The storage room in which Sandra Samuel and Zakir Hussain were hiding from the gunmen measured 3.5 metres by 3 metres. It was lined with shelves, two windows looked out onto grubby lanes and courtyards, and there was a stainless-steel refrigerator. A banal scene, really, but it was a sanctuary. For around three hours, Sandra, 44, a plainly dressed and dedicated nanny, and Zakir, 22, a diminutive cook with delicate, almost feminine features who called himself Jackie, had been wedged behind the fridge. “I called the police, I called our security guard,” says Jackie. “I thought this was the end for me.” There was little indication of what the men upstairs were doing with the American rabbi, his wife and son, Moshe, who was almost two, and their guests. “Nobody was speaking, there was just the moving of tables, shaking noises, bumps, things being pushed against the wall, things grinding,” says Sandra. It was approaching 1am on Thursday, November 27, 2008.

In an adjacent building, a British woman, Anna, was crouching in the hall of her apartment with her Indian husband. Anna, 41, is a thoughtful, dark-haired teacher; she didn’t want to give her real name because, in light of what happened in her adopted city, she fears becoming a target. All their windows — about 21 panes — had shattered from a blast after the gunshots and explosions had started at Nariman House at 9.45pm the previous night. So they waited on the floor for hours in the darkness, calling and receiving calls from worried relatives and friends, unsure of what was going on next door, even though Nariman House was only a few steps away. Curiously, the thing that struck Anna was the silence. It was as though the city beyond had ceased to exist. No car horns, no chatter from the street, none of the normal hum of a sprawling tropical metropolis. That night there was nothing except for gunshots, and they issued from Nariman House infrequently.

British survivors recall the Mumbai attacks. At around 1am there was one unforgettable sound that Sandra, Jackie and Anna would all hear. It came from Nariman House. Anna was crouching. Jackie and Sandra were hiding. And then, very clearly, a woman screamed. From that moment on, there could be little doubt about what was taking place there. “She screamed as a gunshot rang out,” says Anna. “Then there was a real sobbing. She was crying with that kind of… like she was terrified. That kind of crying.”

The central figures in this story are Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, emissaries of the Lubavitch movement who arrived in Mumbai in 2003. They offered local and visiting Jews a free place to eat, sleep, and pray. Gabi, as he was known, was an Israeli-born New Yorker, a strapping man with a wispy reddish beard. Educated in yeshivas (traditional Jewish schools), he saw Mumbai as a chance to build something — a beacon of Judaism — and to fulfil God’s will. Rivka, usually called Rivki, was 28, and grew up in the northern Israeli town of Afula. In some senses, her role was traditional, and included cooking and making a welcoming home. To acquaintances, the couple seemed to complement each other. Gabi, 29, was formal where Rivki was relaxed. “She was more loose, she wore trendy glasses. She was more playful. He was serious,” says Hillary Lewin, an American student and sometime house guest.

Illness afflicted the Holtzberg family. Their first child, Menachem Mendel, was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a genetic disorder, and died in 2006, aged two. Another son, Dov Ber, also had the disease, and was to die at four years old in December 2008, a month after his parents. Amid all this, the Holtzbergs had their youngest child, Moshe, and to them he was a blessing. He did not have Tay-Sachs, and Rivki called him her malach, her angel. Everyone on their street seemed to know him. Rita Sushil Merchant, a neighbour, recalls that Moshe would stand in his window and happily shout to her the new English words he had learnt. Before the attack, he was up to “banana” and “balloon”. What’s more, Rivki was five months pregnant, another reason to be thankful.

Sandra, a Catholic Mumbaikar who previously worked as a private cook and a masseuse, started with the Holtzbergs in 2003. Jackie, a Muslim from Assam, was hired as a cook in 2006 after meeting Gabi at a sports club where he worked. Since the siege, The Sunday Times has learnt, suspicions have arisen that he may have been implicated.

According to Sandra and Jackie, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 was a day like many others at Nariman House. Rivki was very happy. “That was normal,” says Jackie. “She was always very happy.” Gavriel koshered some chickens for guests and other Jews in India, something he did often. In the evening, he exchanged a few words with Sandra about Moshe. “You know, Sandra, I love this baby so much,” she recalls him saying.

The Holtzbergs had guests for dinner. Among them were the American rabbis Benzion Kruman, 28, and Leibish Teitelbaum, 37. There were also two women: an Israeli grandmother, Yocheved Orpaz, 62, and Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich, 50, from Mexico. Kruman, Teitelbaum, Orpaz and Rabinovich would not leave Nariman House alive. Another Israeli visitor, David Bialka, 52, a diamond trader from Netanya, was more fortunate. Unbeknown to the occupants of Nariman House, at around 8.30pm on Wednesday, a dinghy landed at a local jetty. It contained 10 men from Pakistan. Splitting into small groups, they fanned out across the city, some leaving bombs in taxis on the way. Each man carried an AK-47, a pistol, 8 to 12 grenades, and was in constant phone contact with handlers in Pakistan. Two of them, identified as Babar Imran of Multan and Nasir of Faisalabad — little else is known about them — walked a few streets to the only Jewish target. Their handlers would emphasise to them the importance of killing Jews.

The first sign that anything unusual was taking place at Nariman House varies, depending on who you ask. On the first floor, Jackie and Sandra were putting leftovers in the fridge. Perhaps Gabi and the other rabbis were studying; the visiting women from Mexico and Israel may have been using the internet. Suddenly, in the dining-room doorway that leads to the staircase, a man with a gun appeared. “He was thin, light-skinned, tall. Almost like a common Indian,” says Jackie. “A long face, short hair. I only had a very short glance, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face.” In Sandra’s head, the events are much more confused. “I don’t know how it happened. It was all of a sudden, like a shot…” As the man raised his gun to fire, Sandra and Jackie ducked. The bullet missed them and thudded into a pillar. Somehow there was a delay, the man did not shoot again, and Jackie had time to close the door. He and Sandra ran to the row of windows that faced the street and looked out. A crowd was gathering. Motioning down to a TV repairman whose shop faced Nariman House, they asked where their building’s security guard was. The guard had left for dinner, said the repairman. Sandra and Jackie told him to call the police, and might have said more except that the agitated mass of people began throwing rocks at them. There had been gunshots from Nariman House onto the street, and they were angry. The servants retreated to the storeroom, and as they did, a terrorist lobbed a grenade at one of the doors on their floor. “He didn’t come and check on us,” says Jackie. “He must have thought we were dead.”

In a bathroom on the fourth floor, Bialka, the Israeli diamond trader, was taking a shower. He had been in Mumbai on business, and was due to fly home a few hours later. The atmosphere at Nariman House that evening, he says, was congenial. He had studied the Torah after dinner, and then went upstairs to freshen up before his journey. Bialka is too traumatised by what happened next to speak about it — he currently sees a therapist twice a week, and has been unable to return to work — but his wife retells his story. As he stepped out of the shower, there were bangs and the sound of glass breaking. “He thought that it was fireworks,” his wife relates. “When he heard gunshots, he realised something was very wrong.” He threw on trousers and a shirt and opened the bathroom window. “Luckily, it didn’t have any bars on it,” his wife says. The street was 10 metres below. Clutching drainpipes and balancing on air-conditioning units, Bialka half-climbed, half-slid four storeys to the ground. As he ran from Nariman House, locals seized him. Assuming he was a terrorist, “they lynched him and broke several of his bones”.

Word began to spread throughout the city about what was taking place. Gabi made what was perhaps his last telephone call, to a security officer at the Israeli consulate. “He said, ‘Something has happened in Chabad house,’” says Orna Sagiv, the consul general. “‘There’s a terror attack. Come and help us.’” The call was interrupted, however, and they were not able to re-establish contact. Two officials headed for the building. As the terrorists continued to shoot from Nariman House, the crowd retreated. A few were unlucky: Harish Gohil, a 25-year-old call-centre employee, and Salim and Maria Hararwala, 62 and 55, were shot.

Few developments gave cause for optimism. At 10.45pm, an hour after the terrorists entered the Jewish centre, a bomb they had left at a local petrol station exploded. The scream heard by Anna, the Englishwoman, came at around 1am. “At that point, my blood ran cold,” Anna says. In Nariman House itself, it appears that some of the hostages were killed immediately after the terrorists’ arrival, although this would not be known until the end of the siege. Rivki and Gabi seemed to have survived for a few hours after the terrorists arrived, according to Sandra. She says it was Rivki who screamed. Soon after, she heard Rivki shout “Gabi, Gabi, stop, stop”. “What she wanted him to stop, I don’t know,” Sandra says; she suggested that Gabi had been fighting the terrorists. In the morning, there was a burst of hope. A Lubavitch leader in America, Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, had been repeatedly calling Gabi’s phone. At 10.30am, someone — an Urdu speaker — answered. Lubavitch tracked down an interpreter called PV Viswanath, a New York economics professor from Mumbai. Viswanath rang back.

“Several times we asked how the rabbi was,” Viswanath recalls. “He said, ‘They’re fine.’ And then he said, ‘We haven’t even hit him.’” Over the course of four or five calls with the professor, the terrorist asked to speak to an Indian government official. Strangely, he spoke with little emotion. There were no vitriolic comments against Israel or the West. Eventually Shemtov found someone, but could not patch him into the call. They were unable to contact the terrorist again.

While the terrorists focused on the phone conversations with Lubavitch, there was a lull in the gunfire. In the storeroom, Sandra and Jackie suddenly heard Moshe crying upstairs. Sandra’s reaction was instinctive. “I heard him cry, I ran towards him, that’s it,” she says. “I wasn’t frightened. If I was frightened I would have run away.” It is not known who brought Moshe down from his fifth-floor room, or why Babar Imran and Nasir did not shoot him. A sense of humanity may have prevailed. Sandra found him wandering amid the bodies of his parents and the two visiting rabbis. “They were unconscious, not dead,” she insists. “There was no blood on the scene, not one scratch on the bodies. It was like they were sleeping. Rabbi Gabi had a little bit of blood on his leg.” It is possible Sandra did not fully take in the scene, because there was certainly blood on Moshe’s clothing. Grabbing the baby, she and Jackie fled.

At dawn, a helicopter dropped Indian commandos onto the roof. For hours, rockets and bullets slammed into Nariman House as commandos closed in on the terrorists from the roof and the ground floor. Onlookers were stunned at the intensity of the battle. It continued until Friday evening, when the terrorists were killed by commandos. Their bodies were riddled with bullets; Nasir’s arm was charred. A team of volunteers at Zaka, an emergency-response group, had arrived from Israel on Friday with Rivki’s parents, and now they and others moved into the building to recover the bodies. As the Jewish Sabbath started, the siege of Nariman House was over. The rumours began shortly afterwards. Some in Mumbai heard that the hostages had been tortured, their bodies mutilated. There was speculation that the terrorists had taken mind-altering drugs before committing appalling acts, perhaps even sexually abusing the women. Few know what actually happened. The situation was complicated by the fact that no autopsies were performed on the bodies, in accordance with Jewish law.

Three days after I arrived in Mumbai, I tracked down a man who was one of the first people into Nariman House after the siege ended. It was the first time he has spoken to a journalist, and he asked me not to reveal his identity as he feared upsetting the families of the deceased. He allowed me to say that he has medical training. One windy evening, he seemed to want to talk, as if he were carrying a great burden. So we drove to a promenade ringed by skyscrapers and sat in the darkness as he told his story.

He had waited outside Nariman House as the commandos battled their way in on Friday, he said. He was optimistic; when Sandra escaped on Thursday morning, she had stated that the hostages looked unconscious rather than dead. But what he found appeared different. “They were tortured very badly,” he told me, speaking sombrely and matter-of-factly. He was greatly affected by what he saw, and says of the attack’s organisers: “I want to kill them.” All the hostages had been shot, he said. Some had multiple bullet wounds. But there was more. Two of the rabbis had broken bones. The skull of one of the victims had caved in, as sometimes happens when somebody is shot in the head at close range with a rifle, except the man had not been shot in the head. The two female visitors, Orpaz and Rabinovich, were found bound with telephone cord and lying next to each other on a fourth-floor bed. One of the hostages had bruising all over her body, which the man, who is not a pathologist, said was consistent with being hit by a blunt object. There was a large cut on her thigh. And one of her eyes was out of its orbit and lying on her cheek.

It sounded so extreme, so hard to believe, that the man said in a quiet voice: “I can show you photographs.” So we drove through deserted night-time streets to his home, where he opened a folder on his laptop entitled “Nariman House”. Inside were pictures, presumably taken by the Mumbai police, of the terrorists and four of the hostages: Gabi, Teitelbaum, and the two visiting women. He did not have photos of Rivki or Kruman. The pictures are overwhelming, an almost unbearable tableau of blood and contorted bodies. Nariman House is in disarray, the furniture overturned, bullet holes everywhere. It was not hard to believe that the hostages met a horrific, drawn-out end. Based on the images and eyewitness reports, it becomes clear that most did not die in the first hail of bullets as the terrorists entered the building, as has been reported. They may have fought back. Survivors would hear Rivki through the first night, and Gabi appears to have died some time after being shot in the leg, as there is a tourniquet around his thigh. The most brutal injuries suggest torture, but the organisations that might have conclusive answers, such as Zaka, the Israeli emergency-response group, decline to comment.

I showed the images to Vincent Di Maio, a noted US pathologist. He saw in them something hinting at another controversial rumour: that hostages had been alive when commandos stormed Nariman House, but were killed by crossfire. This was the conclusion of volunteers from Zaka. One volunteer leaked the finding to the Israeli press, sparking an angry reaction from the Israeli government, which said the claims were unfounded and could harm Israeli-Indian relations.

According to Di Maio, one of the female hostages was almost certainly fired on after she died. Bullet wounds to the arm and shoulder of one of the visiting women were inflicted postmortem: “Note no bleeding and visible yellow fat,” he says. It is unclear who shot her. Perhaps it was the terrorists. Perhaps it was crossfire when the commandos stormed the house. If it was crossfire, then the accidental shooting of live hostages does not seem too distant a possibility.

One more question remains: how did the terrorists and their handlers apparently know the layout of Nariman House, and the schedule of its inhabitants, so well? Suspicion has fallen on Jackie, the Muslim cook. Since the siege, he says he has had about 100 interviews with police and officials, including Israelis. Solomon Sopher, a leader of the Mumbai Jewish community, says he thinks Jackie is suspected not of direct collusion with terrorists, but perhaps of unwittingly revealing information to scouts who struck up a friendship with him. Jackie denies this, and it is probable that if there were evidence against him, he would have been charged.

I met him by a rain-swept train station in the north of Mumbai. He now lives with Sandra’s son, and works at a falafel firm. When he speaks warmly of the Holtzbergs, he seems genuine. He has pictures of Moshe and Dov Ber, the child who died of Tay-Sachs, on his phone. He carries around a photo of Gabi. “This is my rabbi,” he says.

Moshe, almost three now, seems to have adjusted. He lives in Israel with Rivki’s parents and Sandra. When I call, I hear Sandra and Moshe laughing in the background. Has what has happened scarred him? Moshe, Sandra says, is “like a normal kid”. Meanwhile, Damyanti Gohil, the mother of the call-centre worker who was shot from Nariman House, says that before the siege she would sit out, watch the building’s sparkling lights, and listen to the melodies of prayers and songs. The Holtzbergs had parties and it all seemed lovely. Now it aches so much for her to see the house through her kitchen window that she has blocked it with bricks and cement. Pinned to the cement is a photo of her son, Harish, and his wristwatch. Sitting outside her flat one evening, Gohil pulls her sari over her eyes as she starts to cry. “Something should be done with that building,” she says. “It should be pulled down.” The windows of Nariman House are dark, and the exterior panels gleam a ghostly white in the moonlight.

Surprisingly, considering the grim history, dozens of Lubavitch couples have applied to replace the Holtzbergs in Mumbai. “The light has to shine again from Chabad house,” Berkowitz says. So far, nearly $1m has been pledged for a new centre. Recently Berkowitz led five visitors, all western Jews who knew the Holtzbergs, up the crumbling staircase at Nariman House. Amid the devastation, traces of the Holtzbergs linger, as if they were there only yesterday. Two bottles of medication remain in one of the fridges. On the top floor, in Moshe’s room, a painted Hebrew alphabet scrolls along a wall, and by the door are pencil marks where Rivki recorded Moshe’s height. In the Holtzberg’s bedroom stands a rack containing Gabi’s and Rivki’s shoes; their smart leather ones for synagogue, his trainers, her easy shoes for around town. They have been left here in accordance with Jewish tradition, Berkowitz explains.

It is Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of two Jerusalem temples about 2,000 years ago. On the roof, Berkowitz sits and begins to recite a traditional prayer. “They attacked us and besieged us, our enemies,” he half-sings, the city spread out beneath him. “They made impure what was pure. There is no comfort.” The visitors look at the ground or into the distance. “Hashem,” he says, using one of the Jewish names for God, “return us. We will repent and you will return us. May you reinstate the glorious days of old.” Times Online

If some Muslims wish to wage eternal jihad until Islam dominates the globe, they are only being true to Islam and its doctrines as they understand it. However, in that case, where the world is divided into two warring camps, Islam and Infidelity — or, in Islamic terms, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War — how can these Muslims expect any concessions from the international community? The natural conclusion of the view that "might makes right" is "to the victor go the spoils."

The fact that Turkey conquered Constantinople more than 500 years ago does not prevent the Turkish government from returning Hagia Sophia to Christendom today, which would undoubtedly be a great gesture. But of course that can never be. The Muslim world would undergo a "paroxysm of fury" if a Christian pope dares pray in the conquered church; what would the Muslim world do if Hagia Sophia were actually converted back to a church?

But perhaps Muslims cannot be blamed for expecting special treatment, as well as believing that jihad is righteous and decreed by the Almighty. The West constantly goes out of its way to confirm such convictions. By criticizing itself, apologizing and offering concessions — all things the Islamic world has yet to do — the West reaffirms that Islam has a privileged status in the world.

And what did the pope do in his controversial visit to Hagia Sophia? He refrained from any gesture that could be misconstrued as Christian worship and merely took in the sights of the museum. Moreover, when he was invited into the Blue Mosque nearby, he respectfully took off his shoes and prayed, eyes downcast, standing next to the the grand mufti of Istanbul like a true dhimmi — a subdued non-Muslim living under Islamic law and acknowledging Islamic superiority.

And therein is the final lesson. Muslims' zeal for their holy places and lands is not intrinsically blameworthy. Indeed, there's something to be said about being passionate and protective of one's own. Here the secular West — Christendom's prodigal son and true usurper — can learn something from Islam. For whenever and wherever the West concedes ideologically, politically and especially spiritually, Islam will be sure to conquer. If might does not make right, zeal apparently does. Los Angeles Times

However, if living in strict accordance to sharia is the first priority of some Muslims, one wonders: Why have they voluntarily come and immersed themselves in infidel countries that do not recognize sharia law and, indeed, allow many things that run counter to it, such as the selling and consumption of alcohol and pork and the liberal intermingling of the sexes? Most of the Muslim countries that Muslims abandon for the West are much more conducive to the Muslim lifestyle and uphold many if not all aspects of sharia law. Yet, each year, thousands of supposedly “ultra-devout” Muslims forsake these countries and, of their own free will, come and surround themselves with wine-imbibing, swine-eating libertines. Why?

It is for the same reason that everyone else comes to the West — for the “good life.” They come in order to be prosperous and to enjoy opportunities, security, and equality the likes of which they could never have in their own countries (ruled quite often — no surprise — according to sharia). The vast majority of Muslims emigrating from the Islamic world do not leave due to necessity — say, oppression or starvation. No, they come to the infidel West solely to prosper materially.

But why are Muslims of the “ultra-pious” variety seeking after material comfort in the first place — especially when doing so will almost certainly undermine their professed desire to live strictly according to the sharia? Coming to live in a democratic country composed of some 300 million infidels is bound to affect any Muslim’s observance of sharia. These pious Muslims risk coming into daily contact with, not only pork, alcohol, and dogs, but all sorts of other defilements: flamboyant homosexuals, scantily clad women (who are often in positions of authority!), gamblers and usurers, to name a few. Are they not concerned that they, or especially their children, might become contaminated by the licentious and seductive practices of the infidel West? If their priority is truly to strictly follow sharia, should they not remain in their Muslim countries of origin, which, if not as prosperous as the West, are definitely more conducive to the Muslim lifestyle?

Or, could it be that, despite all the ruckus (and subsequent headlines) made by these Muslims, living in accordance to Allah and his sharia is not their first priority, after all? At least, not to the degree that they would be unwilling to put this priority at substantial risk for the sake of living the good life, in a strictly secular and materialistic sense.

Furthermore, if common sense does not dissuade them from relocating to the West, the very sharia they claim to want to closely observe should. For instance, if pork and alcohol are condemned (e.g., Koran 5:4; 2:219), voluntarily living among infidels, idolaters, and atheists is looked on no better. The Koran declares: “O you who believe! Take neither Jews nor Christians as friends…whoever among you turns to them is one of them” (5:51).

There are countless verses and traditions, in fact, that make it clear that Muslims are to be in a constant state of animosity toward non-Muslims, waging war through tongue and teeth in order to spread Islam, and, when finally in a position of superiority, discriminating against those who refuse to convert (see, for example, 3:28, 5:73, 5:17, 9:5, 9:25, etc). When the Meccans persisted in their unbelief, refusing to accept the prophet-hood — and subsequent authority — of Mohammad, he finally abandoned his kinsfolk with these parting words, which some Muslims believe still define the proper relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims: “We [Muslims] disown you [non-Muslims] and what you worship besides Allah. We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us — until you believe in Allah alone!” (60:40).

So why are some Muslims making public scenes here in the United States over scanning bacon or transporting customers with sealed bottles of wine in their luggage while at the same time freely choosing to live with — and of course benefit from — those whom they are commanded to hate and wage war upon, or at the very least, disavow and be clean of?

“Straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel” has long been a sure sign of hypocrisy. All Muslims who freely migrate to the West must understand that they can’t have it both ways — that they can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They must choose between either strictly upholding the laws and customs of 7th-century Arabia (in which case they should remain in their “sharia friendly” countries of origin) or, if prosperity and comfort is their first choice, let them relocate to the West, but prepare to assimilate — that is, compromise — to some degree. It’s a simple question of priorities. National Review

Perhaps the greatest proof that the old king was being insincere is the fact that, in his ostensibly “multi-culti” speech, polytheists are conspicuously left out. Abdullah continuously stressed that this dialogue is to be only with “our brothers in all religions which I mentioned, the Torah [Jews] and the Gospels [Christians].” If the Saudi king was honestly trying to promote religious tolerance around the world, why weren’t polytheists invited to the talks? Specifically, why weren’t Hindus invited, who also have a long and often bloody history with Islam, including territorial disputes (e.g., Kashmir) that continue to this day?

The theological reason is that polytheists (“al-mushrikun”) are held in an even worse position than Christians and Jews (whom the Koran refers alternatively to as “people of the Book,” but in the latter chapters and verses — which take precedence, according to most systems of Islamic jurisprudence — as “infidels” who must be fought in perpetuity). So while Abdullah’s “brothers,” Jews and Christians, can in fact keep their religion (once subdued and made to live according to second-class, “dhimmi” status), polytheists must either convert, or die.

It is impossible to see the Saudi king’s motives in this monotheistic-faith ecumenism as completely sincere. His “impassioned plea for dialogue” is certainly worthy of support. However, the starting point of that discussion must be the Muslim world’s treatment of the non-Muslims in their midst. Once Saudi Arabia affords basic human rights to Christians and Jews — not to mention Saudi citizens who wish to convert — then dialogue over secondary matters can ensue. Until then, the Saudis have no place at the negotiation table. National Review

Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about the West from radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense of the terrorists. But the Middle Eastern mainstream—diplomats, intellectuals, and journalists—has also bombarded the American public with an array of unflattering images and texts, suggesting that the extremists’ anti-Americanism may not be an eccentricity of the ignorant but rather a representative slice of the views of millions. For example, Egyptian Nobel Prize–winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly announced from his Cairo home that America’s bombing of the Taliban was “just as despicable a crime” as the September 11 attacks—as if the terrorists’ unprovoked mass murder of civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes against enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to answer back their Middle Eastern critics for fear of charges of “Islamophobia” or “Arab smearing,” have let such accusations go largely unchecked.

Two striking themes—one overt, one implied—characterize most Arab invective: first, there is some sort of equivalence—political, cultural, and military—between the West and the Muslim world; and second, America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance.

Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins, or history of democracy, a word that, along with its family (“constitution,” “freedom,” and “citizen”), has no history in the Arab vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language other than Greek and Latin and their modern European offspring. Consensual government is not the norm of human politics but a rare and precious idea, not imposed or bequeathed but usually purchased with the blood of heroes and patriots, whether in classical Athens, revolutionary America, or more recently in Eastern Europe. Democracy’s lifeblood is secularism and religious tolerance, coupled with free speech and economic liberty.

Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are better than tyranny, surely; but they do not make consensual government. Nor do the Palestinian parliament and advisory bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies is elected by an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall, impeach, or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even to speak openly to journalists about the failings of their own government. Plato remarked of such superficial government-by-deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural but is not the same as the formal machinery of democratic government.

Our own cultural elites, either out of timidity or sometimes ignorance of the uniqueness of our own political institutions, seldom make such distinctions. But the differences are critical, because they lie unnoticed at the heart of the crisis in the Muslim world, and they explain our own tenuous relations with the regimes in the Gulf and the Middle East. Israel does not really know to what degree the Palestinian authorities have a real constituency, because the people of the West Bank themselves do not know either—inasmuch as they cannot debate one another on domestic television or campaign on the streets for alternate policies. Mr. Arafat assumed power by Western fiat; when he finally was allowed to hold real and periodic elections in his homeland, he simply perpetuated autocracy—as corrupt as it is brutal.

By the same token, we are surprised at the duplicity of the Gulf States in defusing internal dissent by redirecting it against Americans, forgetting that such is the way of all dictators, who, should they lose office, do not face the golden years of Jimmy Carter’s busy house-building or Bill Clinton’s self-absorbed angst. Either they dodge the mob’s bullets or scurry to a fortified compound on the French coast a day ahead of the posse. The royal family of Saudi Arabia cannot act out of principle because no principle other than force put and keeps them in power. All the official jets, snazzy embassies, and expensive press agents cannot hide that these illegitimate rulers are not in the political sense Western at all.

How sad that intellectuals of the Arab world—themselves only given freedom when they emigrate to the United States or Europe—profess support for democratic reform from Berkeley or Cambridge but secretly fear that, back home, truly free elections would usher in folk like the Iranian imams, who, in the manner of the Nazis in 1933, would thereupon destroy the very machinery that elected them. The fact is that democracy does not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon—the formal icing on a preexisting cake of egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and constant self-criticism. The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men and women insist upon the latter—and therein demolish the antidemocratic and medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian traditionalism, and Islamic fundamentalism.

How much easier for non-voters of the Arab world to vent frustration at the West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a democratic America, Israel, and Europe have conspired to prevent Muslims from adopting the Western invention of democracy! Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and kept from the mujaheddin. Islam is welcome to it, with the blessing and subsidy of the West. Yes, we must promote democracy abroad in the Muslim world; but only they, not we, can ensure its success.

The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its failure to grasp the nature of Western success, which springs neither from luck nor resources, genes nor geography. Like third-world Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for their own self-inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism, and racism—anything other than the absence of real markets and a free society—the Islamic intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim world’s inferiority vis-`a-vis the West, but it then seeks to fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the courage to say that they are poor because their populations are nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free, that their economies are not open, and that their fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression, and cultural exchange.

Tragically, the immediate prospects for improvement are dismal, inasmuch as the war against terrorism has further isolated the Middle East. Travel, foreign education, and academic exchanges—the only sources of future hope for the Arab world—have screeched to a halt. All the conferences in Cairo about Western bias and media distortion cannot hide this self-inflicted catastrophe—and the growing ostracism and suspicion of Middle Easterners in the West.

But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth. Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal, the fertility of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys, invaluable geopolitical locations, and a host of other natural advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building permit in Cairo; when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad; and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic studies than in medicine or engineering?

To tackle illiteracy, gratuitous state-sanctioned killing, and the economic sclerosis that comes from corruption and state control would require the courage and self-examination of Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, even of China. Instead, wedded to the old bromides that the West causes their misery, that fundamentalist Islam and crackpot mullahs have had no role in their disasters, that the subjugation of women is a “different” rather than a foul (and economically foolish) custom, Muslim intellectuals have railed these past few months about the creation of Israel half a century ago, and they have sat either silent or amused while the mob in their streets chants in praise of a mass murderer. Meanwhile millions of Muslims tragically stay sick and hungry in silence.

Has the Muslim world gone mad in its threats and ultimatums? Throughout this war, Muslims have saturated us with overt and with insidious warnings. If America retaliated to the mass murder of its citizens, the Arab world would turn on us; if we bombed during Ramadan, we would incur lasting hatred; if we continued in our mission to avenge our dead, not an American would be safe in the Middle East. More disturbing even than the screaming street demonstrations have been the polite admonitions of corrupt grandees like Crown Prince Abdallah of Saudi Arabia or editor Abdul Rahman al Rashed of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat. Don’t they see the impotence and absurdity of their veiled threats, backed neither by military force nor cultural dynamism? Don’t they realize that nothing is more fatal to the security of a state than the divide between what it threatens and what it can deliver?

There is an abyss between such rhetoric and the world we actually live in, an abyss called power. Out of politeness, we needn’t crow over the relative military capability of 1 billion Muslims and 300 million Americans; but we should remember that the lethal, 2,500-year Western way of war is the reflection of very different ideas about personal freedom, civic militarism, individuality on the battlefield, military technology, logistics, decisive battle, group discipline, civilian audit, and the dissemination and proliferation of knowledge.

Values and traditions—not guns, germs, and steel—explain why a tiny Greece of 50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times larger; why Rome, not Carthage, created world government; why Cortés was in Tenochtitl`an, and Montezuma not in Barcelona; why gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and ever evolving weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western power in the medieval ages, a Europe divided by religion and fragmented into feudal states could still send thousands of thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad in Scotland or Brittany. Much is made of 500 years of Ottoman dominance over a feuding Orthodox, Christian, and Protestant West; but the sultans were powerful largely to the degree that they crafted alliances with a distrustful France and the warring Italian city-states, copied the Arsenal at Venice, turned out replicas of Italian and German cannon, and moved their capital to European Constantinople. Moreover, their “dominance” amounted only to a rough naval parity with the West on the old Roman Mediterranean; they never came close to the conquest of the heart of Western Europe.

Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas—and not merely because of their Atlantic ports or ocean ships but rather because of their long-standing attitudes and traditions about scientific inquiry, secular thought, free markets, and individual ingenuity and spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on morality—Pizarro’s record in Peru makes as grim reading as the Germans’ in central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the amoral dynamism that fuels ships and soldiers.

We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores, or better weather, but because of our culture. When it comes to war, 1 billion people and the world’s oil are not nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the U.S. House of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O’Riley, and the G.I. Bill. Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War, lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest of the world copies its weapons, uniforms, and military organization from us, not vice versa.

Many Middle Easterners have performed a great media charade throughout this war. They publish newspapers and televise the news, and thereby give the appearance of being modern and Western. But their reporters and anchormen are by no means journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry. Whereas CNN makes a point of talking to the victims of collateral damage in Kabul, al-Jazeera would never interview the mothers of Israeli teenagers blown apart by Palestinian bombs. Nor does any Egyptian or Syrian television station welcome freewheeling debates or Meet the Press–style talk shows permitting criticism of the government or the national religion. Instead, they quibble over their own degrees of anti-Americanism and obfuscate the internal contradictions of Islam. The chief dailies in Algiers, Teheran, and Kuwait City look like Pravda of old. The entire Islamic media is a simulacrum of the West, lacking the life-giving spirit of debate and self-criticism.

As a result, when Americans see a cavalcade of talking Middle Eastern heads nod and blurt out the party line—that Israel is evil, that the United States is naïve and misled, that Muslims are victims, that the West may soon have to reckon with Islamic anger—they assume the talk is orchestrated and therefore worth listening to only for what it teaches about how authoritarian governments can coerce and corrupt journalists and intellectuals.

A novelist who writes whatever he pleases anywhere in the Muslim world is more likely to receive a fatwa and a mob at his courtyard than a prize for literary courage, as Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie have learned. No wonder a code of silence pervades the Islamic world. No wonder, too, that Islam is far more ignorant of us than we of it. And no wonder that the Muslims haven’t a clue that, while their current furor is scripted, whipped up, and mercurial, ours is far deeper and more lasting.

Every Western intellectual knows Edward Said’s much-hyped theory of “Orientalism,” a purely mythical construct of how Western bias has misunderstood and distorted the Eastern “Other.” In truth, the real problem is “Westernism”—the fatally erroneous idea in the Middle East that its propaganda-spewing Potemkin television stations give it a genuine understanding of the nature of America, an understanding Middle Easterners believe is deepened by the presence in their midst of a few McDonald’s franchises and hired U.S. public-relations firms. That error—which mistakes ignorance for insight—helps explain why Usama bin Ladin so grossly miscalculated the devastating magnitude of our response to September 11. In reality, the most parochial American knows more about the repressive nature of the Gulf States than the most sophisticated and well-traveled sheikh understands about the cultural underpinnings of this country, including the freedom of speech and inquiry that is missing in the Islamic press.

Millions in the Middle East are obsessed with Israel, whether they live in sight of Tel Aviv or thousands of miles away. Their fury doesn’t spring solely from genuine dismay over the hundreds of Muslims Israel has killed on the West Bank; after all, Saddam Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands of Shiites, Kurds, and Iranians, while few in Cairo or Damascus said a word. Syria’s Assad liquidated perhaps 20,000 in sight of Israel, without a single demonstration in any Arab capital. The murder of some 100,000 Muslims in Algeria and 40,000 in Chechnya in the last decade provoked few intellectuals in the Middle East to call for a pan-Islamic protest. Clearly, the anger derives not from the tragic tally of the fallen but from Islamic rage that Israelis have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly, decisively, at will, and without modesty.

If Israel were not so successful, free, and haughty—if it were beleaguered and tottering on the verge of ruin—perhaps it would be tolerated. But in a sea of totalitarianism and government-induced poverty, a relatively successful economy and a stable culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds us, is a powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.

If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn’t about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation’s culture—not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves—that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business—not the Jews—makes it poor, sick, and weak.

Throughout the Muslim world, myth and ignorance surround U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. Yes, we give Israel aid, but less than the combined billions that go to the Palestinians and to Egypt, Jordan, and other Muslim countries. And it is one thing to subsidize a democratic and constitutional (if cantankerous) ally but quite another to pay for slander from theocratic or autocratic enemies. Though Israel has its fair share of fundamentalists and fanatics, the country is not the creation of clerics or strongmen but of European émigrés, who committed Israel from the start to democracy, free speech, and abundant self-critique.

Far from egging on Israel, the United States actually restrains the Israeli military, whose organization and discipline, along with the sophisticated Israeli arms industry, make it quite capable of annihilating nearly all its bellicose neighbors without American aid. Should the United States withdraw from active participation in the Middle East and let the contestants settle their differences on the battlefield, Israel, not the Arab world, would win. The military record of four previous conflicts does not lie. Arafat should remember who saved him in Lebanon; it was no power in the Middle East that brokered his exodus and parted the waves of Israeli planes and tanks for his safe passage to the desert.

The Muslim world suffers from political amnesia, we now have learned, and so has forgotten not only Arafat’s resurrection but also American help to beleaguered Afghanis, terrified Kuwaitis, helpless Kurds and Shiites, starving Somalis, and defenseless Bosnians—direct intervention that has cost the United States much more treasure and lives than mere economic aid for Israel ever did. They forget; but we remember the Palestinians cheering in Nablus hours after thousands of our innocents were incinerated in New York, the hagiographic posters of a mass murderer in the streets of Muslim capitals, and the smug remonstrations of Saudi prince Alwaleed to Mayor Giuliani at Ground Zero.

Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti Westernized elites find psychological comfort in their people’s anti-American rhetoric, not out of real grievance but perhaps as reassurance that their own appetite for all things Western doesn’t constitute rejection of their medieval religion or their thirteenth-century caliphate. Their apologists in the United States dissemble when they argue that these Gulf sheikhs are forced to master a doublespeak for foreign consumption, or that they are better than the frightening alternative, or that they are victims of unfair American anger that is ignorant of Wahhabi custom. In their present relationship with the terrorists, these old-fashioned autocrats are neutrals only in the sense that they now play the cagier role of Franco’s Spain to Hitler’s Germany. They aid and abet our enemies, but never overtly. If the United States prevails, the Saudis can proclaim that they were always with us; should we lose a shooting war with the terrorists, the princes can swear that their prior neutrality really constituted allegiance to radical Islam all along.

In matters of East-West relations, immigration has always been a one-way phenomenon. Thousands flocked to Athens and Rome; few left for Parthia or Numidia unless to colonize or exploit. People sneak into South, not North, Korea—in the same manner that few from Hong Kong once braved gunfire to reach Peking (unless to invest and profit). Few Israeli laborers are going to the West Bank to seek construction jobs. In this vein is the Muslim world’s longing for the very soil of America. Even in the crucible of war, we have discovered that our worst critics love us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the abstract.

For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported enemies wish to visit, study, or (better yet) live in the United States—and this is true not just of Westernized professors or globe-trotting tycoons but of hijackers, terrorists, the children of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs, and the spoiled teenage brats of our Gulf critics. The terrorists visited lap dancers, took out frequent-flier miles, spent hours on the Internet, had cell phones strapped to their hips, and hobnobbed in Las Vegas—parasitic on a culture not their own, fascinated with toys they could not make, and always ashamed that their lusts grew more than they could be satisfied. Until September 11, their ilk had been like fleas on a lazy, plump dog, gnashing their tiny proboscises to gain bloody nourishment or inflict small welts on a distracted host who found them not worth the scratch.

This dual loathing and attraction for things Western is characteristic of the highest echelon of the terrorists themselves, often Western-educated, English-speaking, and hardly poor. Emblematic is the evil genius of al-Qaida, the sinister Dr. al-Zawahiri: he grew up in Cairo affluence, his family enmeshed in all the Westernized institutions of Egypt.

Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia maddening, especially in its inability to fathom that all the things that Muslim visitors profess to hate—equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance, egalitarianism, free speech, and secular rationalism—are precisely what give us the material things that they want in the first place. CDs and sexy bare midriffs are the fruits of a society that values freedom, unchecked inquiry, and individual expression more than the dictates of state or church; wild freedom and wild materialism are part of the American character. So bewildered Americans now ask themselves: Why do so many of these anti-Americans, who profess hatred of the West and reverence for the purity of an energized Islam or a fiery Palestine, enroll in Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in Pakistan or military academies in Iraq?

The embarrassing answer would explain nearly everything, from bin Ladin to the intifada. Dads and moms who watch al-Jazeera and scream in the street at the Great Satan really would prefer that their children have dollars, an annual CAT scan, a good lawyer, air conditioning, and Levis in American hell than be without toilet paper, suffer from intestinal parasites, deal with the secret police, and squint with uncorrected vision in the Islamic paradise of Cairo, Teheran, and Gaza. Such a fundamental and intolerable paradox in the very core of a man’s heart—multiplied millions of times over—is not a healthy thing either for them or for us, as we have learned since September 11.

Most Americans recognize and honor the past achievements of Islamic civilization and the contribution of Middle-Eastern immigrants to the United States and Europe, as well as the traditional hospitality shown visitors to the Muslim world. And so we have long shown patience with those who hate us, and more curiosity than real anger.

But that was then, and this is now. A two-kiloton explosion that incinerated thousands of our citizens—planned by Middle Easterners with the indirect financial support of purportedly allied governments, the applause of millions, and the snickering and smiles of millions more—has had an effect that grows not wanes.

So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their spokesmen abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the edifice of your anti-Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers from within to even more difficult questions without. Do not blame others for problems that are largely self-created or seek solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home. Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about the deaths of thousands of Americans and your relationship with the United States. America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now you are on the verge of turning its people—who create, not follow, government—into an enemy: a very angry and powerful enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come. City Journal

Luckily, the doctors agreed: “His return to Libya would, we feel, not only benefit the patient, but would also be advantageous for the family. Mr Megrahi has several children of varying age. If he was returned home, his family could become more involved in his health-care needs. We would anticipate this would benefit them, not only in the short-term, but also when considering any potential long-term psychological impact.” Who knew, when Sigmund Freud was lounging around the Berggasse 19 in his smoking jacket, trying to figure out what women wanted and when, exactly, a cigar was only a cigar, that his work would have this kind of effect on Western society?

Indeed, it is a great day, not just for Libya but also for the entire Muslim world, to which our “Christian” president (who somehow can’t seem to find a church in Washington, D.C.) recently sent a televised Ramadan greeting “on behalf of the American people, including Muslim communities in all 50 states.” Yes, His Serene Highness Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, has just nobly urged us to “seek common ground” with Muslims everywhere, including expanding “education exchange programs.”

Now, some of you right-wing lunatics may think that the education exchange programs that brought us Mohammed Atta and his band of merry men were plenty, thank you very much, and that BO2’s call for “increased cooperation in science and technology” hopefully means that next time they will actually land the airplanes we invented and manufactured, instead of crashing them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But surely not even the most paranoid conspiracy theorist among you can quibble with the president’s final wish to Muslims around the world: “May God’s peace be upon you.” And this just eight years since more than 3,000 Americans died in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania after the man-caused disasters of 9/11. Is this a great country or what?

I have to admit, at first I was a little uneasy at this blatant mixing of church and state, until I remembered that there’s no proscription against mixing mosque and state in the Constitution. As the former Barry Soetoro reminded us all in Cairo, Muslims have been part of America since Day One — heck, they practically invented the place. “It was Islam . . . that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” Obama said in June. “I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. . . . And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.” I never knew that Jefferson was one of the Faithful; not only that but, as per Thomas Cahill’s book, I thought it was the Irish who saved civilization. You learn something new from the Dear Leader and Teacher every day.

Anyway, all of this talk about North Africa and Islam got me thinking about General Gordon and one of my great guilty-pleasure movies, Khartoum (1966). You remember — Chuck Heston as General Gordon, ramrod-straight and sporting a fez, and a blackfaced Sir Larry as the Mahdi, smacking his ruby lips and rolling his eyes, as if he were in some Islamic road version of Othello.

Back in 1885, Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, a Scotsman, had the effrontery to mount a spirited defense of Khartoum and its trapped Egyptian garrison against one Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Allah, better known as “the Mahdi” (the “Expected One”). Sent to the Sudan to put down the Arab raiders who were enslaving real African Americans from Africa, Gordon found himself defending the lives of the Ottoman Turkish troops of the Khedive of Egypt, who were trapped in Khartoum and sure to suffer horrible deaths at the hands of the Mahdi and his army, who viewed them as degenerate apostates. Instead of submitting peacefully in a spirit of educational exchange and technological cooperation, Gordon, a general in the Royal Engineers who had served with distinction in the Crimea and in China (hence the nickname), decided to fight. Back then, troglodytic Scotsmen were stereotypically stubborn; even worse, Gordon was also a Christian evangelist and religious fanatic, which made him exactly the same as the Mahdi, fundamentalist-wise. (Lytton Strachey had a good deal of mocking fun with Gordon’s shade in Eminent Victorians.)

Defying calls from the British government for his return, Gordon dug in, holding out for nine months during a terrible siege that ended when the Mahdi’s forces finally overran the city. Gordon was struck down by a spear; his head was hacked off, presented to the Mahdi, and later stuck up in a tree so that children could throw rocks at it. Teachable moment: Never fight back, because you’re only going to die anyway.

The jingoistic Brit public, however, became unaccountably enraged and demanded barbaric Christian vengeance for Gordon Pasha. So when General Kitchener arrived in the Sudan on a punitive mission 111 years ago next month and engaged the Mahdi’s forces at Omdurman — the Mahdi himself having died in the interim — he killed more than 10,000 dervishes, wounded another 13,000, and took 5,000 prisoners. His own losses: 48 men killed and fewer than 400 wounded. What kind of a proportionate, measured response was that? Not quite finished, Kitchener destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb, dug up the body, threw the bones into the Nile, and kept the skull for himself as a drinking cup. Oh, there was a fuss when Queen Victoria found out about Kitchener’s trophy, and so the head was hastily popped back into a Muslim cemetery, but oddly enough, Omdurman was the end of the insurgency in the Sudan.

Luckily, today’s British government, under another Scotsman, Gordon Brown, is no longer willing to sacrifice its national principles in exchange for things like ending an insurrection that would have claimed thousands more lives and establishing peace in a whole region for a century. John Bull is properly ashamed of his old empire, ashamed of subjects like Gordon and Burton and Speke and Stanley, ashamed of his very existence. And so he slowly commits suicide as millions around the world cheer — not just in Libya but closer to Whitehall, in Finsbury Park.

What I don’t understand is how a movie like Khartoum ever got made. The imperialists are the “good guys,” the dark-skinned freedom fighters are the “bad guys,” and somehow we’re supposed to feel bad when Gordon gets what’s coming to him. I mean, can you imagine green-lighting a script that ends with a voiceover proclaiming:

The relief came two days late. Two days. And for 15 years the Sudanese paid the price with pestilence and famine, the British with shame and war. Within months after Gordon died, the Mahdi died. Why, we shall never know. Gordon rests in his beloved Sudan. We cannot tell how long his memory will live. But there is this: A world with no room for the Gordons is a world that will return to the sands.

Personally, I like sand. See you at the beach!

— David Kahane can’t understand how a movie like Zulu (1964) got made either. You can explain it to him via e-mail at kahanenro@gmail.com, or via Facebook (look for the Soviet-era poster). But hurry — he’s off to Martha’s Vineyard to work on Rules for Radical Conservatives, coming from Ballantine Books in July 2010.

Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law, enacted by President General Zia-ul-Haq in1986 and later amended by the parliament in 2004, is one of the most stringent laws. The penalty includes a mandatory death sentence for defaming Prophet Mohammad and life imprisonment for desecrating the Holy Quran. According to official reports, to date, over 500 people have been charged for breaching the Blasphemy Law. Dawn.com traces the history of some of these cases that have been highlighted in the media since 1990.

2009 – August 05: An angry mob attacked the house of an elderly woman in District Sanghar, Sindh, accusing her of desecrating the Holy Quran. A case has not yet been registered but the District Bar Association assured the mob that if the woman – identified as Akhtari Malkani – is found guilty, she will be charged under the Blasphemy Law.

2009 – August 01: Seven people were burnt alive and 18 others injured in Gojra, District Toba Tek Singh in Punjab after fresh violence erupted in the town over the alleged desecration of the Holy Quran three days ago. More than 50 houses were set on fire.

2009 – July 31: A mob burnt 75 houses of members of the Christian community over the alleged desecration of the Holy Quran in the village Azafi Abadi at Gojra-Faisalabad Road. Seventy-five houses and two churches were burnt by the residents of a neighbouring village.

2009 – February: Five Ahmadis in Punjab’s Layyah district were arrested on charges of writing blasphemous remarks in the toilets of Kot Sultan’s Gulzar-e-Madina mosque. No evidence or witness was presented. They were just detained on a ‘presumption of guilt,’ stated the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

2009 – January 28: The Punjab police arrested a labourer and four students for blasphemy, all of whom were Ahmadis. They were accused of writing the name of Prophet Mohammed on the wall of a toilet in a Sunni mosque. Investigations into the case revealed that the accusation was baseless.

2008 – May: The Punjab police jailed Robin Sardar, a Christian physician, upon an accusation of blasphemy from a Muslim street-vendor who wanted to set up his shop in front of Sardar's clinic.

2008 – April 08: Jagdesh Kumar, a 27 year old Hindu worker, was beaten to death by fellow Muslim workers in his factory in Karachi on the charge of blasphemy. The incident took place in the presence of policemen. Some reports suggested that the victim was in love with a Muslim girl that angered the Muslim workers, who decided to teach him a lesson.

2008 – March 06: An elderly man, Altaf Hussain, was arrested for desecrating the Holy Quran in Kabir wala Town of Khanewal District in Punjab. The spokesman for the Ahmadiya community countered that the charges against the 80-year-old were false.

2007 – October 28: The police arrested Muhammad Imran of Faisalabad for allegedly setting the Holy Quran on fire. He was kept in a torture cell for three days and later in solitary confinement without anyone attending to his injuries. He was released in April 2009.

2007 – May 17: The nursing school at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad was shut down and seven Christian staff members suspended after female students of Jamia Hafsa protested over allegations that blasphemy had been committed at the school. Rumours spread that verses from the Quran posted on a wall had been defaced. School authorities denied all such claims.

2007 – April 13: Sattar Masih, a 29-year-old worker at a water pumping station in Kotri city of Sindh, was allegedly attacked by Muslim extremists for uttering blasphemous remarks. An imam of a local mosque, Maulvi Umer, announced some written papers against Prophet Mohammad were found outside the mosque authored by Sattar. Muslim worshipers attacked Masih's house and tried to kill him but the police arrived before that could happen. Masih was later arrested. Later, in January 2009, the accusation was declared baseless.

2007 – April 01: A case against Salamat Masih, 45, and four other Christians was filed for the desecration of Islamic posters and stickers containing the name of Allah, Prophet Mohammad and other Islamic verses in the Toba Tek Singh (Punjab) police station. The SHO allegedly converted the report into an FIR within 20 minutes without initiating any investigation. Subsequently, 80 young Muslims from the neighbourhood ransacked the houses of Christians in the colony.

2007 – January 22: Martha Bibi, a Christian woman from Kot Nanak Singh, District Kasur, was accused of making derogatory remarks about Prophet Muhammad and defaming his sacred name.

2006 – September 21: Shahid Masih, 17, was jailed on suspicion of ripping book pages containing Quranic verses in Punjab.

2006 – June 03: Christians and Muslims in Pakistan condemned Dan Brown's novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ as blasphemous. The then Minister for Culture, Ghulam Jamal, banned the promotion of the movie.

2006 – May 24: A Christian, Qamar David, was arrested from Karachi for allegedly sending blasphemous messages to some Muslims via cell phone as revenge for attacks against churches by Muslims in Sukkur, Sindh, and Sangla Hill, Punjab, earlier that year.

2005 – December 23: Five members of the Mehdi Foundation International were arrested in Wapda Town, Lahore, for putting up posters of their leader Riaz Gohar Shahi showing him as ‘Imam Mehdi’. The Anti-Terrorism Court sentenced each to five years of imprisonment under 295-A of PPC. Their prisoners’ records posted outside the cell falsely indicate that they had been sentenced under 295-C – the Blasphemy Law.

2005 – November 12: After receiving frequent death threats, Parvez Aslam Chaudhry, a lawyer who defended many accused for blasphemy, was allegedly charged with flinging a burning matchstick on an Islamic school in the Sangla Hill stadium in Punjab which caught fire. Chaudhry was also physically assaulted outside Lahore High Court.

2005 – August 11: Judge Arshad Noor Khan of the Anti-Terrorist Court found Younus Shaikh guilty of defiling a copy of the Quran, and propagating religious hatred among society. Shaikh was convicted because he wrote a book ‘Shaitan Maulvi’ (Satanic Cleric) in which he mentioned stoning to death as a punishment for adultery was not mentioned in the Quran. The judge imposed a fine of Rs100, 000 rupees and sentenced him to lifetime imprisonment.

2003 - November 20: Anwar Masih, a Christian labourer and resident of Shahdara, Lahore, was charged for insulting the Prophet in front of his neighbour. Masih had converted from Islam to Christianity. He was acquitted by the Lahore High Court in December 2004. Later, in August 2007, he lost his job in a factory when his employer was threatened for employing a ‘blasphemer’. Masih went into hiding.

2003 – July 09: A journalist in NWFP was sentenced to life imprisonment for blasphemy. Munawar Mohsin, a sub-editor at the Frontier Post newspaper, was convicted of publishing a blasphemous letter in the editorial section that led to violent protests across the country.

2002 – July 18: Additional sessions judge in Lahore imposed death penalty and a fine of Rs500,000 on Anwar Kenneth, a former officer of the Fisheries Department, in a blasphemy case registered with the Gawalmandi police. He was arrested on June 15, 2001, while distributing a pamphlet (Gospel of Jesus).

2002 – June 11: A 55-year-old Muslim cleric, Mohammed Yousaf Ali, convicted of blasphemy was shot dead in the Lahore prison. The murderer was another prisoner, Tariq Mota, a member the banned Sunni militant group Sipah-e-Sahaba. Ali had been sentenced to death for blasphemy on August 5, 2000, in a case filed by another militant group who disapproved of his religious views. Ali had been vocal in condemning religious extremism.

2000 – October: Pakistani authorities charged Younus Shaikh, a teacher at a medical college in Islamabad, with blasphemy on account of remarks that students claimed he made during a lecture. The students alleged that Shaikh had said Prophet Mohammed’s parents were non-Muslims because they died before Islam existed. A judge ordered that Shaikh pay a fine of Rs100,000, and be hanged. In November 2003 he was acquitted after which he left Pakistan.

1998 – May 6: Roman Catholic Bishop John Joseph of Pakistan shot himself in the Sahiwal courthouse to highlight the case of Ayub Masih, a Christian sentenced to death for allegedly uttering blasphemous remarks against Prophet Muhammad. The death of the 66-year-old led to protests by Christians. Subsequently, the Lahore High Court ordered a stay of execution for Masih. His fate remains undecided.

1997 – October 19: Judge Arif Iqbal Hussain Bhatti was assassinated in his Lahore office after acquitting two people who were accused of blasphemy.

1996 – October 14: Ayub Masih, a Pakistani Christian bricklayer, was arrested for violation of Section 295-C. The complaint was filed by Masih’s neighbour who claimed that Masih had invited them to accept Christianity and recommended that they read Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. He later made legal history when his appeal against the death penalty was turned down by the High Court in 2002.

1995 – July: Catherine Shaheen, a teacher in Lahore, Punjab, was denied her salary on grounds of blasphemy. Since then she has been in hiding because of threats against her life made by some fundamentalists.

1993 – November 21: Riaz Ahmad, his son, and two nephews from the Ahmadi community were arrested in Mianwali District for their blasphemous remarks. The rivalry over Ahmad's position as village headman was the real motivation for the complaint against him. The Sessions Court rejected the bail applications of the accused, however, the Supreme Court granted him bail in December 1997.

1993 – May: Twelve-year-old Salamat Masih, Manzoor Masih, 37, and Rehmat Masih, 42, were charged with writing derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed on the wall of a mosque in Ratta Dhotran village of district Gujranwala - where they lived. All the three were in fact illiterate and did not know how to write.

1993 – February: Anwar Masih, a Christian from Samundri in Punjab, went to jail upon a Muslim shopkeeper's allegation that, during an argument over money, Masih had insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

1992 – November: Gul Masih, a Christian, was sentenced to death after having remarked to his Muslim neighbour in Punjab that he had read that ‘Prophet Mohammed had 11 wives, including a minor.’

1992 – Bantu Masih, 80, and Mukhtar Masih, 50, were arrested on the allegation of committing blasphemy. Both died in the Lahore police station. Bantu Masih was stabbed eight times by a fundamentalist in the presence of policemen. He later succumbed to his injuries, whereas Mukhtar Masih was tortured to death in police custody.

1992 – January 06: Christian teacher Naimat Ahmar, 43, was butchered by a young member of a militant religious group, Farooq Ahmad, on the office premises of the District Education Officer in Faisalabad while on duty. Ahmad killed him because the deceased had reportedly used highly insulting remarks against Islam and Prophet Mohammed and by killing a blasphemer he had won his way into heaven. No case of blasphemy was registered against him nor was he tried by any court. Ahmar left behind a widow and four children.

1991 – December 10: Gul Masih of Faisalabad was charged for using sacrilegious language about the Prophet and his wives. The complainant, Sajjad Hussain, had a quarrel with him over repair of a street water tap. Masih was sentenced to death by the Sessions Court, Sargodha, on November 02, 1992. Years later he was acquitted but continued to receive death threats. He is now in Germany on asylum.

1991 – October 08: Chand Barkat, 28, a bangle stall holder in Karachi, was charged with blasphemy by another bangle vendor, Arif Hussain, because of professional jealousy. Hussain decided to teach Barkat a lesson by accusing him of using derogatory language against Prophet Mohammed and his mother. Barkat was charged under section 295-C of PPC, however, he was acquitted by the Sessions Court for want of evidence.

1990 – December 07: Tahir Iqbal, a Christian convert from Islam and resident of Lahore, was accused of abusing Prophet Mohammad at the time of Azaan and imparting anti-Islamic education to children during tuitions. The sessions judge in July 1991 turned down his bail application after he learnt that Iqbal had converted to Christianity, which, he stated, was a cognisable offence. Later on July 21, 1992, before Iqbal’s defence lawyer could appear in court, he was poisoned in police custody. Dawn

Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law, enacted by President General Zia-ul-Haq in1986 and later amended by the parliament in 2004, is one of the most stringent laws. The penalty includes a mandatory death sentence for defaming Prophet Mohammad and life imprisonment for desecrating the Holy Quran. According to official reports, to date, over 500 people have been charged for breaching the Blasphemy Law. Dawn.com traces the history of some of these cases that have been highlighted in the media since 1990.

2009 – August 05: An angry mob attacked the house of an elderly woman in District Sanghar, Sindh, accusing her of desecrating the Holy Quran. A case has not yet been registered but the District Bar Association assured the mob that if the woman – identified as Akhtari Malkani – is found guilty, she will be charged under the Blasphemy Law.

2009 – August 01: Seven people were burnt alive and 18 others injured in Gojra, District Toba Tek Singh in Punjab after fresh violence erupted in the town over the alleged desecration of the Holy Quran three days ago. More than 50 houses were set on fire.

2009 – July 31: A mob burnt 75 houses of members of the Christian community over the alleged desecration of the Holy Quran in the village Azafi Abadi at Gojra-Faisalabad Road. Seventy-five houses and two churches were burnt by the residents of a neighbouring village.

2009 – February: Five Ahmadis in Punjab’s Layyah district were arrested on charges of writing blasphemous remarks in the toilets of Kot Sultan’s Gulzar-e-Madina mosque. No evidence or witness was presented. They were just detained on a ‘presumption of guilt,’ stated the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

2009 – January 28: The Punjab police arrested a labourer and four students for blasphemy, all of whom were Ahmadis. They were accused of writing the name of Prophet Mohammed on the wall of a toilet in a Sunni mosque. Investigations into the case revealed that the accusation was baseless.

2008 – May: The Punjab police jailed Robin Sardar, a Christian physician, upon an accusation of blasphemy from a Muslim street-vendor who wanted to set up his shop in front of Sardar's clinic.

2008 – April 08: Jagdesh Kumar, a 27 year old Hindu worker, was beaten to death by fellow Muslim workers in his factory in Karachi on the charge of blasphemy. The incident took place in the presence of policemen. Some reports suggested that the victim was in love with a Muslim girl that angered the Muslim workers, who decided to teach him a lesson.

2008 – March 06: An elderly man, Altaf Hussain, was arrested for desecrating the Holy Quran in Kabir wala Town of Khanewal District in Punjab. The spokesman for the Ahmadiya community countered that the charges against the 80-year-old were false.

2007 – October 28: The police arrested Muhammad Imran of Faisalabad for allegedly setting the Holy Quran on fire. He was kept in a torture cell for three days and later in solitary confinement without anyone attending to his injuries. He was released in April 2009.

2007 – May 17: The nursing school at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad was shut down and seven Christian staff members suspended after female students of Jamia Hafsa protested over allegations that blasphemy had been committed at the school. Rumours spread that verses from the Quran posted on a wall had been defaced. School authorities denied all such claims.

2007 – April 13: Sattar Masih, a 29-year-old worker at a water pumping station in Kotri city of Sindh, was allegedly attacked by Muslim extremists for uttering blasphemous remarks. An imam of a local mosque, Maulvi Umer, announced some written papers against Prophet Mohammad were found outside the mosque authored by Sattar. Muslim worshipers attacked Masih's house and tried to kill him but the police arrived before that could happen. Masih was later arrested. Later, in January 2009, the accusation was declared baseless.

2007 – April 01: A case against Salamat Masih, 45, and four other Christians was filed for the desecration of Islamic posters and stickers containing the name of Allah, Prophet Mohammad and other Islamic verses in the Toba Tek Singh (Punjab) police station. The SHO allegedly converted the report into an FIR within 20 minutes without initiating any investigation. Subsequently, 80 young Muslims from the neighbourhood ransacked the houses of Christians in the colony.

2007 – January 22: Martha Bibi, a Christian woman from Kot Nanak Singh, District Kasur, was accused of making derogatory remarks about Prophet Muhammad and defaming his sacred name.

2006 – September 21: Shahid Masih, 17, was jailed on suspicion of ripping book pages containing Quranic verses in Punjab.

2006 – June 03: Christians and Muslims in Pakistan condemned Dan Brown's novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’ as blasphemous. The then Minister for Culture, Ghulam Jamal, banned the promotion of the movie.

2006 – May 24: A Christian, Qamar David, was arrested from Karachi for allegedly sending blasphemous messages to some Muslims via cell phone as revenge for attacks against churches by Muslims in Sukkur, Sindh, and Sangla Hill, Punjab, earlier that year.

2005 – December 23: Five members of the Mehdi Foundation International were arrested in Wapda Town, Lahore, for putting up posters of their leader Riaz Gohar Shahi showing him as ‘Imam Mehdi’. The Anti-Terrorism Court sentenced each to five years of imprisonment under 295-A of PPC. Their prisoners’ records posted outside the cell falsely indicate that they had been sentenced under 295-C – the Blasphemy Law.

2005 – November 12: After receiving frequent death threats, Parvez Aslam Chaudhry, a lawyer who defended many accused for blasphemy, was allegedly charged with flinging a burning matchstick on an Islamic school in the Sangla Hill stadium in Punjab which caught fire. Chaudhry was also physically assaulted outside Lahore High Court.

2005 – August 11: Judge Arshad Noor Khan of the Anti-Terrorist Court found Younus Shaikh guilty of defiling a copy of the Quran, and propagating religious hatred among society. Shaikh was convicted because he wrote a book ‘Shaitan Maulvi’ (Satanic Cleric) in which he mentioned stoning to death as a punishment for adultery was not mentioned in the Quran. The judge imposed a fine of Rs100, 000 rupees and sentenced him to lifetime imprisonment.

2003 - November 20: Anwar Masih, a Christian labourer and resident of Shahdara, Lahore, was charged for insulting the Prophet in front of his neighbour. Masih had converted from Islam to Christianity. He was acquitted by the Lahore High Court in December 2004. Later, in August 2007, he lost his job in a factory when his employer was threatened for employing a ‘blasphemer’. Masih went into hiding.

2003 – July 09: A journalist in NWFP was sentenced to life imprisonment for blasphemy. Munawar Mohsin, a sub-editor at the Frontier Post newspaper, was convicted of publishing a blasphemous letter in the editorial section that led to violent protests across the country.

2002 – July 18: Additional sessions judge in Lahore imposed death penalty and a fine of Rs500,000 on Anwar Kenneth, a former officer of the Fisheries Department, in a blasphemy case registered with the Gawalmandi police. He was arrested on June 15, 2001, while distributing a pamphlet (Gospel of Jesus).

2002 – June 11: A 55-year-old Muslim cleric, Mohammed Yousaf Ali, convicted of blasphemy was shot dead in the Lahore prison. The murderer was another prisoner, Tariq Mota, a member the banned Sunni militant group Sipah-e-Sahaba. Ali had been sentenced to death for blasphemy on August 5, 2000, in a case filed by another militant group who disapproved of his religious views. Ali had been vocal in condemning religious extremism.

2000 – October: Pakistani authorities charged Younus Shaikh, a teacher at a medical college in Islamabad, with blasphemy on account of remarks that students claimed he made during a lecture. The students alleged that Shaikh had said Prophet Mohammed’s parents were non-Muslims because they died before Islam existed. A judge ordered that Shaikh pay a fine of Rs100,000, and be hanged. In November 2003 he was acquitted after which he left Pakistan.

1998 – May 6: Roman Catholic Bishop John Joseph of Pakistan shot himself in the Sahiwal courthouse to highlight the case of Ayub Masih, a Christian sentenced to death for allegedly uttering blasphemous remarks against Prophet Muhammad. The death of the 66-year-old led to protests by Christians. Subsequently, the Lahore High Court ordered a stay of execution for Masih. His fate remains undecided.

1997 – October 19: Judge Arif Iqbal Hussain Bhatti was assassinated in his Lahore office after acquitting two people who were accused of blasphemy.

1996 – October 14: Ayub Masih, a Pakistani Christian bricklayer, was arrested for violation of Section 295-C. The complaint was filed by Masih’s neighbour who claimed that Masih had invited them to accept Christianity and recommended that they read Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. He later made legal history when his appeal against the death penalty was turned down by the High Court in 2002.

1995 – July: Catherine Shaheen, a teacher in Lahore, Punjab, was denied her salary on grounds of blasphemy. Since then she has been in hiding because of threats against her life made by some fundamentalists.

1993 – November 21: Riaz Ahmad, his son, and two nephews from the Ahmadi community were arrested in Mianwali District for their blasphemous remarks. The rivalry over Ahmad's position as village headman was the real motivation for the complaint against him. The Sessions Court rejected the bail applications of the accused, however, the Supreme Court granted him bail in December 1997.

1993 – May: Twelve-year-old Salamat Masih, Manzoor Masih, 37, and Rehmat Masih, 42, were charged with writing derogatory remarks against Prophet Mohammed on the wall of a mosque in Ratta Dhotran village of district Gujranwala - where they lived. All the three were in fact illiterate and did not know how to write.

1993 – February: Anwar Masih, a Christian from Samundri in Punjab, went to jail upon a Muslim shopkeeper's allegation that, during an argument over money, Masih had insulted the Prophet Mohammed.

1992 – November: Gul Masih, a Christian, was sentenced to death after having remarked to his Muslim neighbour in Punjab that he had read that ‘Prophet Mohammed had 11 wives, including a minor.’

1992 – Bantu Masih, 80, and Mukhtar Masih, 50, were arrested on the allegation of committing blasphemy. Both died in the Lahore police station. Bantu Masih was stabbed eight times by a fundamentalist in the presence of policemen. He later succumbed to his injuries, whereas Mukhtar Masih was tortured to death in police custody.

1992 – January 06: Christian teacher Naimat Ahmar, 43, was butchered by a young member of a militant religious group, Farooq Ahmad, on the office premises of the District Education Officer in Faisalabad while on duty. Ahmad killed him because the deceased had reportedly used highly insulting remarks against Islam and Prophet Mohammed and by killing a blasphemer he had won his way into heaven. No case of blasphemy was registered against him nor was he tried by any court. Ahmar left behind a widow and four children.

1991 – December 10: Gul Masih of Faisalabad was charged for using sacrilegious language about the Prophet and his wives. The complainant, Sajjad Hussain, had a quarrel with him over repair of a street water tap. Masih was sentenced to death by the Sessions Court, Sargodha, on November 02, 1992. Years later he was acquitted but continued to receive death threats. He is now in Germany on asylum.

1991 – October 08: Chand Barkat, 28, a bangle stall holder in Karachi, was charged with blasphemy by another bangle vendor, Arif Hussain, because of professional jealousy. Hussain decided to teach Barkat a lesson by accusing him of using derogatory language against Prophet Mohammed and his mother. Barkat was charged under section 295-C of PPC, however, he was acquitted by the Sessions Court for want of evidence.

1990 – December 07: Tahir Iqbal, a Christian convert from Islam and resident of Lahore, was accused of abusing Prophet Mohammad at the time of Azaan and imparting anti-Islamic education to children during tuitions. The sessions judge in July 1991 turned down his bail application after he learnt that Iqbal had converted to Christianity, which, he stated, was a cognisable offence. Later on July 21, 1992, before Iqbal’s defence lawyer could appear in court, he was poisoned in police custody. Dawn