Chabad’s Zionization
The attack on Mumbai spotlights the ultra-orthodox (haredi) Chabad-Lubavitch community and its international outreach network. When Chabad outreach (keruv) started in the 1950s, it seemed rather intellectually dishonest because the organization used nostalgia for a never-existent Jewish past as a hook to enmesh secular or secularized Jews in ultra-orthodox (haredi) practice as hozrim bitshuvah (returnees, sometimes improperly called baalei tshuvah), but on the whole the activity was mostly harmless in contrast with current Chabad activities, which long ago crossed the border into dangerous territory.
As the Lubavitcher organization has become larger and wealthier — partially because mobilization for keruv has brought large contributions, members have shown a propensity for corruption.
(See
Feds prepare for agriprocessors tax evasion, fraud charges)
Because outreach has brought into the Lubavitcher community many returnees educated or indoctrinated in the Soviet or Zionist systems, which were both similar and also genocidal, the Lubavitcher movement has itself become more conservative and more prone to support violence or to commit violence. (In Czarist Russia the Lubavitchers had the reputation as one of the rougher Chassidic groups, and they did manage to survive and thrive in the Crown Heights neighborhood as it declined and developed strong ethnic tensions.)
