CITY NOTES
Sydney seems to be a dangerous place. No, not because of the Aussie cricket team, though that is terrible enough. It seems that’s the world capital for knife attacks. All you need now is for someone to stab opera-goers at the Sydney Opera House, and you will get an appropriate event. This season’s cricket is over, and the last Test there was in January, when Pakistan went down to an eight-wicket defeat. Interestingly enough, the next Test there will be in January next year, the Fifth and final Test vs Australia.
No member of either team was stabbed though in the Test that happened. So perhaps we can hope that no one gets any idea about the Indian team. That can’t be said about the six people killed by Joel Cauchi, 40, who had come all the way from Queensland, where he was homeless, and where he had begun collecting knives in January. He had stabbed 13 people before being shot dead. He may or may not have been the inspiration for the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel and the Rev Isaac Royel during a church service that was being streamed online.
One of the injured was a bishop of the Assyrian Church, the other a priest. Without going into a lot of church history, suffice it to say that there’s a lot of Christians in the Middle East, not just in Egypt, but in Syria and Iraq as well. And the Assyrian Church is one of them.
These are thoroughly Arab churches, because apart from the brief interval of the Crusades, and then after the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished and France and the UK occupied the Levant, they had lived entirely under Muslim rule. The attacker was another Arab, a Muslim. Rather than a communal thing, I would suspect an intra-Arab thing. The attacker was at an age when youngsters have a fascination with knives, daggers and other sharp-edged implements.
Or it may also mark the effectiveness of Australian gun control laws, because in neither case was anyone able to do something so distressingly common in the USA– shooting up the entire shopping centre or church, these days with an automatic weapon.
Gun control may be effective in Australia, but not in Pakistan, as Amir Tamba found to his cost. Sitting outside his house in Sant Nagar, he was gunned down by passing motorcyclists. In Australia, especially in Sydney, the killers would have had to stop the motorbike, get off and stab their intended victim. Provided he didn’t run off. While in jail in 2012, Tamba is supposed to have killed Sarabjit Singh, who had been arrested in 1990, and convicted of carrying out a number of bomb blasts, one of which had killed 14 people.
Of course, Tamba was not released with a pat on the head, but after a trial being duly acquitted.
The Interior Minister himself has accused RAW of being behind the murder. It makes a certain sense, because RAW seems to be on murder spree these days, not forgetting comedic elements, such as when they tried to hire somebody in the USA, only he was an agent for the US government.
RAW has already been accused in Pakistan of carrying out assassinations, but of people linked to the Kashmir freedom struggle, not in revenge for killing their man. If that was the case, I’d be very careful if I was one one of those involved in Kulbhushan Yadav’s arrest. However, there’s another link, that between Tamba and Hafiz Saeed, of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, on whom an attempt has already been made (well, there was a blast on the road outside his house, but an attempt is an attempt).
On a larger scale, Iran responded to the Israeli bombardment of its Damascus consulate and the killing of two IRGC generals with a bombardment of targets in Israel by drones and missiles. US, British, French and Jordanian planes shot down the drones. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are accused (on the Net, not the most reliable of sources) of having helped provide targeting information.
Is the fact that Pakistan stayed out why the USA has imposed sanctions on a Byelorussian and three Chinese firms supposed to have provided items to the Pakistani missile programme? The Pakistan government would like it counted as part of the sacrifices it is making for Gaza.
