Posted on 07/09/2005 6:16:03 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
We all know who was to blame for Thursday's murders... and it wasn't Bush and Blair
The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear failed to catch the screams.
Others saw it as a blow for justice rather than art. They persuaded themselves that al-Qaeda was made up of anti-imperialist insurgents who were avenging the wrongs of the poor. 'The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?' asked Dario Fo. Rosie Boycott seemed to agree. 'The West should take the blame for pushing people in Third World countries to the end of their tether,' she wrote.
In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.
All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him.
I'd say the 'power of nightmares' side of that oxymoronic argument is too bloodied to be worth discussing this weekend and it's better to stick with the wider delusion.
On Thursday, before the police had made one arrest, before one terrorist group had claimed responsibility, before one body had been carried from the wreckage, let alone been identified and allowed to rest in peace, cocksure voices filled with righteousness were proclaiming that the real murderers weren't the real murderers but the Prime Minister. I'm not thinking of George Galloway and the other saluters of Saddam, but of upright men and women who sat down to write letters to respectable newspapers within minutes of hearing the news.
'Hang your head in shame, Mr Blair. Better still, resign - and whoever takes over immediately withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,' wrote the Rev Mike Ketley, who is a vicar, for God's sake, but has no qualms about leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban and al-Qaeda or Iraq to the Baath party and al-Qaeda. 'Let's stop this murder and put on trial those criminals who are within our jurisdiction,' began Patrick Daly of south London in an apparently promising letter to the Independent. But, inevitably, he didn't mean the bombers. 'Let's start with the British government.'
And so it went on. At no point did they grasp that Islamism was a reactionary movement as great as fascism, which had claimed millions of mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan and is claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute dunderheadedness to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence.
I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them.
But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors.
Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC.
Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows.
The only plausible excuse for 11 September was that it was a protest against America's support for Israel. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden's statements revealed that he was obsessed with the American troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and had barely said a word about Palestine.
After the Bali bombings, the conventional wisdom was that the Australians had been blown to pieces as a punishment for their government's support for Bush. No one thought for a moment about the Australian forces which stopped Indonesian militias rampaging through East Timor, a small country Indonesia had invaded in 1975 with the backing of the US. Yet when bin Laden spoke, he said it was Australia's anti-imperialist intervention to free a largely Catholic population from a largely Muslim occupying power which had bugged him.
East Timor was a great cause of the left until the Australians made it an embarrassment. So, too, was the suffering of the victims of Saddam, until the tyrant made the mistake of invading Kuwait and becoming America's enemy. In the past two years in Iraq, UN and Red Cross workers have been massacred, trade unionists assassinated, school children and aid workers kidnapped and decapitated and countless people who happened to be on the wrong bus or on the wrong street at the wrong time paid for their mistake with their lives.
What can the survivors do? Not a lot according to a Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He told bin Laden that the northern Kurds may be Sunni but 'Islam's voice has died out among them' and they'd been infiltrated by Jews. The southern Shia were 'a sect of treachery' while any Arab, Kurd, Shia or Sunni who believed in a democratic Iraq was a heretic.
Our options are as limited When Abu Bakr Bashir was arrested for the Bali bombings, he was asked how the families of the dead could avoid the fate of their relatives. 'Please convert to Islam,' he replied. But as the past 40 years have shown, Islamism is mainly concerned with killing and oppressing Muslims.
In his intervention before last year's American presidential election, bin Laden praised Robert Fisk of the Independent whose journalism he admired. 'I consider him to be neutral,' he said, so I suppose we could all resolve not to take the tube unless we can sit next to Mr Fisk. But as the killings are indiscriminate, I can't see how that would help and, in any case, who wants to be stuck on a train with an Independent reporter?
There are many tasks in the coming days. Staying calm, helping the police and protecting Muslim communities from neo-Nazi attack are high among them. But the greatest is to resolve to see the world for what it is and remove the twin vices of wilful myopia and bad faith which have disfigured too much liberal thought for too long.
PING
BS, dontcha know its Bushs fault! :D
The Islamowacko's have more Imam's with there hands or fingers blown off than any other religion!! GO FIGURE!!
Left-wing self-hatred is essentially psychological fallout from Communist propaganda campaigns during the Cold War.
These poor souls don't realize that they worship at the altar of a dethroned god: Marx.
Thus they provide little more than a cautionary public spectacle for those of us who might otherwise be tempted to outsource our thinking to the lowest bidder.
A sad thing really, but instructive in its tragedy.
Of course it's Bush's fault, if we didn't go into Iraq, NONE of this would be happening. </sarcasm>!!
We all know who was to blame for Thursday's murders... and it wasn't Bush and Blair
Then how about Karl Rove, or maybe Jack Straw, Don Rumsfeld, I got it! Richard Perle!
Bump!
Look at the motives: France was really pissed-off about not getting the olympics...
Fo is an anarchist playwright who loves to sing the virtues of communism in his plays. I know, I had to endure one in college for a class I was taking. I'd love to know how he thinks anarchy could have saved those folks in poverty.
Very well said.
I posted this earlier in another thread, but it bears repeating here.
Little more will be done about the threat of Islam.
Almost all that is going to be done has been done.
The world is too PC for anything more to be done.
New York, Washington, Madrid, Beslan, London.
No attack is outrageous or barbaric or savage enough to awaken the survival instinct in the sad, weak, pathetic remnant of Western Civilization.
Once Bush's and Blair's terms are over, they will be replaced by one-world crybabies. the West will hunker down in a corner saying, "Please don't hit me again," to the barbaric supplicants of the satanic moon god.
All the Western leaders will sound and act like Neville Chamberlain.
Most of them already do.
Ultimately, the West will capitulate to the Islamic onslaught.
The bravado expressed in this forum is little more than vain noise.
No one is listening.
Not your president.
Not your congressional delegations.
No one.
Because, if they really, really, REALLY meant to prosecute a War on Terror, the borders would be sealed, sermons in Mosques would be attended by FBI agents and their interpreters, seditious statements would be prosecuted to the FULLEST extent of the law, and there would be thousands upon thousands of foreign Islamic activists rounded up and shipped back on cargo jets to the hell holes out of which they crawled.
Oh, one more thing.
If they really, really, REALLY, REALLY meant to prosecute a War on Terror, every outrage would be met with a response many orders of magnitude greater than any attack perpetrated by the Islamist savages.
Here in the States, the biggest battle will be over whether a Supreme Court Justice will be appointed that will uphold the highest sacrament of Leftist Paganism, their own little human sacrifice on the altar of their highest god, Self.
You know what the sad thing is? You mean that as a joke and it would be very funny but for the fact that there are, predictably, some Muslims who are actually seriously saying that.
Case in point:
"Maybe the French did it because they didn't get the [2012] Olympics and England did," said Aftab Ahmad, 27, a waiter who attended the Central Mosque [London] prayer service. "Why do they always say Muslims do attacks like this?"
No - it's entirely possible that froggish muzzies ARE the ones who set the charges.
long the voice of the Left
and Cohen nails it
and the Guardian printed it
lets hope they remember this next week and in the difficult days and months and years ahead.
we are now seeing the "end of the beginning" and its going to be a long, tough slog thru the muck.
Katie seems to think that Bush and Blair are responsible! Can she be wrong??????? (sarc/ off)
Liberals are so open minded their brains have fallen out.
The wack jobs who claim that poverty in the Islamic world in contrast to opulent life styles in the western world forces Muslim criminals to kill drive me nuts. No one grew up poorer than the members of my family but we reached middle class status by studying, working hard and not blaming others for the setbacks we endured along the way. To hell with these liberal idiots who think apologizing to killers will solve all the world's problems. I would like to remind the apologists that thousands of people in this country cheered on the Russian revolution. After the communists cemented their control in the 1920s, our useful idiots got on ships and went to Russia to help build the perfect society. Stalin had most of them killed, reasoning that if they did not like the way he was running the country they would become pests. Stalin didn't like wimps, and he couldn't even spell appeasement.
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