Britons woke up on 7/7 (Welcome to Londonistan)

Speaking of the ISI's ability to calibrate terrorism, consider the events of 7/7 and 7/21.

Immediately after 7/7, it became obvious that there were plenty of Pakistani links, and this put General Musharraf in the hot seat. He responded with bluster that British terrorism was home-grown, and that it had nothing in particular to do with Pakistan.

How could Pakistan prove its injured innocence? The ISI came up with a brilliant plan: Pakistanis have clearly learned the art of diplomatic theatre from their friends the Chinese. They would get hold of a couple of naïve 'sleepers' suffused with Islamic angst, engineer a copycat suicide bomber attack, but give them explosives that would not explode, so that they would get caught and would spill the beans, or as much as they knew, which would be rather little. Terrific diversionary tactic, indeed.

Lo and behold, the abortive 7/21 affair. The would-be anarchists, an Eritrean, a Somali and an Ethiopian (caught in an apartment in London teargassed by the police, and humiliatingly marched out in their underwear, as faithfully recorded by television cameras) were indeed arrested. Now what are the odds against four explosive-laden backpacks all failing accidentally, especially when all four had worked on 7/7? Astronomical, surely. So the backpacks were not meant to explode.

Envoy Maleeha Lodhi immediately seized on the arrests. Here are excerpts from her statement from the New York Times report 'Europe meets the new face of terrorism'

"When the first bombing happened and everyone focused on Pakistan, we said, 'You may be making a mistake if you have a unifocal view,' " said Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's ambassador to Britain, in an interview. "It's much more mixed up than people think. What you're seeing is something very lethal and it has nothing to do with ethnicity."

"We are seeing a lot of local groups that seem to have a random pattern, no operational linkage or even inspirational linkage," she said. "Some may claim to be Al Qaeda, some not, and that is foxing everybody."

How convenient for the telegenic Maleeha Lodhi! Methinks milady doth protest too much. How very handy to exonerate Pakistan! How very likely this was intended to be so, and the East Africans were meant to be the fall guys! Rather clever, the ISI is.

Yes, in the immortal words of Robin Raphel, Pakistan is truly the 'moderate, modern, model' Islamic State. All's well with the world, and Americans can resume supplying F-16s, Spruance-class destroyers, P3-C Orions and other materiel to Major Non-Nato Ally Pakistan, never mind India's concerns about an arms race being imposed on it.

Most interesting was the response of the police and the public in Britain to the bombings. They, stiff upper lip and all, have agreed to put limits on their civil rights hoping this would help avoid reprises. The 'shoot-to-kill' order has been accepted as a necessary, if unfortunate, fact of life. Even when an apparently innocent Brazilian was shot in the subway, the police did not cave in with mea culpas. Nor did anyone else. There were no cases by 'liberals' filed about the Brazilian's rights, so far as I know.

Here's an excerpt from a newspaper editorial: "The biggest mistake the police made was not the most obvious one of shooting the wrong man… The biggest mistake was not to properly prepare the public for sustained campaign of violence facing the country… More should have been done to prepare the public for the forceful response needed to protect them." The conservative Wall Street Journal? No, the arch-leftist Guardian! So when whites get hurt, all 'progressive' sentiments are out the window. Would India's oh-so-smug, holier-than-thou English language media ever write such an editorial?

Strangely enough, India's army of bleeding-hearts and 'human rights' mafioso, including those who live in London, did not find this to be a serious ethical dilemma: they too don't want to die on the Tube in an explosion. I guess it's NIMBY: not in my backyard. Imagine the fuss they would make if Indian policemen were allowed to shoot-to-kill.

The fact of the matter is that terrorists, those who are intent on taking the lives of innocents (as in the dictionary, not an Islamist definition that ipso facto says a non-Muslim cannot be an innocent), should be treated as beyond the pale: they have forfeited all rights and all expectation of leniency.

It is apparent that Britons realise that the human rights of the terrorist are not greater than those of the average citizen. Contrast this with India, where terrorists have far more rights than average, law-abiding citizens; in fact, only terrorists have rights, because their victims, generally Hindus, have no rights. This is an axiom among the chatterati.

A famous bleeding-heart in India opined after the recent Ayodhya attack that the dead terrorists should not be referred to as terrorists. In case it hurt their tender sentiments, and we can't have that, can we? An alternative name was not suggested, but perhaps 'the boys' or 'misguided youths' -- so innocent -- would be the preferred appellation, as in the vocabulary of the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. I suppose instead of shooting at them, the police should also have plied the Ayodhya 'boys' with lamb biriyani, as was infamously done during a siege in J&K.

Will a stronger and more intrusive police-State stop terrorism anywhere? Probably not. The root causes have to be addressed in a clear-eyed manner bereft of cheap sentimentality. India tried cheap sentiment as the carrot: appeasement, and that has not worked. The British tried the carrot, and now may start trying the stick. The Americans tried the stick as in outright war, but are now beating a bit of a tactical retreat because of imperial overstretch. So what might work?

One possibility: I hear the Americans have considered serious escalation in war-game scenarios. If there's another major attack on US soil, they may put these into effect. These scenarios up the ante quite a bit, and include substantial psychological warfare, aimed at demoralising terrorists from a religious perspective. It remains to be seen if things will come to this pass; but the Americans can be brutal if need be. They know a little counter-terror can go a long way. Will this threat be sufficient? Who knows?

Britons woke up to the facts of life on 7/7. They are now staring at something far more implacable than the Irish Republican Army (which, amusingly, instantly announced an end to armed struggle, which may well have something to do with the Republic of Ireland's sudden prosperity trickling down into the British colony of Northern Ireland). Welcome to the real world: many of us have lived with this sort of danger hanging over us for long. Now you Britons can enjoy the same.

Terrorism comes to Londonistan

August 09, 2005

The 7/7 terrorist bombings in Britain have been analysed to death. Odd. Britain is a minor, has-been power, and its capital is called 'Londonistan' for its tenderness towards Islamists, as in the New York Times report 'For a decade, London thrived as a busy crossroads of terror.'

So why is everyone so exercised about the London bombs? Plenty of Islamic terror incidents elsewhere do not get the same blanket coverage. Yes, it is regrettable that there has been loss of British lives, but it is hard to feel solidarity for them unlike the widespread feeling of 'Today I am a New Yorker' after America's loss of innocence on 9/11.

UK blasts: The Iraq factor

This is partly because Britain has made it a policy to cozy up to Muslims. For instance, during their rule in India, they deliberately encouraged Muslim obduracy and obscurantism as a part of divide-and-rule. During Partition, they cavalierly gave away the Hindu-and-Sikh-majority city of Lahore to Pakistan. When a British captain handed over Gilgit to Pakistan, they should have court-martialed him for violating British treaty obligations, but did not.

The British calculated that being nice to Muslims and mean to Hindus did not carry any penalty, and they were probably right in this. They reckoned that being friendly with oil-rich Arabs and having some nominal say in the affairs of Pakistan were more important than helping India, which they realised would soon eclipse them. I have noticed for years the BBC's and The Economist's antipathy towards India: and this reflects establishment bias.

In an incident pregnant with black humour, the BBC, which is not supposed to call any terrorists 'terrorists', slipped up and called the London terrorists 'terrorists'. Why, was the stiff upper lip trembling a wee bit? When reader George wrote to the BBC after being alerted by SABHA's report they reversed themselves. The mask had slipped, albeit momentarily.

Muslim violence and terrorism in India have never bothered the British. The Maraad massacre and the Godhra incineration and the ethnic cleansing in Jammu and Kashmir were either ignored or rationalised by them. The recent incident in Jammu, when five Hindus were beheaded and a Hindu woman was hacked to death with an axe, did not excite their alleged sense of 'fair play'. Then should Indians weep for them when they are victimised? Poetic justice, as Indira Gandhi found out: He who rides the fundamentalist tiger is skating on thin ice, to mix metaphors wildly.

Britain got into Islamist-appeasement mode with their multi-culturalism. A major aspect of this has been bending over backwards to accommodate the demands -- even unreasonable ones -- of Muslim Britons. It has been blindingly obvious even to a casual observer that this was going to be counterproductive and that British Pakistanis were not assimilating (I wrote about this even before 9/11 in a column).

The war against radical Islam

In the years hence, there have been plenty of reports of a wilful apartheid: Some Pakistani-Britons ghettoising themselves in 'no-police' zones, preying on teenaged white schoolgirls, beating white youngsters to death, engaging in running street battles, etc. Clearly, they are disaffected, and have chosen to be so. No amount of additional sops and concessions will help. Each concession is seen as an admission of weakness. Just ask the Islamist extremists in India: they have been given sop after sop, and they, like Oliver Twist, simply ask for more, and despise the system ever more after each giveaway.

Besides, the British do know a thing or two about terror. In fact, the entire Christian West knows a thing or two about terror as a weapon. When Christians gained political power during Constantine's rule, they went about terrorising the followers of the old religions. They tore down most of the ancient temples, forcibly converted a lot of people, and exhibited intolerance of the highest degree. A Christian king named Theodosius and his cleric, ironically named Theophilus, burned the great library at Alexandria.

Much later, the British, in the aftermath of the 1857 War of Independence in India, used state-sponsored terrorism (including shooting people from cannons and elephants crushing them) against both civilian and military populations: no Geneva Convention there. The Jallianwallah Bagh massacre -- 1,650 bullets, 1,579 casualties in an unarmed crowd with women and children -- this was an exercise in State terrorism.

The British used incendiary materials to firebomb Dresden and other German cities to terrorise the civilian population during World War II. The Americans firebombed Tokyo, knowing fully well that the wooden houses would burn like tinder. Their atomic bombing of Hiroshima, exactly sixty years ago (see my old column 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour') terrified the Japanese. The follow-up atomic bombing of Nagasaki, with Japan prone and ready to surrender, was certainly intended to induce terror in the civilian population, whatever the mealy-mouthed rationalisation for Hiroshima. The Stern gang, Jewish terrorists, wreaked havoc in the trans-Jordan area before the formation of Israel.

Thus the West has been known to use terrorism as an arm of policy. Therefore it is a little disingenuous of the West to be shocked at Islamist terrorism. Not that I am justifying the latter, but it is fair to consider their assertions of root cause. Do Islamists have legitimate grievances about the 500,000 Iraqi children who died due to onerous sanctions? Do they have legitimate grievances about the troubles of Palestinians? Does the Ummah, the supposed Islamist brotherhood worldwide, speak with one voice?

It is hard to say. They may have some justifiable grievances, but so do others who do not indulge in random, large-scale terrorism. And they are also guilty of dissimulation. For several reasons. One is that they simply deny Islam-sanctioned violence against non-Muslims, for instance what happens daily in Bangladesh and Pakistan. The second is extensive Muslim-upon-Muslim violence, as in the Iran-Iraq war, in the continuing practice of slavery in some Arab kingdoms (let us note that the principal capturers of black slaves were always Arabs, who would then wholesale them to whites), and in continuing brutality towards blacks, for instance in the Sudan.

Pakistan is a bad word in Britain

The third reason is that Islamists themselves have done nothing whatsoever for Palestinians, other than trying to fight Israel to the last Palestinian. Oil-rich and education-poor Arab kingdoms could easily have absorbed the comparatively well-educated Palestinians, but they chose not to do so. Instead of providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, the Islamists use their travails as a lightning-rod to paint a picture of Islam besieged.

This suggests that the pan-Islamist movement may be a political activity intended to expand the borders of Islam, rather than a religious or humane movement. This suspicion is strengthened by the thunderous silence among Islamists about the atrocities visited upon their own in China. Isn't it odd, and telling -- in the sense of Sherlock Holmes' 'curious incident of the dog in the night-time' -- that despite Uighur Muslims being severely oppressed in Xinjiang, there have been no incidents of major terrorist violence in China?

Note, for instance, that every year for the last few years, China has regularly executed more people than the rest of the world put together! And a large fraction of those thus subject to judicial murder are Uighur Muslims and Tibetans. But not a peep has been heard out of the Muslim world. This implies that there is an understanding between the Islamists -- to be specific, the ISI of Pakistan -- and the Chinese.

The ISI, incidentally, comes closest to a Central Command for Islamist terrorism worldwide, as can be seen by their fingerprints on every terrorist action anywhere, as well as their ability to turn the spigot on and off on demand, as seen with China. The Saudis supply the funds and the ISI the brains.

The Chinese have formed a Sino-Islamic axis: they give the ISI goodies such as nuclear weapons and missiles; in return the ISI keeps a lid on the Uighurs. Strange bed-fellows, considering that Islamists usually string up 'godless Communists' from the nearest lamp-post and use their corpses for target practice, as was done to the luckless Najibullah when the triumphant Taliban-ISI entered Kabul.

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