Asharq Alawsat the London-based Saudi newspaper of record, wasted no time in condeming the Islamic killing spree against Hindu worshipers in Gandhinagar in which 29 were murdered. The misguided Muslims acted "out of sheer lunacy" and with "barbarity," and will only succeed in bringing the wrath of Islamaphobes down upon them, the paper wrote. It is a pity that such sanguine condemnation is not forthcoming when Jews are targets of lunatic Islamists here in the Middle East.

"The attack on a Hindu temple in Gandhinagar in India?s Gujarat state was an act of utter barbarity. It was also, if Muslim militants were responsible as the first indications seem to suggest, an act of sheer lunacy because Muslims will be the victims, possibly in their thousands. Gujarat?s record makes that highly likely. It has hardly got over the last wave of religious violence when nearly 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed after a train carrying Hindu activists was set on fire. Passions are still running high. The Indian government has moved fast this time to try and stem reprisals against the Muslim community, dispatching 3,000 extra troops. One has to be thankful for that. But only a blind optimist will confidently predict that the reprisals will not happen. One must hope that India?s secular tradition will prevail and that this will be seen by the broad mass of Indians as the act of a couple of individuals, and not of a community. Much more death ? Muslim death ? is what the two young militants and those behind them have unleashed. We pray we will be proved wrong; but we must fear that we will not be.

"The Indian authorities say that letters on the two link the attack to events in Kashmir. A link to Kashmir is more than likely, given the timing of the attack. But it is impossible to begin to understand the train of thought behind the act. Those who carried it out cannot surely have been so stupid as to believe that any good could come out of it. There can be no victors, only victims. Or did they see themselves as the victors? In which case this was the ultimate ego trip: a few minutes of a delusion of victory, at the cost of the corpses of so many, not just the tens of Hindus already killed, but also of Muslims ? hundreds? thousands? ? who might be killed as well.

"There is another, even greater, reason for despair. This barbarity, along with the equally barbarous execution-style murder of six Christian charity workers in Karachi, does unimaginable harm to Islam. The two massacres are probably not linked, but will be in the minds of those around the world who hate or misunderstand the faith. Islamophobes will grab them and try to use them to attack and denigrate Islam. That they could have been handed such a potentially powerful weapon by Muslims is beyond belief. Pakistan too is a victim; the two crimes will be used by its detractors to paint it in the blackest of lights. Maybe that is what those who killed the charity workers, all of them Pakistanis, wanted. There has to be an end to such evil. The victims are not only those who get killed. It is also Islam?s good name. That affects every individual Muslim the world over."