A story in the Sunday Herald (thanks to Teri) about a new series of weepies about how bad it is for Muslims in the UK today makes a curious statement:
The film suggests that paranoia about Islam, racism and heavy-handed treatment by police encourage isolation and extremism. It was written by Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter of The Fully Monty, and tells of a young woman whose Pakistani husband is accused of being a terrorist and is imprisoned.
Glasgow-based Glenaan said: “We went around the country asking whether the then-unthinkable could happen: could Britain produce a suicide bomber? The 400 stories have been condensed into one family representing a community imploding under the pressure.
“As anti-terrorism legislation is made stricter, with an already-disenfanchised British Asian community, we could be in danger of producing more Osama bin Ladens. Islamophobia, mistrust and fear are putting an immense pressure on this community .”
All right. Let me get this straight, please. Anti-terror legislation produces Osamas? So then an absence of anti-terror legislation will make those Osamas disappear?
If we don’t do anything about terrorism, we won’t have any terrorism to do anything about?
This is crazy thinking, of course, and its underlying assumption is that there actually is no terrorism. It is all just a reaction to the evils of the West. It’s the same kind of thinking, found among the Left as well as the Right, that if we would just stop bothering Muslims so much — over Israel, or Iraq, or whatever — then we would have no problem with them.
Such a view shows no awareness of the fact that doctrines like this are being taught all over the Islamic world:
Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah [the society of unbelievers]. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’ah will prevail, or else people’s desires: “And if they do not respond to you, then know that they only follow their own lusts. And who is more astray than one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah? Verily! Allah guides not the people who are disobedient.”[28:50]; “Do they then seek the judgement of (the Days of) Ignorance? And who is better in judgement than Allah for a people who have firm faith”[5:50].
The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man, with the intention of raising human beings to that high position which Allah has chosen for him.
The speaker is the leading radical Muslim theorist Sayyid Qutb. Other writings on jihad by him and many others, along with one by Osama’s former associate and intellectual mentor, Abdullah Azzam, can be found here, at the Muslim Student Association site of Montclair State University. (Some of the links there are broken.)