At last someone sounds a common sense note amid the calls for appeasement. "UK Said at Risk for Backing War on Terror," from AP, with thanks to The One Who Must Not Be Named:
Britain's close alliance with the United States has put it at particular risk of terrorist attack, two leading think tanks said Monday, but a government minister said the nation would not have been safer by staying out of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq....The Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Economic and Social Research Council said the situation in Iraq had given "a boost to the al-Qaida network's propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising" and provided an ideal training ground for al-Qaida-linked terrorists.
Defense Secretary John Reid, however, argued that terrorism had to be confronted.
"The idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground and it is also refuted by every piece of historical evidence that we have," Reid said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview.
Finally, some common sense.
Common sense? That understates John Reid's position considerably. It seems everyone has forgotten the British police constable who was murdered when the cops raided some apartment that was being used as a Ricin factory BEFORE the invasion of Iraq, not after.
Can't remember where I read it at the moment, but I read something about how Doug Herd (Brit foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher if I recall correctly) was a major obstacle in his times to understanding and taking action against what was already afoot in the Middle East.
Any Brit posters care to speculate?
I wonder if the next James Bond movie will have muslims as the bad guys?
I'm looking forward to it, if it does.
The honorobale Mr. Reid was indeed perceptive, but he's up against the standard Big Lie strategy. The US and UK being more susceptible to terror attacks now than before 9/11 has become a mantra repeated in various sectors of the MSM and academia, so people believe it. Perhaps we need to post and keep on posting some catalogues of Islamofascist terror attacks in various places prior to 9/11--waving some bloody shirts of our own. OBL made his point that he would attack and kill Americans back when Bill Clinton was president in the embassy bombings and first attempt on the WTC, acted on it, and never backed away. Spain's bugout from Iraq was not answered with greater Spanish security, but more bomb plots and more "Today Falastin, tomorrow Andaluz" rhetoric.
The Chatham House report comes from an organization long associated with that deplorable man, and bad historian, Arnold Toynbee. He was the one who found a nice outlet for his antisemitism (and his great affection for Arabs and Islam) in his work; he was raked over the coals for this by Elie Kedourie, in his "The Chatham House Version" and more generally, by real historians at a conference devoted to Toynbee in the 1950s, when his Grand Project was still a hot topic, each of whom got up, one after the other, and essentially said "Well, Toynbee may be right about everything else, but in the subject that I know best -- Ancient China, the Mayas, Byzantium, whatever -- he has it all wrong." And so it went, one after the other. Toynbee made a feeble reply in his "Reconsiderations" (a book I should throw out, but I can't find it to throw out).
The best rebuttal of Toynbee not on general history, but on his pathological dismissal of Judaism as a "fossil religion" that deserved to die, can be found in the calmly furious book by Maurice Samuel, the unanswerable "The Professor and the Fossil." If you can find it, it would be worth it.
At Chatham House today, assorted people with assorted Arab names work busily to convince us, whatever we do or do not do -- I heard one of them, a Rima something or other, being exposed on the BBC by an infuriated David Aronovich of The Times for her illogic, and misstatements even of the Chatham House report (which, by the way, does NOT say what the BBC and The Guardian say it said)-- that it is "Iraq" or "Palestine" (you know, the toponym, and therefore the entity, that has totally replaced Israel in so much BBC discussion?)or something else that explains the behavior of Muslims.
How about this? How about the idea that Islam explains the behavior of Muslims? How about the BBC sending one of its reporters to some distant, exotic place -- you know, like Foyle's, to buy a copy of the Qur'an (or a few copies), and then a copy of al-Bukhari's collection of Hadith, and then a copy of the Sira (Muhammad's biography). Why not have that non-Muslim reporter, one not known as an apologist for Islam, start reading, start studying. Give him a few weeks to do it -- to read that, to read Joseph Schacht on Muslim law, and David Margoliouth on Early Islam, to read St. Clair Tisdall and and Zwemer and Spell and Henri Lammens, and then let him to go the library, for another few weeks, to read back usses of "The Moslem World." He can even read Bat Ye'or's three books on dhimmitude, and "Eurabia" as well.
Then let him come back and report on the BBC, in one of those rare moements when the Arab and Muslim apologists are away attending a memorial service for Lord Haw-Haw, or Oswald Moseley, or going to some Reuters-sponsored dinner for Robert Fisk and George Galloway, or others of that ilk.
We all pay taxes so that a police force of somekind can protect us from the criminals in our village, town or city, right?
The 2 so-called "think tanks" that aren't collectively smart enough to understand that you don't put yourself at the "benevolent mercy" of criminals by ridding yourself of the police, should be dissolved immediately and take up something more along their hogwash, limp-wristed line-of-thought.
Perhaps they might become staff members at UC Berkeley, for instance.