A few much-needed observations cutting through the dhimmitude of officials such as Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and showing the hollowness of the idea that all this awaits a political solution, from David Aaronovitch in The Observer, with thanks to Nicolei:
In the face of this ruthless exploitation of the softest of soft targets, do we (do the Russians) talk, shoot or give in? Which do we do in Iraq, when faced with hostage-taking by what are usually now called 'insurgents'?Sometimes you aren't given the option, of course. Last week 12 Nepalese workers for a Jordanian construction company were killed by an organisation calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army. On video one was beheaded ('The blindfolded man moaned and a shrill wheeze was heard. The masked man then displayed the head to the camera before resting it on the decapitated body.') and the other 11 were shot ('Blood seeped from their bodies onto the sand'). The accompanying statement read, 'The ruling of God was implemented on 12 Nepalese who came to Iraq to fight against Muslims and to serve the Jews and Christians. They are from the Buddhist faith.' Nepal has no troops in Iraq.
In the same week al-Jazeera, which has allowed itself to be co-opted as the publicity arm of such organisations, aired a clip from a Zarqawi video showing three Turkish lorry drivers seated in front of some gunmen. Later the men were found dead near Samarra. Turkey has no troops in Iraq.
There were demands, however, made in the case of Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist and Red Cross worker, kidnapped and his driver killed by a group called the Islamic Army in Iraq. When the Italian government refused to withdraw its troops from Iraq, Baldoni was murdered.
The same group has been holding the two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, whose appeals to the French government to repeal the school hijab ban were broadcast on al-Jazeera. The French have naturally refused to comply with the repeal demand, but they did something else instead. Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres appealed to the kidnappers, arguing that, 'We do not understand why journalists (were taken hostage ... when our country, in terms of Iraq, expressed with immense force in the United Nations the necessity of respecting international law to restore peace.'
I sympathise entirely with the desire to free these two men from the threat of death, but isn't de Vabres's position essentially that he quite understands why these groups kill Italians, murder some miserable Nepalese and execute a few Turks, but that it just isn't fair to do it to the French?
So the Islamic Action Front of Jordan (currently attempting to prevent proper penalties against so-called 'honour killers' in that country) says that the journalists' lives should be spared 'Because of France's distinguished position in rejecting the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq.' Not because you shouldn't murder journalists. A Hamas spokesman in Gaza agreed, arguing that freeing the Frenchmen would increase the isolation of Israel and the US. Not because you shouldn't kill journalists. The French argument, regrettably, amounts to the same thing.
Or, to put it another way, if you leave well alone you should be able to avoid being terrorised. Yesterday, in the wake of the Beslan school horror, the historian Corelli Barnett more or less blamed the crisis on the war against terror itself. His thesis was that, since September 11th, the actions of the West (and particularly the Americans) had made things far, far worse.
The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself. Declared in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, declared in New York on 11 September. It wasn't until 11 September, however, that we began to appreciate the scale of what was already happening. The idea that, had we negotiated with the Taliban, left Saddam in place and put more pressure on Sharon to settle, kids would now be safe in North Ossetia, is just wishful thinking.
In Saturday's Guardian Isabel Hilton gave a more interesting explanation. This is an era, she pointed out, of asymmetric warfare in which - regrettably - outgunned insurgents eventually come after kids, journalists and Nepalese cooks. What else (she implied) are they going to do? But wasn't Gandhi's situation asymmetric? Did he take over schools and kill the kids? Did Mandela? Is it really the case that what we have here are outgunned liberation movements?
On Thursday night Channel Four showed the drama The Hamburg Cell, which attempted to get inside the minds of the young al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the 11 September hijackings. What the film showed was a classic cult in operation, with young men - pampered and envious, frustrated and egotistic - urging each other on to more and more pitiless acts of violence. The film not only explained the Twin Towers, it inadvertently explained Jonestown and the mass suicide in the Guyanese jungle.
It was also interesting to see how they provided intellectual justification for their actions. Everything was read in one direction: how Muslims were forced to suffer. So, for example, the West's inaction in Bosnia was thrown into the balance, but not its intervention on the side of the Muslims of Kosovo.
I finished watching The Hamburg Cell to find an email waiting. It was from a named professional in a British provincial city. He was complaining about a couple of anti-Muslim articles by men called Browne and Cummins, run in The Times and the Sunday Telegraph. Part of it read, 'I presume you are also a Jew because it is Jews who have lost their marbles and shoot themselves in both feet and legs.... You can't escape the conclusion that most of the commentators are Jewish and their primary aim is to get the Christians to beat the hell out of Islam and Muslims. But do not be expecting me to shed tears as the same bullies would turn on Jews again and may be there would be a final holocaust against them, invited by themselves.'
Where do I even begin? By pointing out that Browne and Cummins are not, on the face of it, Jewish names? How do I mollify a man whose every sentence is so flawed, yet so certain? Let alone a man who believes that God has instructed him to kill Nepalese cooks, or will absolve him if he shoots a fleeing child in the back?
I am not saying that the only answer is in security. In the case of Chechnya I take the argument of those who point out that, until five years ago and Moscow's reoccupation of the province, there was no significant terrorism there. It seems to me that an absolutely necessary part of the battle for a safer world consists of cutting away as much as you can of the potential support for terrorists.
The logic of this is not, however, to concede to terrorists. Much of what they want we can never give them, and much of what they want lies in the act of terrorism itself. And it as false a trope to say that there are usually political solutions to terrorism as to say that there are always military ones.
Brilliant piece, if I may!
More of such honesty is needed and beocmes easier to find as the terrorists' actions become more and more indigestible.....
God bless the free world.
One way to "chip away" at support is to constantly emphasize, and provide evidence for, the political, economic, intellectual, and moral failures of Islam. Not a single Muslim state is a democracy with the possible, and shaky, exception of Turkey (the army has intervened before, and may have to again), and Turkey is the only Muslim state where Islam was constrained by a series of Kemalist reforms. There are no Muslim states that are economic successes; there are Muslim states that possess great wealth through an accident of geology -- oil and gas, and one (Malaysia) that has great natural wealth and nearly 50% of the population non-Muslim and whose industry and enterprise are exploited through the Bumiputra system, an updated jizya which requires sharing by Hindus and Chinese (bringing in as "partners") Muslim Malays.
Were there no oil and gas revenues, and no foreign aid from Infidels (really, ALL foreign aid to Muslim states must stop, so that those countries will have to busy themselves with attempting to stay afloat, and everyone will have to have jobs instead of sitting in cafes with the hubble-bubble pipe, and a coffee, and talking politics, and watching Al-Jazeera, and going to the mosque, and whipping each other up), the full economic failure woudl be seen.
But it is the intellectual failure that needs most to be empohasized. No statuary, no paintings (would you be surprised if the Louvre, or the Uffizi, or the Rijksmuseum were seized, and everyone in it held hostage, or one masterpiece after another destroyed -- after all, they were not created by Muslims, they violate Muslim laws, they are an offense to Allah, those statues, those paintings of living beings; landscapes get a reprieve). No free or skeptical inquiry. Rather, indoctrination, learning by rote, and above all civilizations of one book, or two -- Qur'an and hadith, or three -- Qur'an and hadith and sira -- All Ye Know on Earth and All Ye Need to Know. Mere technologists can come out of Islam, but not discoverers of DNA or subatomic particles. No music to speak of -- certainly not Gospel or Church music (no Negro spirituals, no Bach, no Isaac Watts hymns), no jazz, no Stravinsky, just a dreary monontonous Egyptian orchestra, of the kind found on those Arab television programs that are beamed into the London hotel rooms of rich Arab businessmen. No literature for a thousand years in Arabic, though some freethinkers and Persian nationalists -- Omar Khayyam, Sa'adi, Firdousi -- who were every inch, like the greatest figure of Islamic science, Al-Rhaze, practically apostates, opposed to the spirit of the imposed Arab Islam, in their attitudes, iand in the content of their poetry. Neither the Shahnama, nor the roses and bulbuls and wine of Omar Khayyam and Sa'adi, nor the "singing crows" of earliest Arabic poetry after the arrival of Islam, have much to do with Islam.
After the gates of ijtihad swung closed nearly a millennium ago, and after the indigenous Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians of the Muslim Middle East were sufficiently reduced in numbers as no longer to contribute much to intelellectual activity, such activity ceased. There was Islam, and only Islam.
In the same way, as Europeans are committing civilizational suicide -- first by shutting down all sources of criticism of current policies, including the refusal to describe the real content of Islam, as the cases of Cummins and Clifford and a thousand others whose names we do not know, make clear -- it will not all happen at once, the decline and disappearance of intellectal life. It will be a slow, a dying fall. Some European non-Muslims will be killed. Others will convert, especially the mentally infirm and the marginal, wanting to join the winning side. Still others will flee to America, the last redoubt, still protecting the New World. And in Europe, as long as those who were formed in part by a non-Islamic culture, and their children, and grandchildren will also have been affected by pre-Islamic life, there will remain sparks of that life -- that is exactly what happened in the Muslim East. And then it came to an end. Those brief centuries in which there was some scientific inquiry came to an end -- one of the great puzzles for historians of science, but really not a puzzle at all. For as long as they ignore the demographic element, and ignore the rigidity of Islam, they will never understand why, for example, though Aristotle was first avaialalbe in the Islamic world, nothing was made of him in that world, but only in Europe, which received those writings of his which had not been known (some were, of course, all along) much later.
Christianity, unlike Islam, and unlike all those stories based on the Galileo episode, proved to be congenial, in the end, to scientific inquiry (the same year, 1543, that Copernicus, who had studied canon law as well as mathematical sciences at Padova, had his main work published, was the very year that Vesalius' contribution to the study of the human body appeared). Islam for a thousand years has been uncongenial to all intellectual life that is not, in the end, about Islam.
Intelligent and thinking people, of course, are born into Islam. Some of them manage to fight their way out mnentally, but keep it to themselves. Some find they remain so defensive, so unwilling to recognize that the mind-forged manacles of Islam have been the main obstacle to achievement and development of their own societies, out of filial piety, out of fear of the unknown, out of distaste for the West's license and disorder (a distaste which, of course, many in the West also share, but not in order to embrace something still worse, the mental prison of Islam).
Instead of boosting Islam, even "moderate" Islam, let us do nothing to help the Muslim countries, in any way. Let their own deficiencies become evident, and let a steady stream -- not of propaganda, but of the truth -- be uttered. The more sensible people in the Muslim world will have to agree, if only secretly and to themselves. If you were a billionaire in Kuwait, and could live anywhere, and had a house in Cadogan Square, in London, and a flat in New York, and your darling child attended the American School in Kuwait, and you were a Muslim, would you really, really want that child to remain a full-fledged and believing Muslim? Or would you, out of civilizational pride, want him to be called a "Muslim" as, of course, you continue to call yourself such, but in your own thoughts, and even in some thoughts that you occasionally allow yourself to express to one or two others (but never to Infidels, no, they must not know), that Islam itself is retrograde and inimical to the development of your son's potential -- well, surely that kind of thing is going on, slowlly, slowly. But it is.
While the pyschically marginal convert to Islam from -- well, from essentially nothing at all, the very best people who are born into Islam are converting out, or leaving religion altogether. It is like two baseball teams, making trades, and one side keeps getting all the best players, trading them for all the worst. Let's keep it up.
We were surprised and dumbfounded when viewing a bbc report (with diagrams) that
(instead of painting the Russian opps as the perpetrators )
Actually Showed AND stated only facts....these bbc "facts" were ..
The operatives were 150? meters from the school
"clearly" (BC quote) In NO position, or stance to conduct a raid,
The terrorists had agreed to let a MEDICAL team enter to clear out some of the bodies.
As the team got within 10 meters of the entrance point they were to use... a Bomb detonates.
(BBC quote--(perhaps by accident?)
After the explosion ,children began to run from the exit,... these children received fire from their six o clock ...Terrorists, INSIDE the building were shooting the escapees in the back.THEN the Russian opps were seen to move in.
There should've never been an issue to handle in the first place. If Muslims would somehow obtain a shread of common sense and decency, that or take themselves out, the world would be a nice place.
Muslims are screwing it up for everyone, and they need to be medicated like any other disease.
Russia should bear NO responsibility for the deaths of their citizens in the school massacre (hey if the stinky palis can use massacre...as in Jenin massacre...when only 26 maggots died)...if a person drives drunk and kills someone the manufactorer of the alcohol isnt responsible...that person CHOSE to drink and drive...just like the maggots CHOSE to massacre helpless babies...no, the responsibility is that of muslims...yea all of them...havent even heard any western muslims condem this massacre...like I said it must be getting pretty hard for them to act sad and upset when inside they are bursting with glee thinking that their backward terror ccult is gaining ground...think wrongly of course.
It's worth pointing out that David Aaronovitch is a man of the left: far to the left of most American liberals, in fact.
I'm confused. Why did Russia "reoccupy" the Russian province of Chechnya if there was no significant terrorism there? How does the Russian army "reoccupy" Russian territory anyway? If this is such a bad thing, did not the United States "reoccupy" the State of Virginia after the Civil War, and shouldn't it therefore be "liberated"?
And we all continue to learn...
I have been thinking about 'Islamic triumphalism' and what I continue to learn about it.
In the early 80s, the Soviet quagmire in Afganstian was delightful to many of us: 'its their Vietnam'. And the horrors of the Iranian revolution were never broadcasted in the West. Media were quick to look for moral equivalencies between the Shah and Khomenieni.
But these two events, 'the crack in the Godless, Soviet Infidel', and 'the crack in the Great Satan', sparked the tremendous movement in Islam that grows today to horrific proportions; and it is not inspired by the 'attack' of the Infidels in Iraq (which, if anything is perceived as a 'triumph' of its own, drawing the Infidel into a battle to bring death; like the Jihadists in Jenin. The Israelis gave them just what they wanted: soldiers walking down streets.), but the triumphs of Islamic violence, the growth in the Islamic collective, all over the world.
We were utterly ignorant, and we continue to be.
In the 80s: the mutation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (the murderers of Sadat), the birth of Hamas, the birth of Hezbollah, and the seeds of what we call 'al Qaeda'. These were all children of the 'triumphs' of the early 1980s, and, of course, the 'triumph' of economic and political 'successes', i.e. oil and the political clout that goes with it.
Hugh has spoken eloquently on 'Islamic triumpalism' here, and Robert aires frequent warnings about how weakness of Infidels is perceived in Jihad, but I have seen nothing by anybody else, anywhere, at least not in a major publication.
Good old British defiance is rearing its head...has the second Battle of Britian finally begun? A piece on 'Islamic triumphalism' in Britian would just tickle me to the bone.
Another scathing post by Hugh. My hearty regards.
I think its time, we start donating time, money, talent to creating ads like the 527s do, to chronologically deoicting facts about islam and ask the US electorate what their candidates have to say about islamism.
It seems that next to the mainstream press which continues to apologise for islamism, its only mainstream TV through which our message can get to the masses.
JTF said:
"But these two events, 'the crack in the Godless, Soviet Infidel', and 'the crack in the Great Satan', sparked the tremendous movement in Islam that grows today to horrific proportions..."
Right on target with this statement. I would like to relate an incident, one from which I became aware, that occurred to my mother in 1985.
My mother was born and raised in France and still holds French citizenship. She has been in this country since 1956.
Anyways, a family health crisis prompted her to return to France in 1985. Her aunt was dying of liver cancer.
She had been back to France on numerous occasions prior to '85, but this particular visit opened up my mother's eyes to something that "just wasn't right."
She was tending to her aunt's bedside one day, but had to leave in order to tend to some other business.
Her departure from the hospital room coincided with one of the daily five calls to prayer of the Muslim faith.
As she stepped out from her aunt's room, she tripped over a worshipper who had prostrated himself right there on the hospital hallway floor.
But, he wasn't the only one. There were several that she had to step over just to get out of the building. Upon exiting, the situation was worse; snarled Paris traffic STOPPED in order to accomodate the call.
That was '85 and the day my mother said that France was no longer her country. She has been back, to be sure, but for her it just isn't the same.
P.S.
My post was also a response to Hugh's post concerning the slow decay of European civilisation by the demographic bomb of Islam.
Avrage Joe you're right. The Russians had no choice but to move in when they did. Not only that, but the children hadn't eaten or drunk anything for 3 days.
Al Jazeera has received a further ban on broadcasting by Interim Iraqi Govt. Naturally they
are OUTRAGED, protesting their 'Code of Ethics'etc. Sent them a satirical E Mail which must have touched a nerve as got a reply from
ROSHAN SALID. Note he 'admits we do give a platform to Al Quaida.'
Thank you for your mail.I can assure you we are not al-Quaida or any other organizations' mouthpiece. But we do give a platform to al-Quaida to express its views as we do the US government,Arab governments and anyone else who has got anything newsworthy to say.That's journalism - letting all the concerned parties express their opinions and then letting the viewers/readers make up their own minds.
As for Iraq, any journalist who has ever been there[and presumably survived hostage taking or beheading - Morgane] will tell you that there are numerous and serious problems in that country. On the other hand, we do report the positive things that US and Iraqi Interim government has to say about the situation.
Is anyone reassured?? By the way their spokesman
has the interesting name of JIHAD BALLOUT!!
Voltaire says:
"...or drunk anything for 3 days."
Except their own urine.
The mujahedeen must have thought themselves clever.
To deny the life-giving liquid to the infidel seeking an earthly survival is much more humorous knowing that they (Shahids) will enjoy the martrydom reward of being eternally watered.
It's a muslim joke.
Just one of many mourning mothers. The normal imagination wavers when contemplating one's mother mourning for her child.
The fodder filled cannons of Islam contain numerous upon numerous volleys of their own spawn and the only thought is one of a contribution for the sake of the ummah.
Cult? No doubt about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/international/europe/05CND-SCHO.html?hp