Roger Scruton may have a case here (oD today, 8 July):
"Long before Britain's involvement in the war in Iraq, long before September 11th, the Wahabite loonies have been preaching murder and resentment in our mosques, and the ghouls of al-Muhajiroun have been recruiting young men and women to the cause of mass murder. Our government wishes to criminalise 'religious hatred', but is blind to the real form that it takes - not the legitimate criticism of Islamic extremism that most of us would wish to make, but the incitement to holy war in the name of Islam".
and Thomas Friedman may also have a point if this is actually true:
"The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden".
But pumped-up hotheads like Douglas Murray, in his New York Sun article (subscription only - text appended as comment 1 to this post) only make things worse.
More useful are the likes of David Gardner in the FT (9 July):
"The overwhelming majority of Muslims do not hate us for our freedoms. They do, however, despise [Western support for dictatorship in the Middle East] and some of the more frustrated among them are thereby prey to the siren songs of the jihadis.
Validation of this analysis came last September from the Defense Science Board (DSB), a federal advisory committee to the US defence secretary. The polls the DSB looked at are chilling. People in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, Washington’s main Arab allies, gave a 98 and 94 per cent 'unfavourable' rating to the US and its policies. But at the same time, the DSB study found that majorities or pluralities in the Arab countries do support values such as freedom and democracy, embrace western science and education, and like US products and movies. 'In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies,' the DSB says, before demonstrating how hatred of the policies has begun to tarnish the appeal of the values". (full text appended as comment 2)
and Jeffrey Sachs, also in FT (8 July) :
"We are not, thank goodness, in World War III as some of America's hotheads have believed since September 11. To believe such is to risk making it a tragic reality. In truth, our struggle is not of one culture against another, but a struggle for our common survival on a fragile planet threatened by too many weapons, too much environmental destruction, too much extreme poverty and disease, too many young men unemployed in the Middle East deprived of hope and dignity, too many fundamentalist misconceptions in a world that has been built by science which can be harnessed by ignoramuses and psychopaths". (full text appended as comment3)
3 comments:
Get Them First
BY DOUGLAS MURRAY
July 8, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/16677
Yesterday morning, the residents of London finally woke up to the jihad. Just as in New York, four years ago, and Madrid, in March 2004, London has now painfully met the enemy in our own land.
For the last four years, Britain has fought a "virtual" war-on-terror. Our engagement in the campaign has been total, yet - for most people - remote. Some complain of being "taken" to war in Iraq or Afghanistan, but for most Brits the effect of such conflicts has been negligible, affecting their daily lives not a jot.
And that fact has led to complacency - not from our superb intelligence or emergency services, but from the British public. Our press has been saturated with apologists and demagogues who claim that the war on terror is a fiction in the minds of George Bush and Tony Blair, or that it can be explained by a conspiracy theory (the theory for which changes most weeks). And, of course, there are those who complain that we are "alienating" or "upsetting" people by speaking in hostile language of division (as though they can blow us up, but we mustn't even say anything hurtful). From Thursday, when multiple explosions rocked the morning rush hour in a trademark Islamic terror act, that discussion is finished. We must realize that this is not a public relations war, but war, period.
The choice we now face is whether Britain follows the example of America or Spain. Or, put another way, whether we go on the offensive and hunt down the terrorists, or retreat and hope they don't hit us again. The timing of these attacks is clearly not (as in Madrid) intended to swing an electorate. At this stage, they appear callously designed simply to wound and kill British people while our security eyes were turned to the G-8 at Gleneagles, or perhaps remind us that just because you win an Olympic bid doesn't mean you win a peace-dividend.
There are plenty of people in Britain who would like to go the way of Spain. They remain buoyed by the idea that if you get your troops out of Iraq, you can also get out of the way of the jihadists. They should be reminded of the scorecard. After Jose Zapatero's appeasing socialist government was elected in Spain, and confirmed its plans to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, more bombs were planted on Spain's railway system. Nobody did more to avoid conflict in Iraq than the French government, yet it was a French oil tanker that was attacked off Yemen. This Islamist terror is indiscriminate and global. It is also non-negotiable - there is no "opt-out."
So what do we do? For us in Britain, the answer lies at home: Like America, our conduct in the vital job of draining the terrorist swamps of Iraq and Afghanistan is right, but our conduct at home is not. There are swamps here, too.
Yet already, within hours of the attacks on London, the shadow home secretary, David Davis, was claiming in the House of Commons that "the terrorism that walks the streets of London has no face." Police Commander Brian Paddick told a televised news conference that "Islam and terrorism do not go together." Really? Because they're making a pretty good fist of looking like they do.
But this hits at the heart of the problem. If you aren't willing to recognize the enemy, how on earth are you going to defeat it? If we had pretended during the years of IRA terrorism that we were not specifically searching for suspects of Irish background, then we could never have countered Irish republican terror. And if the authorities in Britain are not even willing to admit that it is Islamic extremists who are the threat to our society, then we might as well bulk-buy burkas and pretend we can sit this one out with the Spaniards.
But we can't. There is no opt-out. The only way to stop more terrorists from walking onto London buses and blowing them up is to get the terrorists before they get us. On the international scene, that means removing and replacing the regimes that harbor, train, and support terrorists. This job is being done. But on the domestic scene it means winding up the groups and mosques that have made Britain the central Islamist-terror meeting point in the West. For too long we have afforded rights, which we have fought for generations to achieve, to people who do not believe in such rights and only use them to abuse us and our society. Like all of the West, the British are tolerant people, but we must no longer tolerate groups within our midst who preach hatred against us. It is that preaching and the acceptance of it that is directly responsible for the carnage now lying in the streets and squares of one of our most beautiful cities.
We have to wake up to the threat within our borders. Ignoring it any longer implies that the threat is so serious that there is nothing to be done. But there is something to be done, and we must do it. Because this is not the culmination or completion of the jihadist wars within the West. These are just sickening and hate-filled opening skirmishes.
Mr. Murray is a best-selling author and journalist based in London. His new book, "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It," will be published by the Social Affairs Unit in London this September.
The west’s role in Islams’s war of ideas
By David Gardner
Financial Times
Published: July 8 2005 19:55
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/1ca3e8b6-efda-11d9-bd3b-00000e2511c8.html
The cataclysmic attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001 created a small but influential industry, arguing through and on behalf of the Bush administration that the Islamist perpetrators of that atrocity “hate us for our freedoms”. That they loathe us for our values, for what we are and think rather than anything we do.
If only that were true. What we face, instead, is a war of ideas within the Muslim and Arab world. In that light, this is a delusionary proposition, which conveniently absolves us from having to re-examine critically our policies towards this world.
Although we do not know for sure who carried out Thursday’s vicious attacks on London, it was very likely part of the loose and protean franchise of fanatics inspired by 9/11 and its architects, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. But we cannot wait for the precise answer. We need now to engage fiercely with the substance of the problems that are proliferating jihadi terrorism. We need to find ways of isolating this minority before they make any further inroads into the Muslim mainstream.
The most important thing to recognise is how the great democratic wave that freed east and central Europe, Latin America and swaths of sub-Saharan Africa over the past two decades ran into the sands of the Middle East, leaving the Arabs marooned in tyranny. That was in no small part because the US and its main allies shored up local despots in the interests of stability and cheap oil.
These tyrants laid waste to the entire spectrum of political expression in their countries, leaving their adversaries no alternative but to fall back on the mosque. That, in turn, suited their purposes, enabling them to blackmail their western patrons: back us, or deal with the mullahs. There is probably no greater single source of rage in the Arab world than this collusion in tyranny and repression – not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, which, furthermore, is manipulated by Arab rulers as an alibi for maintaining their national security states on a spurious war footing.
The overwhelming majority of Muslims do not hate us for our freedoms. They do, however, despise these policies and some of the more frustrated among them are thereby prey to the siren songs of the jihadis.
Validation of this analysis came last September from the Defense Science Board (DSB), a federal advisory committee to the US defence secretary. The polls the DSB looked at are chilling. People in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, Washington’s main Arab allies, gave a 98 and 94 per cent “unfavourable” rating to the US and its policies. But at the same time, the DSB study found that majorities or pluralities in the Arab countries do support values such as freedom and democracy, embrace western science and education, and like US products and movies. “In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies,” the DSB says, before demonstrating how hatred of the policies has begun to tarnish the appeal of the values.
Compounding this disenchantment, a great many Arabs are sceptical about American intentions. For the most part, Arabs plausibly believe it was Osama bin Laden who smashed the status quo, not George W. Bush. Why? Because the 9/11 attacks made it impossible for the west and its Arab despot clients to continue to ignore a political set-up that incubated blind rage against them. The subsequent decision to invade Iraq further undermined the status quo, but in ways it is not obvious the Bush administration had thought through.
This January’s elections in Iraq saw a remarkable display of heroism by its people that struck a deep chord in Arab countries. Yet however much the triumphalists in Washington claim this as vindication for their bungled strategy, these elections took place at the insistence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them. By that time, moreover, Iraq had started on the road to a sectarian war that may end by sucking in its neighbours: with Shia Iran on one side and Sunni rulers terrified by the empowerment of Iraq’s Shia majority on the other.
The policies of the US and its allies often seem contradictory, at a time when great clarity is needed. Mr Bush rightly attacked the “cultural condescension” that suggests Arabs and Muslims are unsuited to democracy nearly two years ago in a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy. More recently, and in Cairo, Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state, announced that after 60 years of backing stability at the expense of democracy and getting neither, the US has learnt its lesson. But has it?
The answer is vital, because the jihadis need the story of the last 60 years to continue. They need the US to keep shoring up tyranny and defending the status quo. Of course, democracy alone will not resolve the problems of the Middle East. It will, moreover, often be antithetical to short-term stability, since it is Islamist movements that are emerging as the region’s centre of political gravity. But if the west continues to collude with local despots in denying their peoples freedom, we will lose that war of ideas. The jihadis will enter the Muslim mainstream, and continue their tactics of immolation. The shared values of Islam and the west will wither.
Jeffrey Sachs
Financial Times
Friday July 8, 2005
Yesterday when the bombs went off in London I was about a mile away. I therefore witnessed one of the greatest triumphs and resources of modern life against the backdrop of yet another heinous crime. Londoners reacted to the disaster not with shock, violence, or disarray, but with unfailing professionalism, industriousness, concern, and emphatically, civility. There were no pogroms, attacks on London’s large Muslim population, Rather there were statements of praise for the Muslim community, for its integral role in London life. There was no rush to judgment, no bluster, no jingoism, only the steady voices of British politicians directing a democratic response to this most undemocratic of deeds.
London, in short, showed even in a moment of real peril, uncertainty, and grief, that it is truly, uniquely one of the great centers of a world civilization, a civilization in which all races, religions, and creeds can live together peacefully, creatively, productively. I feel about London what I feel about my own home of New York City. Both are what mathematicians call a “proof by existence,” in this case a proof that globalization can work, that divisions among people according to religion, ethnicity, language, can be overcome through a commitment to common purposes among people living in close proximity. London must be the way of the future, of an urbanized internationalized life in the 21st century, for if not, our world will likely succumb to hatred, violence, and despair on our very crowded planet.
Tony Blair showed true leadership yesterday when he declared that the work of the G8 summit in addressing poverty and global climate change was now more important than ever, that the terrorists would not deflect the work of the political leaders in addressing deep economic and ecological problems that gravely threaten the planet and that stoke the violence and conflicts of our times. George Bush spoke well when he declared that an ideology of compassionate concern for the world’s poor would triumph over an ideology of hate. Both men owe the world this much, and yesterday they delivered. Their war in Iraq was gravely misconceived and dangerous; their words yesterday were highly constructive and extremely important.
We are not, thank goodness, in World War III as some of America’s hotheads have believed since September 11. To believe such is to risk making it a tragic reality. In truth, our struggle is not of one culture against another, but a struggle for our common survival on a fragile planet threatened by too many weapons, too much environmental destruction, too much extreme poverty and disease, too many young unemployed men in the Middle East deprived of hope and dignity, too many fundamentalist misconceptions in a world that has been built by science which can be harnessed by ignoramuses and psychopaths. The cell phone can be both the creator of global connectivity and the detonator of urban mayhem.
We are surely in store for many more shocks ahead: terrrorist attacks, massive droughts and other extreme climate events caused by manmade climate change, disease pandemics, and more. Yet we are also more equipped than ever before, with our great wealth and technology, to confront these challenges. Our biggest threats are not psychopaths but also our own ignorance and lack of will. If the G-8 commitments to Africa and climate change are watered down today by “political realities,” for example, we will pay a very heavy price for this neglect in the future.
Our world is complex and non-linear. It is as unpredictable as yesterday morning’s bombings. We must be smart, smarter even than yesterday, to overcome the risks that we face. A war on terror is needed, but only as part of a broader war on poverty, intolerance, environmental degradation, and injustice which fuel so much global instability. The greatest answer indeed that the world’s leaders assembled at Glenneagles can give to yesterday’s criminal attack is a shoulder-to-shoulder commitment to address the pressing concerns of poverty, injustice, and environmental destruction in an open, just, and meaningful way. To find their way in this profound challenge, the political leaders should look to the spirit of London. It is a unique lodestar for a safer and prosperous world in the 21st Century.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/73fe340a-ee3f-11d9-98e5-00000e2511c8.html
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