HBO's Brilliant Documentary on the Mumbai Massacre

Tonight, on HBO, an absolutely riveting documentary on Mumbai. It's hard not to avert your eyes at times. Tunku Varadarajan describes better than I could one particularly horrible scene, one that has embedded in it a deep truth about the genocidal anti-Semitism of jihadists:

This is not a documentary for the young to watch, or even for those adults who crumble easily. How to process the telephone conversation between Wasi and the gunman holed up in Mumbai's Chabad House, where a few American Jews are held hostage? Wasi says: "As I told you, every person you kill where you are"--referring to the Jewish building--"is worth 50 of the ones killed elsewhere." Later, as Indian army commandos close in on the building, Wasi, watching the scene on TV in Pakistan, fears that the last surviving gunman there will be taken alive. So he orders him to shoot the last two Jewish hostages forthwith: "Yes, sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head." The gunman, now weak with hunger and thirst, obliges. We hear a shot. Wasi does, too--he is on the line. What about the second shot, he asks. "I got them both," he is told, by the gunman.