Not all Terrorism is Political: Look to the Underworld for Clues to the Mumbai Terror

Among the many commentaries made by American analysts on CNN and MSNBC during the seige of Mumbai, India, the name of Dawood Ibrahim was mentioned several times as one of those who could organize an operation as big as the one that shut down India's financial capitol for three days.

Ibrahim is thug--a narco-trafficker and Moslem Indian criminal with a mafia like organization he runs out of Karachi, Pakistan. He built his orgaization on the streets of Mumbai organizing gangs, drug operations and prostitutes. He then invested big in Bollywood movies, as the American gangsters did in the 1930s. He was eventually thrown out of India after two thousand Hindus died in the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque. His organization was believed to be behind the killings.

Men like Ibrahim have loyalties only to their organizations, not to political philosophies. But for enough money--and if an operation like this one can be leveraged to his advantage--it is hard to imagine Ibrahim turning down the chance to add some of the bin Laden billions to his bank accounts in Switzerland. And if that means terrorizing Westerners and Jews and shutting down his home town for a few days, well, that's okay too.

I've guessed for some time that someone like this has to be behind the so-called Somali pirates, operating in that same region of the world. For one thing, in a nation like Somalia, where there is no government and not enough for most people to eat, it isn't easy to imagine a group of thugs getting together the organization necessary hijack a freighter. These same illiterate gunmen are negotiating ransoms of millions of dollars for the ships they hijack. You can't put that kind of money in a suitcase and take it to Mogadishu. Ransoms that size are negotiated by pros and wired to off-shore accounts. The pirates have to be the paid gunmen of some criminal organization, and why news people haven't reported this, I don't know.

Now, with bin Laden and his religious maniacs pinned down on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and crippled everywhere else in the world, the most logical operative decision would be for Al Qaeda leadership to hire surrogates. An international criminal like Dawood Ibrahim, with an axe to grind against Hindu India, is the ideal candidate to manage a job like this one. I don't know this to be true, but it is possible. So we must look at the investigation before we assume the terror in Mumbai was executed by real fanatics with a point of view to sell.

The good news is that the FBI, Interpol, and Scotland Yard are all sending specialists and investigators to aid India in getting to the bottom of this outrage. Who knows? It might have been a distraction designed to pull troops and fire power in one direction while arms, nukes, or drugs were slipped through in another. The British have been especially good as untangling these complex webs. As I said earlier: the West and America are with you, India. Terrorists are just criminals in a different guise. Most often they do the dirty work of rich and powerful thugs, who keep their own hands clean and their bank accounts full of money that is soaked in blood.

For more on the criminal Dawood Ibrahim, there is a good story on this English language Pakistani web site: http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsSept2001/coverstory2.htm
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Joined by Democracy and Tragedy: U.S and India

America and India are now joined by tragedy. The attacks by Islamic extremists on Mumbai have made it clear--if it had not been before--that the United States, as the world's richest democracy, is in solidarity with the world's most populous democracy. Both our nations, along with the world's oldest democracy--Great Britain--are joined in a fight against those who hate the very freedoms that have made us great.

India gained its independence from Great Britain 58 years ago and has Asia's oldest stock exchange in Mumbai. English is its language of business. India maintains good relations with Britain and the U.S. as a member of the Commonwealth. In India there is freedom of religion--rare in that part of the world. For all these reasons, India too has now become a target of religious extremists.

India's Prime Minister has taken a strong stand against the violence and terror that has shut down Mumbai--the city Westerners call Bombay. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told his people: "We will take the strongest possible measures to ensure that there is no repetition of such terrorist acts. We are determined to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure the safety and security of our citizens."

India has the third largest military in the world and one of the best trained. Together, the military might and the intelligence strength of our two nation's are unbeatable. Working together we can defeat an evil that targets women and children, hospital and hotel, Westerner and Jew, Hindu and Christian.

Said Prime Minister Singh: "We will go after these individuals and organisations and make sure that every perpetrator, organiser and supporter of terror, whatever his affiliation or religion may be, pays a heavy price for these cowardly and horrific acts against our people."

We're ready India. Just ask us and we are there.

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"Hello, Englishman!" A Thanksgiving Oddity

A very strange thing happened to the Pilgrims when they began to build their settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1620. A native man wandered into their camp, looked around at their group, and then spoke to them.

"Hello, Englishman," he said. "Welcome."

When the Pilgrims had overcome their suprise, they discovered that this native American was a man called Samoset. He was from an Algonquin-speaking tribe in Maine, and it is believed he learned his English from the traders and explorers who had begun to ply the coast of New England during the early 17th century. What was even more suprising to them is that he went away and brought back another native American called Squanto who spoke English as well as they did!

Squanto--sometimes called Tisquantum--was a native of the Wampanoag people, and he had been captured by English traders more than two decades before. His adventures led him on an odyssey to England, Newfoundland, Spain and back to England again. Because he was young when he was captured, he picked up English quickly and was used as a navigator and translator on a number of voyages.

Finally he persuaded his captors, some of whom were now his friends, to allow him to return home on an English trading ship. When he arrived at his village, near the present day Patuxet, Massachusetts, he found his entire tribe had vanished--most of them killed by European disease. He joined a nearby Wampanoag tribe, whose chief was named Massasoit. It was about two years later that Squanto met his English-speaking friend Samoset. One day they were fishing together when they noticed a group of Europeans in a settlement on the land where Squanto's village had once stood. The two men watched the English for several days before they decided to make contact.

Squanto, who had lost his real home and family during his journeys, moved into the camp with the Pilgrims. Without him, the newcomers probably would not have survived that first winter. He taught them about the plants in the woods: which they could use for medicine and which were poison. He taught them to plant corn and to use their leftover fish as fertilizer. He taught them how to hunt and what to hunt. And he helped them negotiate a peace treaty with Chief Massasoit, which, at least for a time, ensured the safety of both groups.

When the Pilgrims brought in their harvest in the fall of 1621, they invited Squanto, Samoset, Chief Massasoit, and their families to join them in a celebration of thanksgiving. But they did not understand the size of Indian families. About 90 native Americans showed up, and Massasoit, seeing that the English were unable to provide a spread for all of them, sent his men out to hunt deer and pheasant and wild turkey.

This is the true origin of the first Thanksgiving in North America. It is the story of two native men, who spoke the language of the people who would eventually end their way of life, and who refused to let these visitors starve during their first cold, New England winter.

Don't Boo Hoo: America Still Strong

The Fed and the Treasury Department had another busy weekend, this time propping up Citigroup,the largest bank in the world.

The way things have been lately it might make you think the U.S. is full of a bunch of losers who can't produce anything or invent anything or save anything or even buy or sell a mortgage without going into default.

Hold your horses, as they used to say in the Old West.

America has the largest GNP in the world, three times larger than its nearest competitor, which is Japan. And that's even though the United States is the third largest nation in population (after China and India, which are each four times larger than the U.S.).

The most number of hours worked per year? U.S. workers top that list too, with Japan coming in second. The Japanese don't have the Grand Canyon and the Grand Tetons and Las Vegas so nobody there goes on vacation.

Want to make some comparisons? California has an economy as large as the nation of France (about sixth in the world). Texas has an economy as big as all of Canada. And New York State? It has an economy as large as the entire nation of Brazil, that big gun down there in Latin America.

In Detroit, where we're having a bit of a blip at present, workers on the assembly line make $75 dollars an hour. That's $150,000 a year. Might be time for folks there to take a few cuts. Yet even with some wage concessions, workers there could still most likely pay the rent. And all of them are certainly living a better life than are workers in China where the average wage is 57 cents an hour.

I hope Barak Obama, if he is truly putting together a "team of rivals" will reach really far across the aisle and bring in a few free market advocates to the Treasury Department and the Fed. They seem to have gone missing from the George W. Bush administration, but I hear they are still around, hiding out at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. They might tell the new president that it is our free market in America (the freedom to succeed, the freedom to fail and start again) that has made this country the dream of the world. And yes, we've learned it must be regulated to keep the corrupt and the greedy (whether capital or labor) from fouling the waters.

What has failed in recent days has not been our free market. It has been our government's oversight. And what with keeping all the nuts in the Middle East from blowing us up because they're jealous, and keeping all of Latin America from moving here illegally because they want a piece of the action, it is not exactly a surprise they dropped the ball.

In fact, while the government is distracted right now, maybe California ought to buy the state of Michigan. The Governator could really turn that place around, maybe with some help from Google. Come on, its better than sitting around a table and getting economic advice from France.

Four More Years of Hillary?

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Now there is a title to conjure with. Please, please, I keep saying in a not-so-silent prayer, please make her husband’s complex financial dealings negate this possibility. That would be the best irony of all, since she has spent her life using her husband to get ahead.

It may seem strange to people now, but for many years in America women felt the only route to political success was through an association with a powerful man—women appointed to fill an office upon the deaths of their husbands, or young wives running for office when their older husbands had retired. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, things seemed to change. Women like Paula Hawkins of Florida and Barbara Mikluski of Maryland, and others, were elected entirely on their own.

Now we move on, I’m sorry to say, to America’s most ambitious woman: Hillary Clinton ...

Having lived in the White House with the world’s most powerful man for eight years did nothing to slake her thirst for power. She pretended she was some kind of co-president. She put down women who wasted their lives away caring for their families (“baking cookies” she called it). She turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering, threw a lamp at him, kept his name, ran for the U.S. Senate from New York (why go back to Arkansas?) and then sought the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

When she lost to Barak Obama I had hoped we had seen the last of her on the national stage for a while. I find her really unpleasant. She seems an early, hard bitten, pre-feminist woman in a post-feminist world. Her mid-Western accent grates on me. Her too-big, insincere smile annoys me. Her dumpy figure and pantsuit couture offend me. Her self-centered left-wing politics more than trouble me because she makes it so clear it all applies to the rest of us, not to her. Oh yes, and those obnoxious name changes: whatever happened to that Rodham middle name, anyway? Who is she: the P Diddy of politics?

Obama may think he’s being a fox to keep his “friends close and his enemies closer” but I think Hillary may prove this philosophy to be flawed. Her new job (assuming this becomes official) calls for using careful diplomacy to further the interests of her nation and her president. Furthering Hillary is the job description she understands best and, in this, ambitious people find very good allies in the leak-hungry Washington media, with whom she is far more familiar than the man who will try to be her boss.

Once again, she is finding success by hitching her wagon to a powerful man. Can’t she do anything on her own?

An Eerie Coincidence: A True Tale of a Book

Coincidences happen quite a bit in life. But I just experienced one that gave me a couple of goose bumps. It has to do with a book, and the bookplate you see here adjacent to these words.

I’ve always collected books. In every city where I’ve worked and lived, I’ve found a good used bookstore in which I’ve spent many happy hours. I bought my first first edition with a TLS (typed letter signed, usually tucked inside the book) at a bookstore on Union Square in San Francisco. It was a very early book of short stories by Edna Ferber called Buttered Side Down and though it isn’t all that valuable to anybody but me I’ve always treasured it.

I also tend to collect friends who like books and two of my best friends in Florida have long been Thad and Polly Seymour, two really wonderful people whom I first met because we were neighbors.

Thad Seymour is also Dr. Thaddeus Seymour, the retired president of Rollins College, a former dean at Dartmouth. He and Polly and I have had lots of interesting discussions about books. Thad grew up in New York City in the 1930s within an interesting family. His father was a prominent lawyer who collected books and his mother was a chic lady who loved fine art and fine jewelry. I always imagined his New York family as very glamorous, strolling together down Manhattan’s avenues on the way to the family brownstone in Greenwich Village. So where is the eerie coincidence, you ask? Well stick with me and you'll see.

When I was doing research on early 20th century novelist Irving Bacheller and told Thad that Bacheller had belonged to the Century Club in New York, Thad told me he also belonged to the Century Club as his father had before him.

Anyway, back to my collection of books.

With the advent of the Internet, I have gradually come to realize that one does not have to collect shelves and shelves of books anymore. Books that are out of print and unavailable at your library are just a click away on Amazon or Abe Books. So, since I’m heading back to the San Francisco Bay Area after the first of the year, I’m doing a lot of sorting and boxing, and this week I went through my first editions with an eye to getting rid of at least a few.

A lot of these go back a number of years in my life and one’s taste changes as the years go by. For example, there was a time when I collected women writers. Now the gender thing isn’t as important to me. So when I came across a Dorothy Parker first edition, Laments for the Living, I paused for a minute trying to decide whether to keep it, sell it, or donate it to Polly Seymour's used bookstore at the local library. Ever since I read a biography of Parker and discovered what a sad life she had—alcoholism, horrible relationships with men—I’ve been feeling less inclined to collect her. Silly, I know. But there you are.

I opened this one to check the penciled notation inside which said “1st Edition, Out of Print” and showed the price of the book. I recalled that this book was a gift from someone I’d just as soon forget, and I almost tossed it in the pile of books I thought I might donate.

Then I looked over to the inside binding page and examined the bookplate there. It was a very good-looking one and showed an old English barrister wearing one of those funny Rumpole of the Bailey wigs floating above a book collection like a cross Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. The book plate also had engraved upon it: "Ex Libris Whitney North Seymour.”

I wondered if this man who had owned my book was related to my friend Thad? I knew Dorothy Parker was a New York writer and I knew the Seymours were New Yorkers, so it didn’t seem far-fetched. But I doubted it would be true.

I told Thad about it. He laughed.

The book had belonged to his father.

“The Century Club in New York owns the rights to that bookplate now,” he told me.

“Do you want the book back?” I asked. "It belonged to your father, after all."

“No, no. We took the ones we wanted and sold the rest. I’m happy you have it,” he smiled.

This book made its journey from a private library in New York, to my own private library via a third party who knew neither generation of Seymours. I had never heard of the Seymours until I came to Florida, long after I acquired the book. Now, as I'm getting ready to leave the state, it seems to me this connection actually reached out of the book and grabbed me by the wrist. Pretty strange, don’t you think? Certainly one of life’s eerie coincidences. I wonder if Dorothy Parker, who must sleep a troubled sleep, had anything to do with it?

Understanding and Loving Our Nerds

Very famous non-nerd and very famous nerd.

I just read the most amazing article by Benjamin Nugent in Psychology Today. Nugent is the author of a book with the arresting title American Nerd: The Story of My People which I’m now going to go out and buy. In his article he explains why some people who are exceptionally good at math and science and chess and inventing things are often also very awkward in dealing with their fellow men. To put it in the current parlance, Mr. Nugent explains why nerds are nerds, and why it is not their fault.

Apparently some highly intelligent people are genetically programmed to have what scientists are calling a “systemized brain” or an “S-brain” for short. A person with an S-brain is good at thinking like a machine, but he doesn’t have the wiring to easily understand people and social systems. As children, S-brainers point out their teachers’ errors, something that rarely endears them to their instructors or their fellow students. They have solitary hobbies like building radios and computers in the garage and they consequently have trouble making friends. People, they discover, don’t work like machines and they are puzzled by this. Being smarter than most other people and being socially inept are isolating and these two traits compound each other. Nerds have fewer opportunities to learn the very things about people they need to know in order to not be so nerdy.

The opposite of an S-brain is an “E-brain” or “empathetic-brain.” People with this kind of wiring, writers Nugent: “are good at divining what people are feeling and people with E-brains develop sharper social skills. More men have S-brains than women and more women have E-brains than men—though men and women both fall all over the spectrum.”

But it isn’t all bad. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both nerds. Albert Einstein knew his universe but he had great difficulty with women, leaving the field wide open for his less intelligent friends.

I read this article with growing excitement. My brilliant father, who sometimes said the oddest and most hurtful things, suddenly came into focus. He was an S-brain nerd, if there ever was one.

When my sister and I were children he was great fun. Nerds can relate to children because they are also socially inept. He said things to us like “Don’t cry. Don’t you know tears just turn to water vapor?” which always made us laugh, though now that I have read this article I wonder if he was actually just giving us what he felt was important information. He loved making us swing sets and even more than that liked solving the problems of children. When he caught us fighting one day over whose turn it was to swing on the swing, he went away and brought back an old kitchen timer, nailed it to the tree, and called it the “turn timer.” End of problem. Well, mostly.

He built our first house because he thought it would be interesting. Once he even tried to explain to me how an internal combustion engine worked—as if I wanted to know! When he really wanted to kick back, he could be found in some quiet corner reading his college physics textbook.

You learned never to ask him how you looked, not if you didn’t actually want to know. Once, when I was at the height of my television career and in the prime of my youthful attractiveness, I went to an enormous amount of trouble to go with him to his fiftieth high school reunion in Homewood, Alabama. (My Mom didn’t want to go.) At the party, I overheard one of his schoolmates compliment me: “She’s so pretty,” said the man. “She must be like your wife.” And my father answered: “Yes but my wife would never wear stockings like that.” The stockings were a shimmery platinum color from Donna Karan. I thought they were gorgeous. I thought a proud father might have said “Thank you” to a compliment like that and I was very hurt.

Yet if there was a Boy Scout at his front door, asking for a donation, he had the softest heart on the block. I was baffled.

Once, he and my mother visited me in Florida. I exhausted myself trying to make my house perfect. I took them to wonderful places. I drove them everywhere. On the last day, we were headed out to get my Dad an ice cream cone, his absolutely favorite thing. I was driving the car and as we pulled out he said to me: “One thing I really don’t like about you—” When he paused here, I stopped the car and turned to him and just about burst into tears. Then he continued: “ … is that you don’t put your seatbelt on until you start the car.” I started laughing, since the second half of his sentence was such a surprise after the first half. When I stopped laughing I said: “One thing I don’t like about you … is that you would start a sentence to me with the phrase ‘one thing I don’t like about you.’” He had been trying to be fatherly. It had just come out the wrong way. The nerd way.

My mother constantly made fun of him because he had no interest in popular culture. “You don’t even know who Barbra Streisand is,” she said one day with derision. He cocked his head and looked at her and you could see the little wheels in his head going around, trying to compute for what reason he should know this person she had named.

Ludwig von Mises, on the other hand, the Austrian economist, this man my dad was familiar with. At age 78 he read Mises’ 845 page tome Human Action because he was curious about how economics worked. No wonder he had no time to listen to “People Who Need People.”

Here is the most ironic part of this story. Now, at 89, my Dad’s wonderful S-brain has gone on the blink. He can’t figure out how anything works anymore and the paradox is that this has caused him to become as funny and friendly as a goofy teenager. He absolutely adores me and my sister and says so all the time, something he never ever expressed before in his entire life.

So there you are. Life is truly strange at least it seems so to me, the high-IQ E-brained child of an S-brained father. And life sprinkles its blessings on you in the strangest ways. Here’s the blessing I pass on: may you be lucky enough to love a nerd.