Do Fence Me In

Here's an interesting little item from the London Times of a few days ago. Seems that India is worried about possible terrorist incursions from Muslim Bangladesh, a nation with an increasing fundamentalist presence in and out of government. Al Qaeda allies there recently set off a clutch of bombs all over the country at once.

So what's India doing about this? It's building a security fence, that's what. Remind you of anything?

Yeah, Israel's security fence is an eyesore and a huge inconvenience to those who wish to travel between Israel and the West Bank (to set off bombs or for some legitimate reason), but it has prevented a great many bombings and at least some Arabs like it. It's temporary, adjustable and easily removed.


I have not been able to find a picture of the India-Bangladesh security fence, so I can't tell if it has the same flexibility as the Israeli fence. I do notice that the London Times story makes no mention of attacks within India by Bangladeshi fundamentalists; those terrorists seem to have restricted themselves to attacks within Bangladesh itself.

So let's review - Israel suffers massive terrorist incursions from a fundamentalist Muslim neighbor, builds a temporary, adjustable and removeable barrier to prevent those incursions, it actually works, and the nations of the world kick up an enormous fuss. India suffers no reported terrorist incursions from its fundamentalist Muslim neighbor (it may have suffered a few unreported ones), it builds a barrier of unknown quality as a preemptive measure, there's no report as to what effect that barrier has whether positive or negative, and the nations of the world utter not a peep. (Yeah, the border between India and Bangladesh is well-defined and that between Israel and the Palestinians is not; that's why the Israeli barrier is removeable, dumkopf. It's a non-issue.)

So what else is new?

Benshlomo says, Oh, George Harrison, if you had any idea what your friends are up to...