested them.

This was by no means the first attempt by radical Islamists to attack Jewish centres in the United States.

March 1977:
Hanafi Muslims seized three buildings in Washington, D.C., including the headquarters of B’nai B’rith, and held hostages for thirty-nine hours, resulting in one death and one severe injury.

February 1993:
Ramzi Yusuf, the mastermind of the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, which claimed seven lives and injured more than a thousand people, declared the towers not a civilian target, but a military one, by virtue of the fact that it might house a “Zionist official.”

June 1993:
“Boom! Broken windows. Jews in the street” is how one of the plotters described the carnage that would ensue from a planned “day of terror” with simultaneous bombings of the United Nations complex, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and other New York landmarks.

March 1994:
Rashid Baz opened fire on a van carrying Orthodox Jewish boys across the Brooklyn Bridge, killing one sixteen-year-old.

July 1997:
Ali Hasan Abu Kamal shot seven tourists atop the Empire State Building, killing one and seriously wounding another. In his suicide note, he accused the United States of using Israel as “an instrument” against the Palestinians.

July 1997:
Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar nearly succeeded in detonating a pipe bomb in the New York City subway system.

July 2002:
Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet attacked the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two.

September 2005:
Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh’s plot against two Los Angeles–area synagogues was disrupted because of a dropped mobile phone.

July 2006:
Naveed Haq assaulted the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, murdering one and injuring five.