The quiet-life option ensures that attacks go on (Steyn)

The Daily Telegraph (London) ^ | July 8, 2005 | Mark Steyn

[T-Bird45]

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On September 11, 2001, al-Qa'eda set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7.30 and nine that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 per cent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against us, two generations of British politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd "crack in the system" through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on 9/11 the failure of the system was total.

Yesterday, al-Qa'eda hit three Tube trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the central zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.

The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue - literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty's Government prioritising terrorism and "security" above all else - and the failure rate was still 100 per cent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by the spate of comic security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St Stephen's Tower, a Mirror reporter blags his way into a servants' gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William's party.

As I wrote in The Daily Telegraph last March, "History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm - the Queen, her heir, her Parliament - should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism."

To three high-profile farces, we now have that high-profile tragedy, of impressive timing. It's not a question of trying and prodding and testing and finding the weak link in the chain, the one day - on Monday or Wednesday, in January or November, when an immigration official or a luggage checker is a bit absent-minded and distracted and you slip quietly through. Instead, the jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G8 summit and managed to pull it off - at a time when ports and airports and internal security were all supposed to be on heightened alert. That's quite a feat.

Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G8 summit. In theory, the anti-glob mob should be furious with al-Qa'eda and its political tin ear for ensuring that their own pitiful narcissist protests - the pâpier-maché Bush and Blair puppets, the ethnic drumming, etc - will be crowded off the news bulletins.

But I wonder. It seems just as plausible that there will be as many supple self-deluding figures anxious to argue that it's Blair's Iraq war and the undue attention it invites from excitable types that's preventing us from ending poverty in Africa by the end of next week and all the other touchy-feely stuff. The siren songs of Bono and Geldof will be working hard in favour of the quiet-life option. There is an important rhetorical battle to be won in the days ahead. The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid.

That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism". What would you call giving IRA frontmen offices at Westminster? It's the target that decides whether terror wins - and in the end, for all the bombings, the British people and their political leaders decided they preferred to regard the IRA as a peripheral nuisance which a few concessions could push to the fringe of their concerns.

They thought the same in the 1930s - back when Czechoslovakia was "a faraway country of which we know little". Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists - the IRA, ETA - operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G8 militaries can't manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.

Did we learn enough, for example, from the case of Omar Sheikh? He's the fellow convicted of the kidnapping and beheading in Karachi of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. He's usually described as "Pakistani" but he is, in fact, a citizen of the United Kingdom - born in Whipps Cross Hospital, educated at Nightingale Primary School in Wanstead, the Forest School in Snaresbrook and the London School of Economics. He travels on a British passport. Unlike yours truly, a humble Canadian subject of the Crown, Mr Sheikh gets to go through the express lane at Heathrow.

Or take Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati, a senior al-Qa'eda member from Morocco killed by Saudi security forces in al Ras last April. One of Mr Majati's wives is a Belgian citizen resident in Britain. In Pakistan, the jihadists speak openly of London as the terrorist bridgehead to Europe. Given the British jihadists who've been discovered in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia, only a fool would believe they had no plans for anything closer to home - or, rather, "home".

Most of us can only speculate at the degree of Islamist penetration in the United Kingdom because we simply don't know, and multicultural pieties require that we keep ourselves in the dark. Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of Britain's Islamic Human Rights Commission, is already "advising Muslims not to travel or go out unless necessary, and is particularly concerned that women should not go out alone in this climate". Thanks to "Islamophobia" and other pseudo-crises, the political class will be under pressure to take refuge in pointless gestures (ie, ID cards) that inconvenience the citizenry and serve only as bureaucratic distractions from the real war effort.

Since 9/11 most Britons have been sceptical of Washington's view of this conflict. Douglas Hurd and many other Tory grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis à vis the Balkans in the early 1990s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a westernised non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalised by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.

Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanised Muslim radicalised by Bosnia. The inactivity of Do-Nothin' Doug and his fellow Lions of Lethargy a decade ago had terrible consequences and recruited more jihadists than any of Bush's daisy cutters. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: it was what Don Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterised as an "unknown unknown" - a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle, for Britain and the West. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

[T-Bird45]

Great Steyn, as is usual and expected. An extended discussion of the Tao of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us", served with a British perspective and a twist of lime.

[beebuster2000]

good post. thanks

[Thinkin]

Thanks for the post....passed it on...

[Veto!]

Steyn ping

[TomasUSMC]

multicultural pieties require that we keep ourselves in the dark

---

In the dark, as in the subway, underground, breathing smoke, crawling out a broken window.

The People of Iran need to be told that if they don't overthrow those insane mullahs, we will have to do it, with the resulting unavoidable collateral damage resulting from carpet bombing.

[glock rocks]

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle, for Britain and the West. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

Radical Islam does not have its Sartre and its Pound. It is the conceit of intellectuals to think that this counts for more than a Richard Reid, armed this time not with a shoe-bomb but a nuclear suitcase or a consignment of anthrax.

Disdaining the appeal of radical Islam is the conceit also of secularists. Radical Islam is not just as fanatical and unappeasable in its anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism and anti-modernism as anything we have ever known. It has the distinct advantage of being grounded in a venerable religion of over one billion adherents that not only provides a ready supply of recruits-trained and readied in mosques and madrassas far more effective, autonomous and ubiquitous than any Hitler Youth or Konsomol camp-but is able to draw on a long and deep tradition of zeal, messianic expectation and a cult of martyrdom. Hitler and Stalin had to invent these out of whole cloth. Mussolini's version was a parody. Islamic radicalism flies under a flag with far more historical depth and enduring appeal than the ersatz religions of the swastika and hammer-and-sickle that proved so historically thin and unsubstantial...

Radical Islam's obvious intent is to decapitate the American polity, cripple its economy and create general devastation. We have seen what a mere 19 Islamists can do in the absence of WMD. We have seen what but two envelopes of mail-delivered anthrax can do to the world's most powerful capital. Imagine what a dozen innocuous vans in a dozen American cities dispersing aerosolized anthrax could do. Imagine what just a handful of the world's loose nukes, detonated simultaneously in New York, Washington, Chicago and just a few other cities, could do to the United States. America would still exist on the map, but what kind of country -- and what kind of polity -- would be left? If that is not an existential threat, nothing is.

-- Charles Krauthammer

[T-Bird45]

Thanks for the Krauthammer quote as it is exactly on point with Steyn. The desire for touchy-feely PC when it is our very lives or way of life being threatened is insane.

[M. Espinola]

"The People of Iran need to be told that if they don't overthrow those insane mullahs, we will have to do it, with the resulting unavoidable collateral damage resulting from carpet bombing."

Correct! If the mullahs are not overthrown & quickly, these fanatics cut from the same depraved mold as those terrorist jihadists which committed the London mass transit mass slaughter, will be in possession of offensive nuclear weapons, and are fanatical enough to launch the unthinkable!

Unless there are united, concerted & forceful efforts to topple those in charge of jihad promoting rouge states, the very enemy which trains and bankrolls the horde of jihadic killers, we will not succeed in defeating this global scourge.

[glock rocks]

ping

[Reactionary]

"Unless there are united, concerted & forceful efforts to topple those in charge of jihad promoting rouge states, the very enemy which trains and bankrolls the horde of jihadic killers, we will not succeed in defeating this global scourge."

Exactly. But no one has the guts to do it, lest the Leftists spew hate crime.

[goldstategop]

The Left argues Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda and wants us to get out of Iraq. What happened in London yesterday has revealed that if we retreat, our enemy will take the war to our home soil. Reactive defense is no strategy for dealing with Islamofascist violence in the Age Of Terror, or more accurately, the Third World War. We have a choice between surrender or victory. There is no third option.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Last Dakotan]

The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid.

Sums up the entire article.

[Jim_Curtis]

Is he blaming some lukewarm response to join bin Laden's jihad against the Christian Serbs for Islamic terrorism? I hear the author moaning but not clearly stating anything.

[bourbon]

Excellent. I just located a new tagline.

[RedwineisJesus]

"""Great Steyn, as is usual and expected."""

Seemed a little subdued. None of the usual hilarity.

But then, it WAS a very sad day, and even Mark Steyn is not a superhuman capable of cranking out fantastic pieces at will, I guess.

I'll give him a couple of days.

[M. Espinola]

"Exactly. But no one has the guts to do it, lest the Leftists spew hate crime."

I don't even like throwing this thought out there, but if our leaders do not attack 'all' aspects of Jihad Inc, we will indeed suffer the unthinkable, since pseudo-appeasement only strengthens this enemy's terrorist hate crimes.

The Axis was defeated through total war directed against their brand of world-wide terrorism.

They started it - we finished it!

[Travis McGee]

Great CK post!

[fso301]

Do you have a link to that Krauthammer article? I'd like to send it to someone.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

I hear the author moaning but not clearly stating anything.

That's because he can't say, "Kill or Convert all Muslims." any more than Bush or Blair can. So not only is it moaning, it is hypocrisy.

[Darnright]

Wretchard, over at The Belmont Club, has written along similar lines, concerning the terrorist hits in London.

He writes, "This would mean that the cell or gang was homegrown, rather than smuggled in from North Africa or elsewhere. Or it could mean coordination between the two. In any event, there are two considerations here. The first is Britain's role as a leading member of the "Coalition" in Iraq and Afghanistan. The second is its role as a host to a large and growing Muslim minority. The first British citizens to be killed in Afghanistan were fighting for the Taliban, which is proof in itself that the Iraq war is not the original motivating force. Last year, two British Muslims pulled off a suicide attack at an Israeli beach resort. In many British cities, there are now demands for sexual segregation in schools and for separate sharia courts to try Muslim defendants. The electoral strength of Muslims is great enough to encourage pandering from all three parties: The most egregious pandering of all has come from Blair himself, who has promised legislation that would outlaw any speech that could be construed as offensive to Islam. Since most British Muslims are of Asian descent, a faint sense exists that criticism of their religion is somehow racist: In practice this weak-mindedness leads to the extension of an antiquated law on blasphemy that ought long ago to have been repealed but is now to cover the wounded feelings of Muslims as well as Christians."