Posted on 08/16/2006 9:20:58 AM PDT by Reagan Man
Had the Liquid Bomb Plot (as some English papers call it) succeeded, a headline the next day might have accurately said, “British Terrorists Attack America.”
Though the plot was foiled by excellent British police work, it nonetheless demonstrated that the land of Locke and Blackstone, the cradle of Western democracy and law, has become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.
Given that the terrorists planning to commit what may have proved to be the deadliest anti-American terrorist attack ever were born and bred in democratic Britain, President Bush may want to reconsider his strategy of pushing democratic regime-change around the world, and especially in the Middle East, as the means of protecting the U.S. against terrorism.
“We know that democracies do not foment terror or invade their neighbors,” Bush said last year, explaining his policy.
“If the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and resentment and violence ready for export. The United States has adopted a new strategy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East; a strategy that recognizes that the best way to defeat the ideology of terror as a weapon is to spread freedom and democracy.”
But the first premise of this strategy is borrowed from bleeding-heart liberalism. Muslim terrorists, it supposes, start out as victims of benighted governments. Remove those governments, it concludes, and you will end Islamist terrorism.
Yet, how can this apply to Great Britain?
Freedom House, which ranks the world’s nations by the degree of “political rights” and “civil liberties” they afford, gives the United Kingdom the best score possible in each category. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranks the U.K. as the world’s 5th freest economy. The U.S. ranks only 9th.
So why have native Brits been implicated for the second time in little more than a year (the London subway bombings was the first) in an Islamist conspiracy to commit mass murder?
All 23 alleged conspirators held in Britain in connection with the latest plot were reportedly British born and raised. They did not embrace terrorism under the heel of some Oriental despot; they embraced it at British universities and in relatively comfortable suburban British homes.
British oppression did not create these suspected terrorists. A radical Islamic ideology did. Changing Britain’s form of government will not change that radical vision.
Indeed, the challenge for Britain will be to defeat those who embrace it without sacrificing its own traditions of liberty.
Writing in the London Daily Telegraph on Sunday, film maker Russell Razzaque explained his own brief exposure to an Islamist club at a British university in 1989. Leaders of the club espoused the view that: “The duty of every Muslim was … to join the battle to set mankind straight and this was possible only via the establishment of a global Islamist state ruled by a single ruler—Khilafah—imposing a strict interpretation of Shariah law across the board. Our religious and moral obligation was to this cause alone.”
The same edition of the Telegraph reported on the Islamist literature found in office of the London Metropolitan University Islamic Society, headed by Waheed Zaman, one of the suspected Liquid Bomb Plot terrorists. One sheet said: “Allah guarantees the person who carries out Jihad in His Cause … that He will either admit him into Paradise (Martyrdom) or return him with reward or booty.”
Zaman’s sister said of him: “My brother loves fish and chips and Liverpool Football Club.”
Earlier this year, I wrote in praise of the speech House International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican, delivered when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in his committee. With Rice sitting before him, Hyde advocated a return to the “clear-eyed and sober-minded understanding of this world” embraced by our forebears.
He rebutted the well-meaning but mistaken notion that “our interests are best served by assigning a central place in the foreign policy of our nation to the worldwide promotion of democracy.” He dismissed this as “the Golden Theory” and advocated instead a morally responsible realism.
“We can and have used democracy as a weapon to destabilize our enemies, and we may do so again,” Hyde said. “But if we unleash revolutionary forces in the expectation that the result can only be beneficent, I believe we are making a profound and perhaps uncorrectable mistake. History teaches that revolutions are very dangerous things, more often destructive than benign, and uncontrollable by their very nature. Upending established order based on a theory is far more likely to produce chaos than shining uplands.”
In last year’s Lebanese elections, the Hezbollah terrorist group won 14 parliament seats and a place in the government. This year’s Palestinian elections delivered the Palestinian Authority to Hamas. Is it in U.S. interests for Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to become more like Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority? Even if those states could peacefully replicate the political order of our best ally, Great Britain, would that stop anti-American Islamist terrorists from arising within their borders?
History is already proving Henry Hyde right.
High concepts such as democracy doesn't appeal to psychos.
It's not democracy. It's their liberal immigration policies.
Ping for reference.
This author is a simpleton, much like George Will.
The difference between Britain, and oh say Iraq of 2001, is that the democracy actively pursues the terror plotters, works in conjunction with the US intelligence services, aggressively prosecutes the enemy within, and investigates their connections back to terrorist groups in the Arab world.
OTOH, Saddam paid cold hard cash to suicide bomber families, worked with Al Qaeda, harbored known terrorists and provided them apts and cell phones, issued phony passports to the vermin, and was intent on inflicting maximum damage to the US and its interests.
But gee, it really doesn't matter whether a state is a allied democracy or a tyrranical terror sponsor, does it?
See now why this hysteric "All Muslims are terrorists" doctrine of the Neo Isolationist is so utterly absurd?
I keep asking this question and as yet none of the Squeal Like Pigs choir in the Neo Isolationism movement can answer it.
If Islam is the problem, why are the bulk of the forces fighting, and doing the bulk of the dying, on our side Muslim Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghanis? Any of you even bother for a heartbeat to consider the Kurds are Muslims?
So Neo Isolationists. How well did your support for your regional pet bully boys work out in stopping 09-11-01?
An utterly stupid, bigoted, absurd article by a less then room temperature intellect wholly unable to evolve beyond his arrogant childishly provincial 09-10-01 mindset.
Fairness demands two caveats. First, you need to ad parts of the United States and Canada to this 'breeding ground" as recent arrests both here and in Canada demonstrate. Anywhere in the world where there is in insular Islamic community poses a danger.
Secondly, Political Science 101 will teach that among the weaknesses of democracy are the likelihood that eventually the majority will either vote to eliminate the minority faction or vote to do away with the democratic system.
Islamists have stated time and time and time again that they're not interested in democracy, which they think is perverse and degenerate because it allows man to make laws, rather than to submit to the laws of Allah as written in the Koran and the Hadiths.
In fact it is a central tenant of today's jihadis that democracy is itself one of the world's major evils,, and must be destroyed.
Whoever promoted this idea that democracy will discourage Islamic terrorism simply hasn't been listening to Muslims. They despise democracy.
What percentage of white males are violent sexual predators? What percentage of Muslims are terrorists? And most notably, what percentage of Muslims are terrorist sympathizers? Nobody wants to ask that question, it seems.
Hmmm. I wonder if a good old-fashioned frontal lobotomy might cure a jihadi?
Point well taken.
There are crazies everywhere. But democratic states responsibly track them down and prosecute them. Dictatorial states, instead, exploit their crazies and channel them against their enemies.
Ask the 250,000 men in the Iraqi Army, who are conducting raids of terrorists everyday. Ask the Jordanian and UAE Intelligence services that have helped us track vermin since 9-11. Ask the Turks who have been fighting off Al Qaeda in there midst. Ask the arabs and muslims who we and the brits have recruited to do translations and infiltrate the cells. Ask the thousands of Iraqis who have been giving us tips on weapons caches and terrorist locations.
Not trying to say there is not a HUGE terror sympathizing contingent in the muslim world, just that we are going to need cooperation of the many good muslims to slay this dragon.
"Had the Liquid Bomb Plot (as some English papers call it) succeeded, a headline the next day might have accurately said, “British Terrorists Attack America.” "
A plot to pit allies against one another...
What happens when the democracy votes terrorists into power? Does that not count as a democratic option?
The problem is that Bush is doing logical gymnastics trying to find a "noble" goal (creating democratic governments by force in the ME) because political correctness is preventing him from identifying the real goal: eliminating radical Islam by any means necessary.
True, not to mention the Muslims who provided tips to the Brits about the most recent plot. I'm not saying that all Muslims are terrorists or sympathizers, but there are far too many of them to call it a "fringe."
The President's fantasy that imposing "Democracy" on other nations is a constructive step needs to be refuted. As for the general fallacies in the foreign policy that he outlined in his Second Inaugural Address, I would again recommend my contrived debate between our First and Present Presidents on the issues involved: George Washington Debates George W. Bush. I think it is pretty clear which President wins that debate.
William Flax
True. Far from a fringe.
Um, weren't they stopped? By the government?
What percentage of terrorists attacking America are non-Muslims?
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