Dr. Walid Phares writes an informative piece on the Bombay train explosions and mostly gets it right.

Is this the beginning of the Jihadi war on India? Yes and no. Yes it is a jihadist war on India, but no, the trains’ bombings weren’t the beginning of that war. Unlike the U.S., Spain, and the UK, the Indians have been subjected to small explosions of the holy war for years. Yesterday’s bombings of Mumbai’s trains (previously Bombay) are not the first strikes on Indian mainland. In October 2005, terror bombings killed more than 60 people in the Indian capital of Delhi. Mumbai itself was the target of terror attacks that massacred 55 persons and injured 180 in August 2003. And in December 2001, jihadist groups launched raids on India’s parliament killed a number of people, as well. The targeting of the most populous democracy on earth has been taking place for years, even before 9/11 at the hands of followers of a Salafi-Tablighi ideology, with common roots with al-Qaeda’s terrorist doctrine. The July 11 blasts in Mumbai aiming at innocent civilians are the last in a string of crimes directed against the Indian population by militants following orders and engaged in an irreversible path of violence. But who did it and why?

Dr. Phares has done his homework but the article falls short of providing insights and there’s a reason to it: it lacks historical perspective. The article mostly deals with Pakistan-backed terrorism on Indian soil

Any observer can predict that the Mumbai trains won’t be the last ones to be attacked in the future. The penetration of the second largest country in the world is deep and wide, and above all backed from across the border by Pakistan’s powerful fundamentalists. According to reports, almost every shop in the main bazaar of every town – large or small – in Pakistan had a Lashkar collection box to raise funds for the “struggle in Kashmir.” The group was indeed banned by the government in 2002; nevertheless, it still operates across the country, inside Kashmir, and has now spread its tentacles deep inside India. The latter can deal with the branches within India’s many provinces, but the roots of that tree are deeply planted and fertilized inside Pakistan.

Jihad against India dates back to around 1000 years in history when Arabic barbarians began ransacking her borders and gradually succeeded in enslaving large portions of her soil. The Bombay explosion is another episode in that long train of unending Jihad. I recall reading somewhere that Pakistan represents the unfinished dream of adding India to the ever-growing list of countries in Dar-ul-Islam: read the sorry history of South East Asian countries, which were once glorious Hindu kingdoms before Islam took over.

While the West is yet to come to terms with this murderous ideology, Indian history offers plenty of evidence and lessons on how to tackle and defeat it. However, as I said in my ancestral wisdom post, not many seem keen to study these lessons today. They’re busy sucking up to the said murderous ideology, and implementing one of its key features: censorship.