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The Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai is a few hundred metres from where my family and I lived when I was at university. I loved the elegance of the place and I feel overwhelming sadness for what the Islamist terrorists have done. Yes, I’ve used the “I” word in conjunction with “terrorist”, something the New York Times is unwilling to do.

Which brings me to our homegrown Islamist, David Hicks, and the bleeding hearts of his local cheer squad who have been trumpeting his cause, whatever it is, and blaming President George W. Bush and John Howard for the years Hicks spent in Guantanamo Bay.

David Hicks has reportedly admitted being involved with the Kashmiri terrorist organisation, Laskhare- Taiba (Soldier of the Pure), and admitted firing at Indian troops from the Pakistani side of the Line of Control in Kashmir.

When he had finished serving his jail term in Australia, why wasn’t he handed over to Indian security forces for interrogation about what he knew about Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT), their leaders, methods of training, local agents and future targets?

There is credible evidence that LeT was involved in the Mumbai carnage, and any information Hicks could have provided would have been useful. Indeed, if he was truly contrite, he should have volunteered to help India, which is one of our allies in the war against terror.

Contrary to allegations by civil liberties zealots, of Guantanamo inmates suffering torture and having their copies of the Koran torn up in front of them, these inmates have actually had, courtesy of the despised Bush Administration, access to expensive medical and dental treatments for which pensioners and lower socio-economic citizens in the US and Australia have to wait years — if they get them at all before they die. Abdullah Massoud, after being captured fighting alongside Afghan Taliban forces against Americans in 2001, was sent to Guantanamo, where the one-legged terrorist was fitted with a special prosthetic leg, at a cost of $75,000 to the US taxpayer.

Unlike impoverished citizens of the US or Australia, who are humbly grateful if they get their hip replacement within two years of the operation being marked “urgent”, Massoud, upon his release in March 2004, hobbled back to Afghanistan and resumed his war against us infidels.

He might have been still limping — hey, prosthetics are not perfect — but it didn’t stop him organising the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan working on the Gomal Zam Dam project. Massoud said he had nothing against the Chinese but wanted to pressure Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf against co-operating with the Americans (the same Americans who had fitted him with his $75,000 prosthetic leg).

Pakistani forces stormed Massoud’s hideout, killing all the kidnappers, including Massoud, but only one of the Chinese engineers was rescued alive. So the Chinese brought home all 100 engineers and dam workers, and work on the dam ceased. This was grim for the Pakistanis who desperately needed the water from the dam. In none of the news reports of Massoud’s death was it reported that his artificial leg was provided by the US while he was in Guantanamo. He was depicted as a freedom-fighter, an inspiration to jihadist youth despite his disability.

Massoud was not the only Guantanamo detainee who, after release, headed back to Afghanistan or the tribal regions of Pakistan to resume the battle against us infidels/dhimmies who have colonised Muslim lands and delayed the establishment of a Islamist Caliphate stretching from Chechnya via London, Madrid and Mumbai to Bali. It will be interesting to see what President-elect Barack Obama does about Guantanamo, specially after Massoud’s masters have described his African ancestry in less-than flattering terms. Obama is regarded by the purein- heart jihadist as an apostate deserving of death as he is a Christian, forsaking the Muslim faith of his fathers. A note of sanity has been expressed by the custodians of a Muslim cemetery in Mumbai, who refused to accept the terrorists’ bodies for burial on the grounds that their killing spree was un-Islamic.

Murderous agenda

There should be more of this — our local imams and sheiks should be calling for marches in Waziristan to protest the jihadists’ murderous agenda which involved killing two Australians. And David Hicks should be asked to explain — if he can — why Lashkar-e-Taiba’s grievance about Kashmir led them to seek out and kill a Jewish rabbi, his pregnant wife and three teenage girls in Chabad House in Mumbai. — Babette Francis was born in India and lived there during the years of Independence and Partition.

Member Organisation, World Council for Life and Family

NGO in Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC of the UN