Tablet Magazine » Mumbai

Daybreak: No Peace Without a Process

Marc Tracy — Wed, 25 May 2011 13:00:35 +0000

• President Abbas said Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech yesterday left “nothing we can build on,” and that he would continue the U.N. statehood push in the absence of a peace process. Therefore … . [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg reminds us that the Palestinians, not the Israelis, are the ones who get to wait out the clock. [Bloomberg View]

• Some Democrats are questioning even President Obama’s Mideast stance. This does not, however, including the Jewish head of the Democratic National Committee, and mainly includes anonymous people. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman has the solution to the impasse, in his Friedman-y way. [NYT]

• An official in Pakistan’s military intelligence expressly condoned the targeting of the Chabad house in the 2008 Mumbai massacre. [ProPublica]

• Dana Milbank watches Bibi with his daughter’s Israeli au pair. (It actually sorta works.) [WP]

Sundown: Mumbai Victims Sue Pakistan Intel

Marc Tracy — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:43:40 +0000

• The family of the Chabadniks killed during the 2008 Mumbai attack are suing Pakistan’s military intelligence agency for wrongful death in U.S. federal court. They allege (as many have) that the agency works closely with the terrorist group that launched the attacks. [JTA]

• The IDF uses Facebook to find draft dodgers. [Fast Company]

• Settlers. Love. Palin. [Ben Smith]

• The link between Prime Minister Netanyahu and George W. Bush is an author and political adviser named Ron Dermer. [Politico]

• The United States has reportedly put the freeze-extension deal in writing, as Netanyahu has demanded. [JTA]

• Three experts say America should publish a “declaration of principles” concerning the Mideast peace process. More getting things down on paper. [IHT]

Below: An Iranian weightlifter appears on a platform along with an Israeli weightlifter, while “Hatikvah” is played. For this (via Kaplan’s Korner), he has been banned from weightlifting for life.

Sundown: Right Turns on Beck, and Vice Versa

Marc Tracy — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:00:12 +0000

• Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin—no friend of Soros or (or of Tablet Magazine!)—condemned Glenn Beck’s “offensive innuendo.” [Contentions]

• Beck, meanwhile, attacked the Anti-Defamation League, inaccurately saying that its “Soros-started” “smear campaign” accused him of being an anti-Semite. Poor Abe can’t catch a break. [Media Matters]

• Will America’s delicate relations with Pakistan prevent a full investigation into the 2008 Mumbai bombing that targeted a Chabad house? [WP]

• The Israeli cabinet unanimously approved the aliya of nearly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had been living in dire conditions. [JPost]

• A woman who fights to end the ritual slaughter of chickens on Yom Kippur had her Brooklyn house vandalized with red paint. [Gothamist]

• San Francisco may vote on an initiative to ban circumcision. It is shocking to find that the activist behind the proposal is named Lloyd Schofield. [Jewcy]

SNL does Patti.

Mumbai Chabad Threatened

Marc Tracy — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:00:52 +0000

“Israel is dogs. We will strike again—heil, Hitler.” So reads the handwritten note that the Chabad house in Mumbai was sent. A picture of Hitler was reportedly attached.

In November 2008, Islamic terrorists staged a massacre in the Indian city, killing 170. The Chabad was one of several sites specifically targeted, and six occupants were killed.

Mumbai Chabad Receives Threat [JTA]

Sundown: The Hitler-Mobile

Hadara Graubart — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:06:18 +0000

• Despite feeling “really torn” about trading in property that once belonged to a “horrible mass murderer,” a German car dealer has reportedly arranged the sale of Hitler’s Mercedes to a Russian billionaire. [AP]
• A group of Los Angeles Catholic schoolteachers celebrated a midweek Shabbat as part of the ADL’s “Bearing Witness” program, which reinforced the connection between the religions—guilt—when one woman was moved by a Holocaust story to ask herself “[W]hat am I doing with Darfur and the genocide in Africa?” [LAT]
• To mark the anniversary of the Chabad center bombing in Mumbai, a blogger reflects on how a video tribute to victims Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg led him to a transcendent viewing of the Denzel Washington thriller Déjà Vu. Yes, you read that right. [Blogcritics]
• Kiki Smith, a German-born American artist known for using ideas of feminism and Catholicism in her work, has been chosen to create a window for New York City’s landmark Eldridge Street Synagogue along with architect Deborah Gans. [NYT]

Suspect in Mumbai Attacks Posed as a Jew

Hadara Graubart — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:00:35 +0000

It’s been a year since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people, including six occupants of the local Chabad House, and there has been some progress toward prosecuting one of the alleged perpetrators. David Coleman Headley, a 49-year-old Pakistani immigrant to the United States, was arrested last month in Chicago en route to Pakistan and charged with involvement in a plot to attack Denmark after the Muhammad cartoon fiasco. The FBI quickly determined that he was also likely a suspect in the Mumbai attacks. Indian authorities have linked Headley—who was head of an immigration law firm in Mumbai from 2006 to 2009—to Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba and determined that he cased all 10 locations targeted by the terrorists last November. They plan to push the United States for Headley’s extradition in January.

According to an Indian National Investigation Agency report, Headley gained entrance to the Chabad center by posing as a Jew, and the FBI discovered a copy of a book called To Pray as a Jew among his belongings. A rabbi in India, who gave a tour of the wreckage to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week, is still baffled by the tragedy: “It was bizarre that the terrorists should come and make this one of their key hunting grounds.… It didn’t have any meaning in any nationalistic sense, in any political sense.”

India to Move for Extradition of Headley from US [Times of India]
Headley Mapped all ‘26/11 Targets,’ US Suspect Posed as Jew: Police [Telegraph (India)]
‘Mumbai Terrorist Pretended to Be Jewish’ [Ynet]
Harpers Tour Site of Mumbai Massacre [Canada.com]

Daybreak: Mumbai Jews Still Afraid

Hadara Graubart — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:25:23 +0000

• The location of a new Chabad House in Mumbai is a secret revealed only to Jews looking for community; this caution reflects a general atmosphere among the city’s Jewish population since last year’s attacks. [WP]
• Meanwhile, the group responsible for the destruction remains a threat. [NYT]
• Thomas Friedman compares attempts to delegitimize President Obama with the “poisonous political environment” that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1995. [NYT]
• An examination of Israel’s options when it comes to a nuclear Iran. [Haaretz]
• Architect Daniel Libeskind is set to design a new synagogue for a Reform congregation in Munich, replacing the city’s “liberal synagogue,” which was destroyed during World War II. [JTA]