The public know how these attacks happen — unlike the politicians

04 July 2007

Rod Liddle says that the car-bomb plot was the predictable consequence of multiculturalism, lax immigration, mad human rights laws and neocon aggression. Shame the government can’t see this

The overwhelming majority of the public is also opposed to the continuing war in Iraq, of course (although it has reached this conclusion a little late in the day for my liking). Whatever your feelings about the war, it must, surely, provide a moral justification for those Islamists intent upon unleashing murder upon our soil and, at the same time, inculcate a deep sense of confusion within our Muslim community. Seen objectively, the aggression instigated by our political leaders against Iraq is no less motivated by a utopian, millennialist vision of how-the-world-must-be than the violence perpetrated by those who wish us all to be better off under the benevolence of a world caliphate. Evangelical liberal fundamentalism has led to rather more deaths in the world just recently than its fundamentalist Islamist counterpart: you might conclude that they are two sides of the same coin. This may seem to be an argument for cultural relativism of the worst kind; after all, we cleave to the values of liberal democracy because we know them to be right and thus worth fighting for — and, of course, imposing, at the point of a gun and a bomb, upon other people who may not yet have seen the light. Well, perhaps. But in which case it is difficult on objective grounds to adopt outraged expressions when those other people attempt to impose their equally implacable vision of how-the-world-must-be on us, at the point of a gun. This seems to me an incontestable proposition and has been advanced recently by people as philosophically diffuse as General Sir Michael Rose and John Gray, among many others. Yet it is antithetical to the government’s point of view. But imagine for a moment that you are a British Muslim, suspended in a sort of demilitarised no-man’s-land between the secular state and the long-held tenets of your faith. What conclusion would you reach about the competing claims of the war against terror and the war against the infidel? Might you not be inclined to ascribe to them an equivalence?

The odd thing is that on all of these issues — immigration, human rights legislation, the notion that British Muslims do not share very many of our liberal values, the war against Iraq — the public seems to get it and our political leaders simply do not. There will be many more attempts at carnage on our streets before they do get it, I suspect. In the meantime, I suppose we’ll just have to put our faith in al-Qa’eda’s continuing incompetence.