Opinion

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Editorial

The Watchword
Of Vigilance

T

he terrorist attack on Mumbai
seemed at first to involve a ter-
rible tragedy in a faraway place,
unconnected to us. Then we learned that
they had also come for the Jews.
In a place where the Jewish population
is miniscule and dwindling, the killers
still took the time to murder six innocent
people at the city's Bais Chabad.
The depravity of this crime disgusts
anyone with an ounce of humanity in
their souls. There is evidence that some of
the victims may have been tortured and
strangled before death.
No threat to anyone, in a place far
from the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians, they were still regarded as
proper targets for those who practice
indiscriminate murder in the name of a
distorted religious belief.
The Jewish population of Mumbai is
estimated at around 5,000, which makes
it the largest center in India. It was once
much larger, but many former residents
have chosen to make aliyah to Israel and
the few surviving Jewish institutions there

are struggling to remain in opera-
tion.
The attackers were using
sophisticated communication and
geographic locating devices. They
knew exactly where they wanted
to go.
Railroad station, luxury hotels
and restaurants and a place where
they were likely to find Jews to
murder. This was their checklist,
the plan they brought with them
from their handlers.
It appears that India's security appa-
ratus was woefully unprepared for this
attack. During the height of the assault,
the local anti-terrorist units seemed over-
whelmed by the attacking force of just 10
men.
Later evidence also seemed to indicate
that a warning from U.S. intelligence on
an impending seaborne attack on Mumbai
never reached the right people or was
ignored.
Still, unlike in many European cities,
the situation regarding Mumbai's Jewish

population was regarded as so unthreaten-
ing that no special security was detailed to
the Bais Chabad.
"This is one of the few countries where
Jews never faced persecution or dis-
crimination:' said Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, a
leader of India's Jewish community, in the
New York Times.
There had been no friction between
Mumbai's Jews and the Muslim neighbor-
hoods in which the city's synagogues are
located. No one could have dreamed they
would be targets.

But now everything has changed; not
only for the Jews of Mumbai but for small,
isolated Jewish communities everywhere
in the world.
Any sense of security, of feeling that
they were far removed from conflict and
so had nothing to fear, is gone now They
understand that vigilance is needed wher-
ever they are.
If that vigilance can save lives in the
future, then the lesson of Mumbai will
have been learned well.

the plan. She signed on for this
ride in capital letters.
But I get the sense that
watching Kwame Kilpatrick
carted off to jail satisfied the
public's demand for account-
ability. Beatty has slipped into
the role of the woman who
loved unwisely.
At Mary Surratt's execution,
special care was-taken to tie
down her long black dress
so that her legs would not be
exposed after hanging. That would have
been unseemly. Something of that odd
Victorian rectitude still survives.
Executions of women are extremely rare
in America. Studies have shown that juries
who would have handed down the death
penalty for a male convicted of the same
crime will rarely impose it for a woman
because of traditional beliefs in gender
roles.
An exception is someone like Aileen

Wuornos, the Florida prostitute found
guilty of murdering seven men. Her occu-
pation excluded her from the protected
list.
The classic example is Lizzie Borden.
There is little doubt that she hacked
her father and stepmother to death as
they slept; but the jury in Fall River,
Massachusetts in 1893 could not bring
itself to believe that an upper-class woman
was capable of such an act.
Beatty was a high achiever at Cass Tech
in Detroit, a woman her classmates pre-
dicted would accomplish great things, way
too smart to get mixed up in something
like this.
It is sad that a high school crush came
back to ruin her life.
But she knew that her actions would
ruin the lives of others. So spare us the
pathos. ❑

❑

Reality Check

Women Gone Wrong

W

hen Mary Surratt became the
first woman executed by the
federal government, the coun-
try gasped in disbelief.
If you don't recognize the name,
Surratt was convicted of being part of
the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham
Lincoln and was hanged in 1865.
Repeated appeals for clemency were
rejected by President Andrew Johnson;
but right up to the moment the gallows
trap fell open, prison officials expected a
stay of execution.
Although she had been vilified by the
press and the evidence against her was
overwhelming, the thought of executing
a woman was staggering. After her death,
the same newspapers that had excoriated
her during the trial accused the military
tribunal that heard the case of a rush to
judgment and refusing to hear evidence of
her innocence.
I thought of her while reading the news
accounts of Christine Beatty's guilty plea.

Since Mayor Loverboy has
gone off to serve his time, there
has been a subtle change of
focus in media treatment of
Beatty. It has concentrated on
her children and her pastor
and the dim prospects for her
future. It's almost as if there
is a feeling of regret that this
woman had to be dragged into
the mayoral mess.
Well, as the lyric to the old
Pearl Bailey song goes, "It takes
two to tango"
Forget about messing around with a
married man and encouraging him to
upend his family's life. Beatty was perfect-
ly willing to use her position of power to
destroy the lives and careers of two police
officers who were trying to do their jobs.
So as far as I'm concerned, she deserves
whatever she gets.
There is no difference between what the
former mayor did and her complicity in

George Cantor's e-mail address is
gcantor614@aol.com.

;14

December 11 • 2008

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