Posted on 08/13/2006 3:27:00 AM PDT by goldstategop
Here's how an early report by Reuters covered the massive terrorism bust in the United Kingdom. They started out conventionally enough just chugging along with airport closures, arrest details and quotes from bystanders, but then got to the big picture:
" 'I'm an ex-flight attendant, I'm used to delays, but this is a different kind of delay,' said Gita Saintangelo, 54, an American returning to Miami. 'We heard about it on the TV this morning. We left a little early and said a prayer,' she said at Heathrow.
"Britain has been criticised by Islamist militants for its military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prime Minister Tony Blair has also come under fire at home and abroad for following the U.S. lead and refusing to call for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas."
Is there a software program at Western news agencies that automatically inserts random segues in terrorism stories? The plot to commit mass murder by seizing up to 10 U.K.-U.S. airliners was well advanced long before the first Israeli strike against Hezbollah. Yet it's apparently axiomatic at Reuters, the BBC and many other British media outlets that Tony Blair is the root cause of jihad. He doesn't even have to invade anywhere anymore. He just has to "refuse to call for an immediate cease-fire" when some other fellows invade some other fellows over on the other side of the world.
Grant for the sake of argument that these reports are true -- that when the bloodthirsty Zionist warmongers attack all those marvelous Hezbollah social outreach programs it drives British subjects born and bred to plot mass murder against their fellow Britons. What does that mean?
Here's a clue, from a recent Pew poll that asked: What do you consider yourself first? A citizen of your country or a Muslim?
In the United Kingdom, 7 percent of Muslims consider themselves British first, 81 percent consider themselves Muslim first.
And that's where the really valid Lebanese comparison lies. Lebanon is a sovereign state. It has an executive and a military. But its military has less sophisticated weaponry than Hezbollah and its executive wields less authority over its jurisdiction than Hezbollah. In the old days, the Lebanese government would have fallen and Hezbollah would have formally supplanted the state. But non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and al-Qaida have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to fry. If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N. seat and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of use to such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and Lebanon is. They act locally but they think globally.
And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's Christians may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to note the numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent weeks who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his (Shiite) Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.
Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.
That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it's mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It's a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don't act on it.
The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The World," they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon. The Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern multicultural democracy -- legalisms, victimology -- to their own advantage. The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at a certain level Her Majesty's government shares the same problem as their opposite numbers in Beirut: They don't quite dare to move against the pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable them to do so.
So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by MI-5 and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the one after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen. If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he'd have thought you were a kook. If you'd told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she'd have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it's here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?
Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness the unraveling of the world.
Excellent analysis of the lefist program and its origins as a program.
Leftists love authoritarianism and hate freedom, and one thing that Steyn didn't mention is that Islam is a cult that views itself as a political system as well as a religion. It is an authoritarian political system, ruled by a particular class, accumulating the wealth in the hands of the few while spouting a sort of collectivist babble to cover it up - and, in other words, right up the leftist alley.
The secret with leftists is that they always assume that they are going to be the ones in charge in any authoritarian system; after all, they know better than anyone else, and it is their right to be in charge. They won't be the ones suffering in some benighted goat-ridden village 200 years hence, when our societies have regressed to 8th century conditions; they'll be the ones with the carefully tended and still functional jet, who get to go off to the Saudi pleasure palaces (which will still have electricity) on the coast of Spain to enjoy the women, alcohol and drugs permitted to Allah's elite.
Leftists are authoritarian elitists, and are so self deluded it's impossible to reason with them. But that's how they envision their life under Islam. They're special.
The perfidy of the collectivist American elite has an extensive history, sir, long before the emergence of Gramsci.
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Yep.
Correct assessment. But I think it's more lethal than that. The Left is not viewing this as a high stakes poker game. They believe that they are Born to Rule and They Know So Much Better than the Rest of Us.
Just ask them. They'll tell you.
Morning backhoe!
You're preaching to the choir...
Rancher with a case extendahoe
Enoch Powell was right about Rivers of Blood being the eventual result of Britain's immigration policies.
Not only not allowing Muslims from anywhere to immigrate, but sending them all back to their home country hell holes.
Ping
This is a dead-center shot right to the very heart of the problem.
It should be plastered on every billboard in the world.
Bump and thanks
"Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness the unraveling of the world."
It would have read better, and been more typical of Mark, to have said, "Throttle the theology," but even Mr Steyn isn't quite ready to admit what we're up against.
Not a religion???? Islam worships an invisible man in the sky. If that doesn't qualify, neither do some others I can think of.
Aw, I know- maybe the repetition reaches a few who haven't seen it.
You must have an extendable dipper- that's a handy extra feature on a 'hoe.
Thanks- I'll pass your link along.
I consider myself a Christian first, an American second.
That sequence is not what is at issue.
It is the nature of Islam, which is more of an ideology than a religion, as we are used to considering such allegiances.
And as an ideology, and a religion, its current practices are wicked.
If Islam's practices were life-enhacing, it wouldn't be significant that young Britons consider themselves Muslims forst, and Britons second.
It's the religion, stupid.....
bttt
The money paragraph in this piece as far as I'm concerned.
Thanks for the ping Pokey.
FMCDH(BITS)
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