...to one of my favorite FReepers.
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.
...to one of my favorite FReepers.
It was not killed by killing the person behind it but by planting a new idea and showing them a new way.
Ok it took some major shoves to get them going down that path but once a couple miles down the road they found they liked it. Especially the women and peasants liked it and that meant that a good 70% of the population liked it for sure.
You fight an idea with an idea.
I have to believe it's coming. Sooner or later, Western Civilization is going to reach the end of its patience and we will have a very very bloody reckoning.
I'm not so sure....
Well said.
Sadly, it will take another catastrophe brought by the Religion of Peace before common sense will prevail. Stein nails it.
Depends on the ideas. If the price of believing that drinking water causes the decay of civilization becomes your life, people will stop believing that (except for a small number of complete wackos. They never quite disappear)
But it's impossible to raise the price of believing that God commands you to do something that would otherwise be unthinkable, to be so high that there will be no more people willing to do that.
Still, it's possible to greatly reduce the pool of willing volunteers, even then.
Steyn and the pollmeister have been reading my mail. I was thinking this the other day, that it had to be the case:
"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."
Our problem is, of course, our tolerance. The problem isn't that states don't ban Islam, but that our culture cannot bring itself to mock the tenants of the religion itself.
Read the story of Mohammed and you begin to get the clear sense that he was nothing but a con-man. But our tolerance leads us to the state where we cannot make fun of basic religious tenants (except small-o orthodox Christianity, of course).
The easiest way to kill Islam is to disinfect it with sunlight.
Bump for later reading, and thanks for the Steyn ping, Pokey!
More and more, I am coming to agree with your view. It is time for the mocking to begin. On the flight out of Heathrow on Friday, with my sad little clear baggie in my lap like all the other passengers out of Heathrow that day, I chatted with the seat mate to my left, a nice young man from London who also cannot seem to understand how the Muslims hope to change the hearts and minds of people by threatening to or actually succeeding in blowing up innocent people. We shared a (covert) laugh over the lousy recruiting policy they have. And how confident can they be in the rightness of their religion if they feel they have to kill anyone who wants to get out?
We really have to mock the media too; after all, it is the old media that paints these losers as "suave", or "brave" or "principled" instead of pathetic, unkempt, and distasteful. The shoe bomber, what a fox (blech)! What about that one the media referred to as "suave" who was merely fat, greasy, and repellant?
<< Absent a determination to throttle the IDEOLOGY, we're about to witness the unraveling of the world. >>
In a nutshell!
(Thanks pokey)
<< Islam is no different than Nazism. It is not a religion. >>
Absolutely True.
Islam is an ideology.
And Nazism was simply islamafascism with technology.
<< In (once-great britain,) seven percent of Muslims consider themselves "British" first, eighty-one percent consider themselves Muslim first. >>
Young muslim males in the uk number around one million.
The British Army, nancyboys and girls and clerks and cooks included, numbers around one hundred thousand.
Like all of Eurabia, the Euro-peon Neo-Soviet's offshore satellite state, once known as the "United Kingdom," is doomed.
As: unless we radically surgically remove the rapidly metastisizing cancerous ideology known as islam from our nation's body; are we.
And the necessary kind of men we have not, too. The academia produces tones of pulp "scientific" text on alleged fundamentalist Christian (very bad! very bad!) influence over the West's foreign policy, which leads to Muslim "disenchantment" and the terrorist plots.
They produce this pulp mainly in the Ivy League universities, but the international lefty crowd includes this BS in the curriculum even here, in NZ.
So once again, who'll throttle the alien and evil ideology, when the enemy is right among us?
I believe that the elitists on the left, not the useful idiots, are playing the same game.
@@@@
I agree with you, and based on the pattern of the first two decades of the 20th Century, I am terrified of what may be coming in the next ten years.
Certainly not academia, as you mentioned. Unfortunately, the fight against the enemies of civilization will only take place in earnest if/when those enemies score a terrorism success (or series of successes) that far surpass 9/11 in both body count and damage to the world economy. Short of that, we'll be stuck in a defensive, PC "winning hearts and minds" mode that will serve only to encourage them.
"For them - the highest loyalty is to Islam, not a particular country."
True, but the same thing can be said of anyone in any country that takes their religion seriously. When the faithful have to choose between loyalty to God or to country, God usually wins.
The difference is that freedom of religion should generally remove any conflict of loyalty. Islam is about as opposed to freedom of religion as you can get, Christianity supports it. Thats why Christians are more likley to die for their faith than kill for it.
The only solution is that we have to get as serious as the Islamofacists are about winning this war.
No holds barred.
We can't reason with them. We can't make bargains with them. No amount of diplomacy or concessions will ever change the fact that they want to kill us and rule over us with an iron Islamic-Nazi fist.
Sadly, we will likely have to be attacked again on our own soil before the sheeple will realize this.
Like you, I think this is, unfortunately, correct.
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