Bombers Get the Virgins, Their Families Get the Bulldozer

[onedomino]

I sympathize greatly with the British people regarding the suffering caused by the London bombings, but the article below, written by a Conservative British MP, exemplifies why Britain is in so much cultural trouble. If the British actually had the backbone and political realism of the Israelis, maybe homegrown homicide bombers and radical Islamic fundamentalists would not be using the UK as a platform for spreading hate.

Just Don’t Call It War
Boris Johnson, British Conservative MP

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?table=&section=&issue=2005-07-16&id=6366 (The Spectator Magazine requires registration)

If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families.

After decades of deranged attacks the Israelis have come to the conclusion that this is the best way to deter Palestinian families from nurturing these vipers in their bosoms, and also the best way of explaining to the death-hungry narcissists that they may get the 72 black-eyed virgins of scripture, but their family gets the bulldozer.

No doubt there are some people in Britain — I can think of at least one Daily Mail columnist — who would approve of such tactics; but we are not Israelis, and we are novices not just at dealing with suicide bombers, but with suicide bombers as British as the fish-and-chip shops in which they grew up. They were born in our NHS, these killers. They were coddled by our welfare state, they were fed on our butties and our Spangles, they played cricket on our glum and bemerded streets. They were washed by the rains and blessed by the suns of home. They have in their houses (or, perhaps, scattered in fragments at four London Transport crime scenes) documents in which Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs requests and requires that the bearer be given all the deference and precedence that is the due of a British national.

They were not metics, or the second-class citizens of the Occupied Territories. We cannot build a wall against them, or erect turnstiles on the way into London, foul-smelling pissoirs of the kind that connect the West Bank and Israel. So we have to focus — in the way that only this kind of slaughter can make us focus — on what we should do now to stop people like them hating us so much that they want to kill us. Something so scorched these fools in their young male psyches that they were prepared — in at least one case — to leave wife and child, and to take their own lives and the lives of dozens of other Britons.

In groping to understand, the pundits and the politicians have clutched first at Iraq, and the idea that this is ‘blowback’, the inevitable punishment for Britain’s part in the Pentagon’s fiasco. George Galloway began it in Parliament; he was followed by Sir Max Hastings, with the Lib Dems limping in the rear. It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the Told-You-So brigade. As the Butler report revealed, the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment in 2003 was that a war in Iraq would increase the terror threat to Britain. Anyone who has been to Iraq since the war would agree that the position is very far from ideal; and if any anti-Western mullah wanted a text with which to berate Britain and America for their callousness, it is amply provided by Fallujah, or the mere fact that Tony Blair cannot even tell you how many Iraqis have been killed since their liberation — only that the number is somewhere between ten and twenty thousand. (Killed predominantly by former regime elements and international homicide bombers.)

Supporters of the war have retorted that Iraq cannot be said to be a whole and sufficient explanation for the existence of suicidal Islamic cells in the West, and they, too, have a point. The threat from Islamicist nutters preceded 9/11; they bombed the Paris Métro in the 1990s; and it is evident that the threat to British lives pre-dates the Iraq war, when you think that roughly the same number of Britons died in the World Trade Center as died in last week’s bombings.

In other words, the Iraq war did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists, though the war has unquestionably sharpened the resentments felt by such people in this country, and given them a new pretext. The Iraq war did not introduce the poison into our bloodstream but, yes, the war did help to potentiate that poison. And whatever the defenders of the war may say, it has not solved the problem of Islamic terror, or even come close to providing the beginnings of a solution. You can’t claim to be draining the swamp in the Middle East when the mosquitoes are breeding quite happily in Yorkshire. (Why not? Because there are murderers lose in Yorkshire, the swamp is not draining in Iraq? What a stupid correlation. Go and drain the swamp in Yorkshire.)

The question is what action we take now to solve the problem in our own country, and what language we should use to describe such action. The first step, as we swaddle London and Yorkshire with Police/Do Not Cross tape, is to ban the phrase ‘war on terror’, as repeatedly used by G.W. Bush, most recently on 7 July in Edinburgh, with Blair nodding beside him. There is nothing wrong in principle in waging war on an abstract noun; the British navy successfully waged a war on slavery (after the British Navy propagated it for centuries), by which they meant a war on slavers. But if we continue to say that we are engaged in a war with these people, then we concede several points to the enemy, and set up a series of odious false equivalences.

For 30 years we fought something called the Irish Republican Army, and it was always an axiom of our anti-terrorist strategy that we did not accept the self-description of these thugs as ‘soldiers’. This wasn’t a war, we said; this was murder. They weren’t soldiers, these men whose apologists now draw parliamentary expenses (so showing an interesting partiality in our ‘war on terror’). They were just killers, we said; not military figures, but criminals. So why do we now call it war? Why glorify the actions of these Yorkshire maniacs? Why do we hand them this right to be recognised as belligerents, when we do not even understand their war aims? (No one is handing them the right for anything. Here Johnson is suffering from semantic psychosis. There is nothing wrong with the WoT phrase. It identifies that we have declared war on terrorist murderers. Equating the war on radical Islamic fundamentalists with the British war against the IRA is disingenuous in the extreme. No one in Britain stole an island from the Muslims 400 years ago, refusing to give some of it back until 1921, and keeping the rest partitioned to this very day.)

At least the IRA had comprehensible geographical objectives: to reverse the partition of Ireland. What do these folks want? Do they really want British troops out of Iraq, when most people I met in Baghdad secretly or openly want them to stay and help fight the insurgency? Is it really the injustices of Palestine that get their goat? Is that what makes a young cricket-loving Beeston lad go and top himself? Is it the continued existence of the house of Saud? Or were they all so seriously maladjusted to modern Britain, and found it so hard to get girlfriends that they went down the Tube in search of the hur, the 72 black-eyed ones of paradise that some Islamic scholars believe to be correctly identified not with virgins but with raisins?

If we are baffled by them, it may be that they find our own motives equally puzzling and suspicious, and that, too, is why it is a bad idea to talk of a general ‘war on terror’. (This is the kind of muddled, "why-don't-we-understand-them and why-don't-they-understand-us," diseased miasma that emanates from those who are about to be blown up. Look, they are irrational killers and they want to destroy as many of us as possible. We have to kill them first. It is that simple. When someone is coming at you with a knife, if you hope he understands you, and you stop to understand him, then you will soon be dead.) There are plenty of people in Iraq who think Britain did a wonderful thing in helping to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it is still too early to reach a final verdict on the success of the Iraq war. But it was surely a mistake to continue, in spite of all the evidence, to present this invasion as part of the ‘war on terror’. It became obvious to everyone that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and it is easy to see why Muslims might suspect that there must be another explanation.

To the paranoid Muslim mind, the evident bogusness of the ‘war on terror’ — in so far as it applied to Iraq — suggested that the war was really about something else: about oil, about humiliating and dominating the Islamic world; and because they make no separation between religion and politics, the bogus ‘war on terror’ seemed to imply an undeclared war on Islam, and that was an impression that neither Bush nor Blair properly corrected. If the neocon project means democracy throughout the Middle East, and Starbucks, and women being able to drive, then I am an ardent neocon. Just don’t call it war. (Remember, the guy writing this is a "Conservative" MP. Is it any wonder that if this tripe is representative of the conservative British view that Tony Blair was re-elected? Johnson, a Conservative MP, herein gives excuses for the "paranoid Muslim mind." Forget about the mass murders by Saddam, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Saudi homicide bombers, 911, Bali, 311, and 77, the Muslims preaching hate from the Mosques in Britain are excused because they do not understand the War on Terror.)

There has been a fatal elision between the ‘war on terror’ and the campaign to democratise the Arab world, and many Muslims can be forgiven for thinking that this is really a war to democratise the Middle East in the interests of General Motors, evangelical Christianity, Hollywood and global pornography. (They can be forgiven for psychotic delusions fed by Islamic apologists like Johnson? Again, this character is a Conservative British MP, writing in a "respected" British magazine. Can there be more graphic evidence of the decay in Europe?) No wonder they dislike it; and if we use the vocabulary of war, it gives the maniacs all the more excuse to wage war on us. (WTF? Blame the victims.) When Bush said, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us,’ and then invaded Iraq on charges that were frankly trumped-up, he co-opted tens of millions of Muslims into the camp of his enemies, even though they might loathe Saddam. They had nowhere else to go.

To keep talking of war plays on militant Muslim paranoia, and, incidentally, since it is a key point of Islamic theology that the suicide bomber may not be called a martyr, and therefore entitled to his ration of virgins/raisins, unless he dies in ‘war’, we are by our own vocabulary offering these people an incitement to murder and a laissez-passer to paradise. Above all, misplaced talk of ‘war’ is a distraction from the real disaster, which is that we have a serious and long-term security problem, not in Iraq but in this country, among young men who speak with Yorkshire accents. This is a cultural calamity that will take decades to correct.

We — non-Muslims — cannot solve the problem; we cannot brainwash them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem. (And your blame-the-victims-who-are-fighting-back world view, Johnson.)

To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass? (This nitwit just got through disparaging Bush and the US in Iraq, one of the only leaders and nations actually fighting radical Islam.)

It is time that we started to insist that the Muslim Council of Great Britain, and all the preachers in all the mosques, extremist or moderate, began to acculturate themselves ("Acculturate themselves?" What a sickening PC phrase. You mean stop preaching hate?) more closely to what we think of as British values. We can’t force it on them, but we should begin to demand change in a way that is both friendly and outspoken, and by way of a first gesture the entire Muslim clergy might announce, loud and clear, for the benefit of all Bradford-born chipshop boys, that there is no eternal blessedness for the suicide bombers, there are no 72 virgins, and that the whole thing is a con and a fraud upon impressionable minds. That might be a first step towards what could be called the re-Britannification of Britain.

There is much more to be done, not least in the treatment of women. But we should not call it a war, whether cultural or military. The language of a ‘war on terror’ may help the government to pass its illiberal measures, such as the ID cards that would have been of no assistance whatever against last week’s bombs, but it is profoundly dishonest. Britain is not at war. Even if you include last week’s fatalities (This is a Conservative MP!), the number of deaths from terrorism is falling across the world; indeed, the world has seldom been more peaceful since the age of the Antonine emperors. The more we talk of war, the more we big up the terrorists, inflame suspicions across the Muslim world, and give power-crazed politicians the chance to force through some liberty-eroding measure. (Truly twisted) Last week’s bombs were placed neither by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals. (Sounds like Zappo, the socialist from Spain) It was not war, but terrorism, and to say otherwise is a mistake and a surrender.

 

[onedomino]

Posted on Fri, Jul. 15, 2005
British Leaders Concede Overlooking Homegrown Terrorists
BY TOD ROBBERSON
The Dallas Morning News

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/world/12144310.htm

LONDON - (KRT) - Having long portrayed Muslim extremism as a threat emanating from abroad, prominent Britons acknowledged Friday that they had neglected the domestic front and that, in fact, the enemy has been lurking in their own streets, shops, schools and mosques.

Officials and community leaders said Britain's Muslim population has been infiltrated by radicals who continue to prey on susceptible young men and inspire them to carry out attacks such as the bombings that killed at least 54 people in central London on July 7.

In Britain and across Europe, authorities are scrambling for answers, chief of which are how native-born Muslims are being recruited and radicalized, and how governments can stop them from attacking again.

"We are all responsible for it in a way because we have been talking about the fact there are elements within the community who perhaps are carrying out the rhetoric and message of hate, and very little has been done," Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told an audience Friday. (It is true about the message of hate [and this probably also occurs in the US], but remember the ones "responsible" are the killers.)

"The community across the country condemns such activities, but beyond that, what have we been doing (to stop it)?" he added.

Sir Ian Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, warned Friday that additional attacks are possible as he appealed to Britain's 5 million Muslims to take a more active role in policing their own communities, identifying youths at risk and reporting anyone who might be advocating extremism.

"You have to find the preachers of hate and whom they're talking to," he told leaders at a London mosque. "The time is now. We cannot let the men of violence win. ... I can't do that. You might be able to do it. You have got to help the communities of London find them."

Researchers say the young Muslims motivated to carry out such attacks are deeply affected by images they see on television and the Internet from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia in the mid-1990s. In each case, Muslims are seen as the victims of western attacks or a western failure to intervene to protect Muslims from mass killings.

Anger and bitterness is pervasive throughout Britain's Muslim communities, and if only a tiny percentage are motivated to act on their anger and exact revenge, the effects can be devastating.

The July 7 bombings in London are hardly the first in which British citizens have been involved in such attacks. Richard Reid, the man who in December 2001 attempted to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his shoe, was born in the London suburb of Bromley. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, from East London, was implicated in the January 2002 kidnapping and killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

Two other British natives, Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Mohammed Hanif, targeted a Tel Aviv bar in a 2003 suicide bomb attack that killed three Israelis and injured more than 50.

Like the London bombers, they shared a common background as the sons of Muslim immigrants. Most were well educated and had some university training. The neighborhoods where they grew up typically are sandwiched between slums and solid working-class communities. Jobs are scarce there. Gang activity, drugs and pornography are easily available.

"We have to face the fact that there are some social and economic factors" that "sometimes contribute to a sense of anger and do contribute to racial problems," said Steven Graham, a professor of human geography and author of the book, "Cities, War and Terrorism." (Yeah, that's right apologize. It's not the killers, it's society.)

Similar factors are at play across Europe, according to Robert S. Leiken, director of the immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center in Washington.

Whereas first-generation Muslim immigrants focused their efforts on assimilating, he wrote in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Europe's second-generation Muslims "are likely to be distinct, cohesive and bitter. ... To make matters worse, the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen (Islamic warriors) to fundraise, prepare and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries."

Young Muslims in such communities often face stark choices. Many fear getting swept into the drug and gang culture unless they take a firm and open stand against it, which frequently means adopting Islamic dress codes and lifestyles, researchers said in interviews.

If such youths begin searching for a deeper spiritual experience, they become vulnerable to the messages of radical leaders in their communities.

Television images of war in the Muslim world, combined with vitriolic chat room discussions and Internet sites devoted to Islamist viewpoints help bolster the radical message, (You mean the Beeb is responsible? Hmm...the MSM made them do it.) said Paul Rogers, head of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. The university is in the Muslim heartland of northern England, where most of the London bombers lived.

"You can't pin it down entirely to socioeconomic factors, but there is a degree of bitterness and anger among the youth who haven't fully decided where they are, whether they are a part of British society or whether they are retaining their own cultural identity," Rogers said.

The northern city of Leeds, where three of the suspected London bombers lived, is described by British Muslims as typical of communities around the country where young men are vulnerable to extremist influences.

In interviews, residents of Leeds said it was clear in retrospect that a process had been underway for as long as two years to isolate the London bombers, get them more deeply involved in private Islamic discussion groups and steer them away from friends and neighbors who advocated moderation and tolerance.

In the neighborhood where bomber Shehzad Tanweer grew up, local youths said that Muslim gangs fight nightly with other gangs composed mainly of white unemployed youths, many of whom spend their days drinking beer. A half-block away from the fish-and-chips shop owned by Tanweer's father, there is an abandoned house that, residents said, serves as a hideout for youths who want to drink alcohol and take drugs.

Tanweer, 22, and his friends escaped that environment by meeting regularly in an upstairs room of a local Islamic bookstore, the Iqra Islamic Learning Centre, as well as a nearby Muslim youth center. They reportedly were drawn to Muhammad Sadiq Khan, 30, a charismatic primary-school teacher and father who joined them in the London attacks.

British police sealed off the youth center on Thursday and evacuated 200 houses as they searched for explosives and other evidence related to the London bombings. Phones have gone unanswered for days at the Iqra bookstore, which police raided and sealed off on Friday.

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