24 May 2013
Stiff competition for Most Fatuous Reaction award
Published in: Melanie's blog
There’s been some stiff competition over the past 24 hours for the coveted award of Most Fatuous Reaction to a Jihadi Atrocity.
I hooted at the commentator visiting from planet Zog, who had thus totally missed all the barbaric snuff movie beheadings and eviscerations and human bomb attacks carried out by jihadists over the past two decades across the world and who wailed, poor dear, that ‘none of it made any sense’.
I enjoyed the pointed satire of the commentator who intoned that we were all guilty of causing the two jihadis to hack poor Drummer Rigby to death and tried to behead him, while claiming they were fulfilling the edicts of the Koran and waiting for the police to arrive in order to try to murder them too – but then I realised that it wasn’t satire at all.
I marvelled at the languidly superior commentator who drawled that the problem in Woolwich had been caused by ‘testosterone’ and that the real threat to all of us was actually from the collapsing EDL and the all-but collapsed BNP. And at the even more languidly superior commentator, who flicked barbs at Britain’s ‘hyperbole’ and ‘hysteria’ and implied that in Woolwich Britain kind of had it coming to it since it had been perceived as indifferent to ‘the appalling impact of a drone attack on a Pashtun village’.
Nice.
But worthy contenders as all these are for this prestigious award, I have decided that two further notable contributions tie in equal first place. In a statement described by the Spectator as ‘sensitive and calm’ the Prime Minister, David Cameron, told the nation that the Woolwich attack ‘was also a betrayal of Islam’ ,’ there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act’ and the fault lay ‘solely and purely with the sickening individuals who carried out this appalling attack’.
In similar vein the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson said:
‘It is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam but it is also equally wrong to try to draw any link between this murder and British foreign policy or the actions of British forces who are risking their lives abroad for the sake of freedom. The fault lies wholly and exclusively in the warped and deluded mindset of the people who did it.’
So to the Prime Minister and the Mayor, there was nothing to connect the Woolwich atrocity to Islam at all. But on his little video rant, one of the killers drew explicitly on the Koran as the inspiration for his attack:
‘Surat at-Tawba through...many, many ayat throughout the Qur’an that...we must fight them as they fight us...’
which refers to a number of exhortations to ‘fight the unbelievers and ‘kill the polythesists wherever you find them’ and other such stuff in similar vein..
Nothing to do with Islam? It’s as absurd as saying the Inquisition had nothing to do with the Catholic Church, or the Holocaust had nothing to do with Nazism but these things were just the product of a few warped and deluded individuals.
If indeed such terrorism is noting to do with Islam, why is it justified by the Islamic high establishment? As the liberal Egyptian thinker Tarek Heggy wrote last year:
‘The cornerstone of the theory, which is the essence of Islamic thinking, is that humans must not set the rules governing relations between people, but that these can only be set by the Almighty. To this day, not a single leader of any movement of political Islam has reconsidered the idea of hakemeya [the Islamist view of man-made laws] introduced by Sayed Qutb in his famous treatise, “Signposts Along the Road” … Thus the Islamist has a constant problem with man-made constitutional and legal rules.…
‘Certainly the leaderships of most schools of political Islam refuse to describe the suicide attacks launched by Muslim fanatics against civilians as terrorist attacks. Certainly too none of them consider Osama bin Laden a terrorist. Indeed, most hold him in high regard…’
What’s bizarre is that jihadis are treated as genuine Muslim spokesmen -- see the way broadcasters were giving one of them air-time yesterday -- but when it comes to analysing an Islamic terror attack, that very same political and media establishment falls over itself to agree with those extremists that its perpetrators are not real Muslims at all.
Even more absurd, these craven politicians are now being left behind by Muslims themselves. In the Guardian, for example, Usama Hasan has written:
‘British society, including its Muslim communities, needs to move beyond the routine condemnation of terrorist attacks and plots – there have been dozens since 9/11. We need instead to address the extreme Islamist ideology that al-Qaida and its sympathisers promote to incite attacks against soldiers and civilians worldwide in both war-torn and peaceful countries. Muslim leaders need to take ownership of the specifically religious aspects of the problem, that is to say the twisted theology that easily brainwashes vulnerable people, some of whom are intelligent university students and graduates.’
Maybe Usama Hasan could have a quiet word with the Prime Minister and Mayor of London.
23 May 2013
Denial is still a river in Londonistan
Published in: Melanie's blog
On one thing the British liberal class is certain – the hacking to death of a soldier in a Woolwich street yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with religion. The murderers screamed ‘Allahu akhbar’ as they tried to decapitate the soldier (a barbaric hallmark of Islamic terror), announced proudly that ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you’ and quoted the Koran as religious justification.
But the atrocity, we have been repeatedly told, had nothing to do with religion. Ever since 9/11, the UK and US political and media establishment, along with much if not most of the British security service and increasingly the US security establishment, has repeated this mantra. Killing in the name of Islam is a warped hijacking of the religion, a perversion of the religion, the very antithesis of the religion. But based on the precepts of the religion itself? Good heavens, no.
For more than two decades, the British political and security establishment has gone to extreme lengths to deny the true religious nature of the Islamic jihad, or holy war, against the free world and ‘backsliding’ Muslims (who are the jihad’s most numerous victims). There are several reasons for this state of denial, of which in my view the key is that to the official mind a holy war is such a fearsome prospect – it’s uncontrollable, can last for decades, is driven by wholly irrational motives immune to negotiation and is characterised by unmitigated savagery -- they cannot admit that this is what it actually is.
So instead they come up with absurd statements like the one made to me some years ago by a very senior security official, who said this couldn’t be an Islamic religious war because to say it was would demonise all Muslims.
This was clearly a risible non sequitur. The fact that many Muslims not only do not support the jihad but are being themselves persecuted by it does not make it any less of a holy war against their perceived backsliding or heresy.
Nor can anyone plausibly claim that the jihad is based on a ‘warped’ or ‘perverted’ form of Islam and is therefore not actually Islam at all. It is clearly an interpretation of Islam which, whatever you may think of it, is grounded in the religion. The fact that many Muslims reject this interpretation – and that there are indeed other rival interpretations -- is irrelevant to this point. It is arguably as authentic as more pacific interpretations – and more to the point, dominates the Islamic world today. To deny that is to deny its endorsement by the world’s leading Islamic jurists and scholars – or to pretend that they, too, are somehow not ‘real’ Muslims.
One of most difficult things to get across in this increasingly desperate argument is that there is within the Islamic world a continuum of aggressive or unacceptable views which emanate from the religion – a continuum which extends from prejudice and bigotry at one end to terrorism at the other -- that makes atrocities such as the one in Woolwich yesterday all but inevitable. While most at the merely bigoted end will neither support nor take part in terrorism, the noxious views they accept and promulgate create the lethal sea in which terrorism swims.
The result of the refusal to acknowledge this religious continuum is to undermine those Muslims who do most earnestly want to reform their religion. While the British and American victims of the jihad obdurately refuse to identify it as a religious issue, reformist Muslims haven’t got a leg to stand on in trying to make the case to their own community.
Today, I was contacted by someone from a Muslim family whose name is known to me but whose identity I will protect. His message in response to the Woolwich atrocity is so important, and so heartfelt and anguished, that I reproduce it here.
‘Confronting the Causes of Religion-Motivated Terrorism.
‘I'm from a Muslim family background, and I needed to write down my thoughts on this terrible and traumatic event. I feel that it raises points that would be appropriate for the excellent articles that you publish.
‘The overwhelming majority of Muslims here and throughout the world will be as horrified as anyone by the terrible events in Woolwich. Furthermore, I am certain that the overwhelming majority of Muslim organisations, imams and community leaders would describe the actions of the men concerned to be evil and un-Islamic. The accepted consensus among most scholars is that when you live in a non-Islamic country (where you are allowed live and practice your religion in peace), you are forbidden to make war on the people of that country.
‘That being said, surely it’s time for Muslims everywhere to confront some of the extreme views held within their communities and face up to the fact that such views may act as stepping-stones for some ignorant and impressionable people who go on to carry out atrocious acts of violence.
‘It is a fact that far too many Muslim scholars promote and far too many Muslims believe, interpretations of Islam that are anything but moderate. For example, that non-Muslims are morally and spiritually ‘inferior’ beings to Muslims or that in an ideal ‘Islamic’ society, the death penalty should apply for a Muslim who leaves Islam, for anyone who insults the Prophet, has sex outside of marriage or takes part in an homosexual act.
‘Whilst I’m not suggesting that any significant number of the Muslims holding such views would ever commit or even condone the events we saw in Woolwich, I am suggesting that if someone already believes such interpretations of Islam then it would be easier for them to believe that it’s morally acceptable to behead an off-duty soldier in the street.
‘As we have seen in the various media exposés, extreme views such as those outlined above are being promoted, often with impunity, in mosques, madrassas, faith schools and Islamic student societies throughout Britain. The result of this, as numerous polls have demonstrated, is that an unacceptably high minority of British Muslims support extreme and illiberal interpretations of Islam. For example, a poll carried out by Policy Exchange suggested that over a third of young British Muslims believe that the death penalty should apply for apostasy.
‘In every other aspect of our society, an ‘extremist’ is defined by both their actions and their personally held views. It is perfectly reasonable to label a racist a ‘racist’, whether or not they carry out illegal acts or promote law-breaking. For some reason, however, such rational logic isn’t generally applied when it comes to describing members of religious groups.
‘It seems that any Muslim who states that they support obeying the laws of the land is defined by default as ‘moderate’ without regard to whether he or she might hold some views that are very extreme and unpleasant indeed. However, a large section of our media and institutions appear to only label a Muslim as an ‘extremist’ if he or she breaks the law or incites others to do so.
‘This is illogical and irrational. The time has come for Muslim organisations, scholars, imams and lay-people to stand up and state unequivocally that interpretations such as those outlined above are unacceptable and should never be promoted, here or abroad. They should go further and distance themselves from anyone who promotes those views.
‘What’s more, politicians, the media and all of us should ask questions of any person who refuses to condemn such bigotry and ostracise them, just as we do with someone who refuses to condemn racism. Universities must ban Islamic societies that promote hateful views, and any mosque, madrassa or Islamic faith school that promotes extreme, illiberal interpretations of Islam should be closed down and the management prosecuted.
‘Stating that non-Muslims are inferior to Muslims or that people should be killed for leaving a religion or having gay sex is simple hate speech, whether or not the speaker believes that it is ordained by Allah. The fact that hate speech is illegal under English law recognises the fact that hateful speech can sometimes promote hateful action. Surely it’s time for the people who promote the views outlined above are treated as the criminals they are.
‘Most importantly, the time has come for our media, politicians and anti-fascist organisations to expose, name and shame any Muslim organisation, mosque, imam, scholar or spokesperson who refuses to condemn and distance themselves from the unacceptable interpretations of Islam that are far-too-often promoted without challenge in Britain today.’
The Prime Minister has spoken of the Woolwich killers ‘betraying’ Islam. But in refusing to acknowledge the true religious nature of such terrorism, it is surely he who is betraying reformist Muslims everywhere.
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