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The Pakistan Connection

2005-07-27 It is almost a truism to say that when a terrorist attack takes place in a Third World country, Western powers and the Western media dismiss it as an example of the internal tensions that beset that country. But when a similar or even, a lesser attack takes place in a Western country, it becomes an event of global significance.

The international news channels are full of nothing else. There is talk of international conspiracies. And the world community is asked to sit up and take note of the rogue states that are now threatening the peaceful existence of white people.

I hesitate to make this point again and again because it can be misinterpreted to suggest a certain insensitivity towards the victims of terrorism in Western countries. The truth is that I was as agitated as any American over the 9/11 attacks and wrote what must be one of my most emotional columns after that tragedy, echoing the global feeling that, as the world united against the terrorists, we were all New Yorkers that day.

The London bombings have been even more emotionally wrenching for me. I was born in London, I went to school there and it remains one of my most favourite cities in the world. Even though I was many miles away when the bombers struck, I reacted as though my home had been violated and the attack had reached me personally.

But as bad as I felt about those incidents, there is still no getting around the fact that when it comes to terrorism, the West follows a double standard. There is one rule for the Third World. And one rule for the developed world.

We still don't have a final figure for fatalities in the London bombings but even the most pessimistic estimates suggest that the eventual death count will not reach even one-third of the number of innocent people who died in the 1993 Bombay serial blasts. While I share in the general mourning for the Londoners who were killed by cowardly terrorists on 7 July, my question is: how many Westerners mourned the Bombayites who were blown up by terrorists?

At that stage, the Western world reacted as though the violence was a consequence of India's own domestic problems. When we protested that this was not so, nobody was willing to listen. We produced evidence that the bombers had been part of Dawood Ibrahim's gang of international criminals. We proved that the plastic explosive had been shipped in from West Asia. And we provided testimony from those bombers whom we were able to apprehend. They all said the same thing