2 posts tagged “terrorism”
It’s Not the Cold War
Updating strategy to fight the ideology.
November 29, 2008 9:00 AM
By Mark Steyn
see photos at the Boston Globe's BIG PICTURE
. . . In the ten months before this week’s atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you’re supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city’s emergency-response system.
And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).
What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.
This free public service website was created to give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents across the world.
Global Incident Map -- Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity
While this website employs much automation, the news gathering itself is not automated -- news items are located, reviewed, and manually entered into the database. With inadequate staffing, there are periods of each day when events are delayed in getting onto the map.
Global Incident Map was created by the publishers of www.TerroristWarning.com and www.TransitSecurityReport.com as a continuation of efforts to contribute to the Global War on Terrorism.
The map was designed and conceived by the publisher of www.TerroristWarning.com, Morgan Clements, with inspiration garnered from the RSOE Hararia Information Service AlertMap , the federal map systems used by FEMA, and other incident maps.
