L’implication présumée de médecins dans les attentats manqués contredit l’idée selon laquelle les terroristes d’Al-Qaida seraient recrutés parmi les démunis et les opprimés, bien que cela puisse être le cas dans certains pays comme le Maroc. Au contraire, les membres de groupe semblent être issus essentiellement de la classe moyenne, tout comme les auteurs des atrocités du 11 septembre 2001 aux Etats-Unis. (Stephen Fidler, The Financial Times, le 3 juil. 2007)
There’s no explanation at this stage why they’re doctors, other than that it’s a perfect cover. It seems at odds with their profession, which is to look after people. (Police official)
The suspects should be thought of « not as doctors, but as terrorists. Until yesterday, if anyone had said that doctors were involved in terrorism, I would have said that was completely impossible. (Abhay Chopada, a colorectal surgeon, The IHT)
Il y a des signes montrant que les têtes pensantes d’al-Qaida n’ont pas renoncé aux méga-attentats, mais la répression les oblige à la prudence et ils ont le temps. En attendant, les attentats plus ou moins bricolés permettent d’occuper le terrain de la peur, ce qui est déjà une petite victoire stratégique. (Le Figaro)
Quand j’étais encore membre de ce que l’on peut appeler le Réseau jihadi britannique – une série de groupes terroristes musulmans britanniques reliés par une idéologie simple – je me souviens comme nous rigolions en nous félicitant chaque fois que les gens à la télé disaient que la politique étrangère occidentale était la cause unique des attentats islamistes comme le 9/11, Madrid et le 7/7 à Londres. En rejetant la responsabilité de nos actions sur le gouvernement, ceux qui ont lancé l’idée des “bombes de Blair” faisaient notre travail de propagande pour nous. Plus important encore, ils nous ont aussi aidé à échapper à tout examen critique du moteur réel de notre violence : la théologie islamique. (Hassan Butt, The Daily Mail, le 1/7/07)
La presse commencerait-elle à se rendre compte de l’inanité de la plupart des « analyses » dont elle nous bassine depuis tant d’années?
Car si les inepties n’ont jamais manqué, comme le pointent magistralement les articles et les livres de Paul Berman (et notamment celui où il revient un an après sur l’intervention alliée en Irak), les contradictions, comme autant de fissures dans la muraille médiatique, commencent de plus en plus à se voir.
Avec des effets des plus paradoxaux et ironiques, qui, si la situation n’était pas si tragique, prêteraient presqu’à rire.
Comme…
Cette prétendue défense des opprimés et des damnés de la terre, dirigée par… un ploutocrate saoudien!
Ces terroristes obsédés de pureté idéologique, culturelle et religieuse… formés dans les meilleures universités occidentales, ardents lecteurs de la philosophie allemande et faisant main basse sur les technologies de destruction dernier cri dudit Occident honni!
Ce soutien des Palestiniens, à la une des médias ou des banderoles des campus ou des rues, qui atteint ses plus hauts sommets quand ceux-ci multiplient les attaques-suicides de discothèques, pizzerias ou salles de mariage mais… restent étrangement muets quand lesdits attentats ont, suite à la répression et aux restrictions accrues qu’ils ont nécessairement provoquées, encore aggravé la précarité et la misérable vie quotidienne desdits Palestiniens!
Cette attribution, du côté des masses musulmanes ou des belles âmes qui prétendent les soutenir, de la haine la plus grande… pour le pays qui a le plus utilisé sa force militaire (la quasi-totalité des guerres menées, du Koweit à la Bosnie ou au Kosovo en passant par le Liban ou la Somalie, ces deux dernières décennies) ou diplomatique (l’énergie déployée par un Clinton) pour les aider!
Ces Européens et Français tout particulièrement qui vocifèrent à longueur d’année dans les rues sur une peine de mort (« preuve ultime de la sauvagerie américaine » et pourtant en large perte de vitesse dans la plupart des états) mais… restent étrangement silencieux sur les pays où les victimes sont découpées en morceaux (main, bras, œil), abattues à coups de pierre ou enterrées au bulldozer!
Ce mouvement de la paix drainant des millions de manifestants de gauche… avec à sa tête un Chirak!
Cet autre mouvement, enfin, de résistance au totalitarisme et à la tyrannie (bien plus petit mais qui heureusement obtint gain de cause) soutenu par les héros de la dissidence antisoviétique Michnik ou Havel et … dirigé par l’idiot désigné du village planétaire, le cowboy mal dégrossi Bush!
Extrait (traduit au babelfish) :
La gauche ne voit pas parce qu’un bon nombre de gens par ailleurs intelligents ont décidé, a priori, que tous les grands problèmes du monde proviennent exclusivement de l’Amérique. Même les problèmes qui n’en proviennent pas. C’est une attitude qui, il y a soixante ans, aurait pareillement désarmé ces mêmes gens devant le phénomène du fascisme européen.
Charniers géants, trois cent mille Irakiens disparus, une population écrasée par trente-cinq ans de bottes baasistes leur défonçant le visage – voilà ce que c’est que le fascisme ! Et vous, vous croyez que quelques contrats juteux avec les potes à Bush chez Halliburton, un ou deux brandissements frénétiques de la Bible et les ridicules réductions d’impôts de Bush et ses aubaines pour les super-riches ne sont pas différents de ça ? Pas différentes du fascisme ? D’une véritable politique de massacre?
A Friendly Drink in a Time of War
By Paul Berman
Dissent magazine
Winter 2004
A friend leaned across a bar and said, « You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people agree with you. »
« Not true! » I said. « Apart from X, Y, and Z, whose left-wing names you know very well, what do you think of Adam Michnik in Poland? And doesn’t Vaclav Havel count for something in your eyes? These are among the heroes of our time. Anyway, who is fighting in Iraq right now? The coalition is led by a Texas right-winger, which is a pity; but, in the second rank, by the prime minister of Britain, who is a socialist, sort of; and, in the third rank, by the president of Poland-a Communist! An ex-Communist, anyway. One Texas right-winger and two Europeans who are more or less on the left. Anyway, these categories, right and left, are disintegrating by the minute. And who do you regard as the leader of the worldwide left? Jacques Chirac?-a conservative, I hate to tell you. »
My friend persisted.
« Still, most people don’t seem to agree with you. You do have to see that. And why do you suppose that is? »
That was an aggressive question. And I answered in kind.
« Why don’t people on the left see it my way? Except for the ones who do? I’ll give you six reasons. People on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war because . . . « -and my hand hovered over the bar, ready to thump six times, demonstrating the powerful force of my argument.
« The left doesn’t see because – » thump!-« George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called ‘false consciousness.' »
Thump! « The left doesn’t see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don’t. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too. »
Thump! « Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn’t do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less! »
Thump! « The left doesn’t see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won’t be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs.
« THE OLD-FASHIONED LEFT used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don’t hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course. »
THUMP! « Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel’s problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel’s problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.
« I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left-a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines-one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There’s a name for that, a systematic distortion-what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology. »
Thump! « The left doesn’t see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don’t see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially. »
Six thumps. I was done. My friend looked incredulous. His incredulity drove me to continue.
« And yet, » I insisted, « if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe’s fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism. »
I grew still more heated.
« What a tragedy that you don’t see this! It’s a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they are receiving. A tragedy for the genuine liberals all over the Muslim world! A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world’s richest and fattest neighborhoods.
« What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush’s many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced. »
My friend’s eyes widened, maybe in astonishment, maybe in pity.
He said, « And so, the United Nations and international law mean nothing to you, not a thing? You think it’s all right for America to go do whatever it wants, and ignore the rest of the world? »
I answered, « The United Nations and international law are fine by me, and more than fine. I am their supporter. Or, rather, would like to support them. It would be better to fight an antifascist war with more than a begrudging UN approval. It would be better to fight with the approving sanction of international law-better in a million ways. Better politically, therefore militarily. Better for the precedents that would be set. Better for the purpose of expressing the liberal principles at stake. If I had my druthers, that is how we would have gone about fighting the war. But my druthers don’t count for much. We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it-supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately. »
My friend said, « I’m for the UN and international law, and I think you’ve become a traitor to the left. A neocon! »
I said, « I’m for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left? »
« But isn’t George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it! »
My own eyes widened. « You haven’t the foggiest idea what fascism is, » I said. « I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush’s cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush’s ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . . »
But this made not the slightest sense to him, and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. His book The Passion of Joschka Fischer will come out in the spring.
Voir aussi (merci lagrette) les révélations d’un jihadiste repenti dans le Daily Mail (extraits traduits au babelfish):
Quand j’étais encore membre de ce que l’on peut appeler le Réseau Jihadi britannique – une série de groupes terroristes musulmans britanniques reliés par une idéologie simple – je me souviens comme nous rigolions en nous félicitant chaque fois que les gens à la télé disaient que la politique étrangère occidentale était la cause unique des attentats islamistes comme le 9/11, Madrid et le 7/7 à Londres. En rejetant la responsabilité de nos actions sur le gouvernement, ceux qui ont lancé l’idée des “bombes de Blair” faisaient notre travail de propagande pour nous. Plus important encore, ils nous ont aussi aidé à échapper à tout examen critique du moteur réel de notre violence : la théologie islamique.
Et comme avec les attentats précédents, les gens disent encore que la violence à laquelle se sont livré des Musulmans vient de la politique étrangère. Par exemple, samedi dernier sur Radio 4, le maire de Londres, Ken Livingstone, a déclaré: « D’après toutes nos informations sur les jeunes musulmans révoltés, le moteur principal de leur colère n’est pas l’Afghanistan, mais l’Irak. »
Et bien que beaucoup d’extrémistes britanniques soient irrités par la mort de leurs frères musulmans à travers le monde, ce qui m’a conduit moi et beaucoup d’autres à préparer des attentats sur le sol britannique et à l’étranger, c’est l’idée que nous combattions pour la création d’un Etat islamique révolutionnaire et mondial qui appliquerait la justice islamique.
Mais la raison principale pour laquelle les radicaux sont parvenus à augmenter leur recrutement est que la plupart des institutions musulmanes en Grande-Bretagne ne veulent tout simplement pas parler de théologie.
Ils refusent d’aborder la vérité difficile et souvent complexe que l’Islam peut être interprété comme justifiant la violence contre le non-croyant – et répètent à la place l’incantation que l’Islam est paix en espérant que toute le débat s’arrêtera tout seul.
Ceci a laissé le champ libre aux extrémistes. J’en sais quelque chose puisqu’en tant qu’ancien recruteur extrémiste, je tombais régulièrement sur des gens qui avaient essayé de soulever ces questions auprès des autorités des mosquées et qui s’en faisaient exclure. Et à chaque fois que ça se produisait, c’était une victoire morale et religieuse pour nous parce que ça servait de sergent recruteur pour l’extrémisme.
Du fait que tant de membres de la communauté musulmane refusent de remettre en cause des arguments théologiques d’un autre âge, les tensions entre la théologie islamique et le monde moderne s’aggravent chaque jour.
Je crois que la question du terrorisme peut être facilement démystifiée si musulmans et non-musulmans se mettent à discuter ouvertement des idées qui nourrissent le terrorisme.
Il est crucial que la communauté musulmane de Grande-Bretagne sorte de son état de dénégation et réalise qu’il n’y a aucune honte à admettre qu’il y a de l’extrémisme dans nos familles, nos communautés et chez nos co-religionnaires du reste du monde.
I was a fanatic…I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist
By HASSAN BUTT
The Daily Mail
01/07/07
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network – a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology – I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this « Blair’s bombs » line did our propaganda work for us.
More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.
And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, on Saturday on Radio 4’s Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: « What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq. »
I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network – I met him on two occasions.
And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.
If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?
How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?
There isn’t enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.
Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.
For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.
But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).
Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.
Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.
In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.
The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.
For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state – typically by starting debate with the question: « Are you British or Muslim? »
But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don’t want to talk about theology.
They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever – and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.
This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.
Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.
Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.
A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.
In other words, individual Muslims don’t have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.
But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don’t actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.
The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.
For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we’ll stay here.
But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.
However, it isn’t enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.
Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.
I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.
Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.
If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I’d like to term the Land of Co-existence.
And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.
Voir enfin, du côté du gouvernement britannique, où en revanche, Brown est encore plus dans l’apaisement que son prédécesseur qui avait pourtant, on s’en souvient, atteint des sommets dans le domaine:
The strategy of consensual dissimulation
Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips’s Diary
On July 3, 2007
People in Britain are shocked — shocked! — that medical doctors are suspected of involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist attacks on Britain over the past few days. The shock reflects the deep unreality of public discourse up till now. People have persisted in believing that Islamic terrorism could be explained by poverty, deprivation, alienation and so forth, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Now they are horrified that doctors, whose calling is to save life, can be bent on mass murder.
The capacity of the human mind to delude itself never ceases to amaze. How can such educated individuals be killers? people exclaim. Have such people really leaned nothing from history? Have they forgotten the Nazis, forgotten Dr Mengele, forgotten that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by people who delighted in Goethe and Mozart? Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s number two, is a paediatrician. Yet he is responsible for the deliberate mass murder of thousands of people.
On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0755 approx), the reformed Islamist extremist Hassan Butt patiently spelled out to presenter Jim Naughtie that Islamist terrorists carry out their acts of mass murder as an expression of religious faith and fervour. They do it, he said, ‘for the pleasure of God’. Far from being acts of despair, these terrible atrocities are acts of religious exultation.
If we don’t understand, even now, that what we are facing is a religious war, a jihad against the unbeliever and backsliding Muslims across the world we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves against it. Yet while former Islamist extremists such as Hassan Butt and Ed Husain are urgently telling us the truth, Gordon Brown’s new administration is shutting its ears and embarking on a suicidally stupid and cowardly strategy. Astoundingly, it has decided to deny the religious element of this jihad altogether, to redefine Islamic terrorism as mere criminality and to ban all terms that call this horror by its proper name. From the Daily Express today, we learn:
Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in ¬connection with the ¬terrorism crisis. The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase ‘war on ¬terror’ is to be dropped. The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair… Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language. ‘There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,’ the spokesman said. ‘It is important that the country remains united.’
For ‘consensual’, read bowdlerised, censored and dissimulatory; and for ‘united’, read defeated. This is a disastrous beginning to Brown’s premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn’t mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth. That is why it is not enough for British Muslims to condemn these acts of terror. They have to acknowledge that what drives these acts is a part of the faith to which they subscribe — a part which they must renounce.
In the light of that, the Commons statement yesterday by the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith — whose performance had our terminally frivolous and ignorant media drooling in pleasure this morning — was an absolute disgrace. Clearly following instructions to avoid telling the truth in this new strategy of ‘consensual’ dissimulation, she conspicuously avoided talking about Muslims or Islam. Instead, she spoke — absurdly — about ‘communities’ and insisted that these terrorist outrages were merely ‘criminal’ acts. Exactly which ‘community leaders’ will she be talking to, one wonders, about the problem posed by these purely ‘criminal’ activities? Hindus? Chinese? Rastafarians?
Invited, moreover, to agree with a daft and worrying statement (by the chair of the supremely moderate Sufi Muslim Council) that ‘such actions have nothing to do with Islam’ she eagerly concurred, saying:
Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.
Yes, the British Home Secretary has actually said that terrorist outrages committed by al Qaeda have nothing to do with Islam.
In the Telegraph, the Labour MP Denis MacShane — who has himself paid a political price for speaking the truth about Islamist extremism —rightly poured scorn on the Tory leader David Cameron for criticising those who used the word ‘Islamist’ to describe the ideological roots of the terrorist threat (yes, the Tories are also playing this suicidal game). But MacShane went on to claim that, by contrast,
There is a new determination in government to spell out hard truths.
On the contrary. Gordon Brown has talked about the need to ‘win hearts and minds’ in the community we cannot now name, just as the west did during the Cold War. Clearly, if Mr Brown had been in charge during the Cold War, we’d have lost it. For it is now plain that to him, winning the hearts and minds of British Muslims means endorsing and regurgitating their own false claim that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and suppressing the truth that what we are up against is religious fanaticism and a holy war in the name of Islam against the infidel west.
This is the way we lose that war. Britain’s friends and allies in the free world should be appalled.
jcdurbant 