Britannia Radio

December 1, 2008

The continuing British trance of denial

Daily Mail, 1 December 2008

Around the world, people have reacted with horror to the vile atrocities in Mumbai.

For three days, our TV screens transmitted images of carnage and chaos as the toll of murder victims climbed to upwards of 190 people, with many hundreds more injured.

Despite the fact that British citizens were caught up in the attacks, there is nevertheless a sense in Britain that this was nothing to do with us — a horrible event happening in a faraway place.

Among commentators, moreover, there has been no small amount of confusion. Were these terrorists motivated by the grievance between Muslims and Hindus over Kashmir, or was this a broader attack by al Qaeda?

If British and American tourists were singled out over Iraq — which many assume is the motive for such attacks — why were Indians targeted in the Victoria railway station? And why was an obscure Jewish outreach centre marked for slaughter?

Such perceptions and questions suggest that, even now, Western commentators still don’t grasp what the free world is facing. This was not merely a distant horror.

We should pay the closest possible attention to what happened in Mumbai because something on this scale could well happen here.

But because we don’t understand what we are actually up against, we are not doing nearly enough to prevent this — or something even worse — occurring on British soil; and if it were to happen here, we would be unable to cope.

The Mumbai atrocities show very clearly what too many in Britain obdurately deny — that a war is being waged against civilisation.

It is both global and local. It is not ‘our’ fault; it has nothing to do with Muslim poverty, oppression or discrimination.

The Islamic fundamentalist fanatics use specific grievances — Kashmir, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya — merely as recruiting sergeants for their worldwide holy war against all ‘unbelievers’.

The Mumbai attackers targeted British, American and Indian citizens simply because they wanted to kill as many British, American and Indian ‘unbelievers’ as possible. Where they found Muslims, they spared them.

They also singled out for slaughter the occupants of the Chabad House, a pious Jewish outreach organisation with no Israeli or political agenda — underscoring the point that at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of Israel festers their hatred of the Jews.

This was not, as is so often described, ‘mindless violence’. On the contrary, the terrorists precisely calibrated both their choice of targets and the way in which they attacked them. This tells us many things.

India was chosen in order to further two aims. First was to foment greater tension between India and Pakistan.

No less important was the wish to destroy the ever more vital strategic alliance between India and the West in common defence against the Islamist onslaught.

That was why British and American visitors in those two grand hotels were singled out. And that was why Mumbai itself was chosen — as the symbol of India’s burgeoning commerce and prosperity and its links with the West.

The manner of these attacks also carried a message. Many hostages were taken, but no attempt was made to use them to demand redress of any grievances. They were simply killed. That made a statement that the terrorists’ agenda is non-negotiable.

The attacks demonstrated, above all, the reach of the perpetrators and the impotence of their designated victims. Those who believe that Islamist terror can be halted by addressing grievances around the world are profoundly mistaken.

With these atrocities, moreover, Islamist attacks have moved much closer to war than conventional terrorism.

The Iranian-born foreign affairs specialist Amir Taheri has pointed out that the Mumbai attacks embody the plan outlined by a senior Al Qaeda strategist after the U.S. decided to fight back following 9/11 — a decision that the Islamists had not expected.

This new strategy entails targeting countries with a substantial Muslim presence for ‘low-intensity warfare’ comprising bombings, kidnappings, the taking of hostages, the use of women and children as human shields, beheadings and other attacks that make normal life impossible.

Such a simultaneous, multi-faceted onslaught quickly reduces a city and a country to chaos. It can be repeated anywhere — and British cities must be among the most vulnerable.

This is because — astoundingly — Britain now harbours the most developed infrastructure of Islamist terrorism and extremism in the Western world.

The security service has warned that it is monitoring at least 2,000 known terrorists, and has said repeatedly that although many outrages have been averted a major attack may not be preventable.

Indeed, British security officials have sleepless nights about the various ways in which the Islamists are trying to cause mass casualties in Britain — and the fact that even now this threat is not taken seriously.

This point was made yesterday by the former head of Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command, Peter Clarke.

As an example, he noted that Kazi Nurur Rahman, a convicted terrorist who was arrested shortly after 7/7 with a machine-gun and 3,000 rounds of ammunition, had been trying to buy machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades and missiles — undoubtedly for use against British targets.

Far from the popular caricatures of bumbling, impressionable and socially alienated misfits, he said, there was a capable and motivated enemy spanning the globe which would try to replicate the Mumbai atrocities in Britain.

Even more chilling was the warning by a former head of the SAS that Britain has made no adequate preparations to deal with such an onslaught upon a British city — even though that is precisely the ‘doomsday scenario’ that the security world fears.

Such synchronised attacks, he said, required a ‘military-type response’, either by squads of soldiers or armed police. But we have neither in place.

This country is simply not trained, equipped or prepared in any way to deal with something on this scale.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown said that the Mumbai attacks had raised ‘huge questions’ about how the world should address violent extremism. But the first question he must answer is how the British approach will now change.

For the fact is that not only is Britain hopelessly unprepared for attacks of this kind, but the Government’s approach to the problem of home-grown radicalisation is misguided.

Wrongly believing that it can use religious fundamentalists to counter terrorist recruitment and that it must at all costs avoid causing offence, it is failing to stop extremists spreading their propaganda, handling their demands with kid gloves and undermining genuine moderates among Britain’s Muslims who have been left exposed, vulnerable and abandoned.

The reason for such flawed policies is the false analysis on which they are based. The Government and security establishment refuse to acknowledge that what we are facing is a religious war. Instead, they think that Islamist terrorism is driven by grievances which are basically the fault of the West.

But you have only to look around the world or at the history of the past four decades and more to see the absurdity and ignorance of this view.

Look at Thailand, for example, currently convulsed by Islamist terrorism in the south with bombings, beheadings and the murder of Buddhists.

Look at the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. Look at the Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Look, as Peter Clarke noted, at the attacks variously upon New York, Bali, Istanbul, Jakarta, Sharm el Sheikh, Casablanca, Madrid, London and India.

If we don’t understand what we are fighting, we cannot defeat it. Mumbai is yet another wake-up call — to a Britain that is still in a trance of denial.

December 1, 2008

Sucking up to Syria

Jewish Chronicle, 27 November 2008

Along with other British Jews, I have heard the Prime Minister speak movingly in public of his attachment to Israel, forged at his father’s knee in the Scottish manse where the people of the book were revered and their attachment to their ancient land cause for sympathy and support.

Yet, at this moment of intense and escalating danger for Israel, his government has nevertheless chosen to suck up to its enemies.

On his recent trip to the Middle East, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, attempted to enforce the EU boycott of goods produced by Israeli West Bank settlements, which he described as ‘illegal’, in order to place them under an economic siege that would hasten their disbandment.

The view that the settlements are illegal has been the Foreign Office position for years, although the reason it gives — that they are in breach of the Geneva Convention — is disputable and is rejected by Israel.

However, of even greater concern than this hostile act of attempted interference in the policy of another nation state was Mr Miliband’s announcement that Britain was now renewing its intelligence links with Syria. This is akin to the police sharing their information with the mafia on the basis that they are both on the same side against organised crime.

As the counter-terrorism analyst Jonathan Spyer has written, Syria is trying to market itself as an ally of the west against al Qaeda. But it has repeatedly given sanctuary to al Qaeda on its side of the Iraqi border.

Syria is a major sponsor of Islamist terrorism. It supports Hamas, Hizbollah and Islamic Jihad and acts as Iran’s proxy in the region. Only a few months ago, Israel bombed what is widely believed to have been an illicit Syrian nuclear reactor producing plutonium for atomic weapons.

Like the outgoing Israeli government, the British believe that Syria can be peeled away from its alliance with Iran to renounce its ties with terror and make peace with Israel.

Doubtless Syria would prefer not to be in Tehran’s pocket. But with Iran currently in the ascendant in the region and with America and Europe patently quailing before it, why should Syria think it in its interests to dump Iran for the west and its ‘moderate’ Sunni allies which Iran is outwitting at every turn?

In Damascus, Mr Miliband cited the recent establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Syria and Lebanon — whose government has been subjected to Syrian interference — as evidence that Syrian attitudes were being transformed. But the pro-Syrian Al-Akhbar newspaper explained that this formality merely reflected the domination of the Lebanese government by pro-Syrian elements.

Indeed, the Syrian official Assef Shawkat, himself formerly a chief suspect for the killing of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, which has been laid at Syria’s door, is now in charge of the joint Syrian-Lebanese campaign against ‘terrorism’.

Through the rapprochement with Syria, Mr Miliband has effectively thrown under the bus the Lebanese who are struggling to resist their Iranian and Syrian oppressors and achieve democracy.

The happy outcome for Syria is that it now has links with Britain and Europe while retaining its alliance with Iran, its support for Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, its interference in Lebanon and a free pass for the Hariri murder.

And Britain has got… nothing. Except the undermining of Israel’s security, the further strengthening of Iran and the weakening of the west.

The reason for this imbecility is not just the antipathy to Israel within the Foreign Office and on the left. It is also the belief currently dominant within the British establishment that talking to the enemies of civilisation such as Hamas, Hizbollah and even Iran (but not, tellingly, al Qaeda) can bring them in from the cold.

Believing in their own divinely inspired genius for dividing and ruling, these tunnel visionaries fail to understand that, sometimes, my enemy’s enemy may also be my enemy — and not, as is assumed to be axiomatic, my friend.

Like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown believes that solving the Israel-Palestine conflict would defuse global terror, including the threat of a nuclear Iran. But this is back to front.

Israel-Palestine will only be solved when the terror states backing the Palestinians are dealt with. Appeasing Syria in the belief that it will help defeat terror will strengthen the terrorism axis and put Israel in even greater danger.

This disastrous policy demonstrates once again an unpalatable fact: even those who are sympathetic to Israel promote policies which could destroy it.