After Londonistan (Britain No Longer Heaven For Jihadists)

New York Times ^ | June 25, 2006 | CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

[AntiGovernment]

"Behold!" reads an official police notice on the waiting-room wall at the Bethnal Green police station, in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. "Fear from people should not prevent one from saying the truth if he knows it." It is a hadith saying of the Prophet Muhammad

...

Whether Iraq is a "cause" of terror or a mere pretext is a difficult question. Radical jihadists have threatened and attacked countries that opted out of the Iraq conflict. And if Iraq "causes" someone to become a suicide bomber, it is almost certainly not in the way Western liberals understand political causation. The terrorist may already hold jihadist views. He may be whipped into bloodlust by images on TV or the Internet. He may regard the invasion of Iraq as an incursion upon the prerogatives of the Ummah — but the source of his anger is unlikely to be any supposed violation of international law. In the end, though, it may not matter if everyone means something different by "Iraq." A shared opposition to the war tightens the identification between radical and nonradical Muslims, and between both those groups and some members of the non-Muslim Western left, and this muddies the terms with which the battle of ideas around terrorism is fought.

...

Yvonne Ridley, a journalist who was seized by the Taliban in 2001, converted to Islam two years later and is now a leader of the anti-Iraq war Respect Party, called on Muslims to stop cooperating with the police.

[AntiGovernment]

Very good and insightful article about terrorism and Islam in Great Britain.

[AntiGovernment]

Ping

[aculeus]

... There is another problem. If the jihadists from all over the world who have gone to fight in Iraq follow the example of their Afghan forebears and carry on the jihad when they return home, then Britain is going to be very hard hit. Earlier this month, The Sunday Times reported that there is a "British brigade" of 150 radicals fighting coalition forces in Iraq. Shortly before the death of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. bombing raid earlier this month, his Web site was running English-language recruitment messages reading, "They are fighting; you should be too."

[dk/coro]

LOL...show me an anti-Militant Islamist -- and I will show you a pig that has yet to get its lipstick smeared.

Folks...We Are AT War!!! Global in scope; inter-civizational; and on a scale and with a time-frame not yet discernible.

The outcome is far from certain, in my view. When viewed at the tribal level, it depends on the will and tenacity of the tribe. And, that is where the sine curve of civilizational life spans comes into play -- Big Time !!!

[aculeus]

Sunday morning bump for an interesting long article.

[jordan8]

London is a HAVEN for Muslims, that's the problem, whether it is HEAVEN for Jihadists is not as important. A few bombs going off here and there won't change much, a mass population of hostile foreigners occupying British territory will, and permanently.

London ranks among the capitals of the Muslim world . . . the government insists that it will do everything in consultation with the country's 1.6 million Muslims, half of whom are under 25, with the goal of winning their hearts and minds.

If these words don't awaken in you the desire to cut some liberal throat then you just don't get it.

[attiladhun2]

Samuel P. Huntington calls the current clash of Islam and the West a "clash of civilizations." I say it is not so much a clash of civilizations as one of civilization vs. Bedouin-barbarism. (Islam is actually the anti-civilization since it has contributed little to the greater civilization of humanity but rather plunders from civilizations and when the plunder runs out "Islamic civilization" declines and then disappears).

[dk/coro]

I won't split hairs over this one. SJH was addressing the issue in much broader terms than Bernard Lewis, Dan Pipes, Gaddis, Johnson, etc, who narrowed the debate -- especially after 9/11 into the clearly defined challenge Islam poses to "Christendom" (Western Democracy).

All of the above pragmatists certainly, as a group" clearly argued the tribal aspects of man's cultural affinity vis-a-vis the Fukuyama globalists, who falsely, in my opinion, placed their bets on man's inherent sociability and desire for global harmony.

Tommyrot, of course. I am surprised that Bush would let Fukuyama and his cohorts in the front door of the Executive Mansion -- much less, listen to their utopian blather. Pie in the sky One Worlders, to a man.

Clinton, Albricht, Holbrooke, Talbot, Soros, Gergen all fall into that camp. Dangerous policy; very dangerous to the very survival of the Republic, IMO. And, please note that not one of the above ever donned a uniform in service to their country.

Have a great summer. /dkp

[attiladhun2]

I got a great deal out of Huntington's book, but a far better book to understand the current situation is not his, but Leon Uris' The Haj. He accurately depicts Islam for what it is--a blood cult based on personal honor, power, and nepotism. He also accurately depicts the Arab as a person who can hold onto two contradictory views at the same time and who can be persuaded to participate in the most harebrained scheme as long as it has prospects of glory and plunder. I think this makes any clash with these people especially dangerous.