Plum-Voiced Deepak Chopra Blames, Who Else?, USA for Mumbai Debacle

The WSJ has an article by Dorothy Rabinovitch describing several CNN interviews of the noted Indian GI tract expert who points to the USA as the cause of the bloodshed in Mumbai.

......commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. [my emph] Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Of course, Dr. Chopra has long ago abandoned complicated thought processes like "cause and effect" and of course, examining the fanatical religious woman-bashers and fundamentalist fascisms they adhere to. Perps' complaints and demands are never subjected by Deepak to the light of cold historical reasoning---that tedious obstacle to simplicity and reductionist Oprahfications on the road to Nirvana. Logic and reasoning hamper the good Doctor's serene reduction of complexities to a single unity. Larry King has already arrived at Deepak's end zone of continuous contemplation of the clash of opposites, always reducing such disturbances to the world's one and only source of evil, located in Washington D.C.

I for one believe Deepak should stick to cleansing bowels and ingesting garlic and ginger to facilitate our journey ere we shuffle off this mortal coil! Or perhaps he could be given a seat on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's meteorological Global Warming Cte. in the Obama Green Cabinet to help ward off the inevitable melting of the polar icecaps. Al needs all the advice and help he can get.