Sunday, 25th November 2007
8:54pm
Yes I know that the election result is said to have been about domestic issues rather than foreign policy. Yes I know that Kevin Rudd is much more of a centrist than the Labour party he leads. Yes I know that the Liberal party got up to some truly despicable tricks (see the excellent Andrew Bolt) and seems to be well past its sell-by date. But the gloating by the left tells you all you need to know about the way in which the defeat of Australia’s epic Prime Minister John Howard will weaken the free world in its war to defend civilisation.
It was Howard who was the staunchest Prime Minister in the world against the jihad and who alone seemed to grasp its full dimensions. It was Howard who understood the way in which the anti-western intelligentsia was fatally weakening Australia from within, and how it needed to be fought to defend Australian values. It was Howard who stood alone among western leaders in defending his country's national identity against mass immigration, earning the inevitable label of racism and the undying enmity of bienmal-pensants everywhere. It was Howard who defended reason against irrationality, sentimentality and bigotry — and was branded a bigot for his pains.
Now he is gone, knocked out by a man who copied to the letter the trick pulled by Tony Blair in persuading blue-collar workers who had previously abandoned Labour for the Liberals (the equivalent of the British Conservative party) that it was safe to return to Labour because he was a Howard wannabe in contrast to his rabble of a party. But just as with Blair, no-one really knows what Kevin Rudd actually stands for — and whether he will now move back towards the left. Whatever now happens, the fact that he ran on a platform of pulling troops out of Iraq and endorsing the ludicrous scam of man-made global warming are enough in themselves to tell the jihadis that Australia has now lost its (one-man) nerve. Australia just made itself (and the rest of us) a whole lot less safe.
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Friday, 23rd November 2007
3:36pm
As the Annapolis tragic farce approaches, Natan Sharansky as ever tells it how it is:
I have never understood this strange reasoning: First strengthen the weak leader, by giving legitimization to anti-Israeli actions that he allows (or encourages, and sometimes even operates) and then, once the anti-Israeli positions have made him popular, expect that he will suddenly change his spots and lead his people determinedly toward the desired peace.
This distorted approach has become a kind of sacred cow. ‘We must strengthen Abu Mazen,’ say Israel's leaders as a kind of mantra. It is of no importance that along the way they are educating another generation of Palestinians to hatred, violence and the aspiration to destroy Israel. It is of no importance that the way to the strengthening is the diametric opposite of peace and dialogue. The main thing is that we are strengthening Abu Mazen.
The old argument of President Shimon Peres and Meretz MK Yossi Beilin and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on ‘with whom to make peace, a strong leader or a weak leader’ is no longer relevant. A look back over the years since the Oslo Accords shows clearly that the direction in which Palestinian society has marched is not the direction of peace. It was all in all just a hudna (truce) before another intifada. And when the society is becoming more extreme, what difference is it to us if the leader is strong or weak?
So many of Israel’s leaders — no less than the west but for different reasons — inhabit a fantasy world in which they ignore the reality that is directly confronting them, because it is just too difficult and terrifying, in favour of wishful thinking. It is a particular feature of politicians on the left. That is why so many innocents tend to die on their watch, because they insist on believing that they can tame the men of violence even while such men continue to kill. As Sharansky says, it is not the absence of sufficient concessions that will doom Annapolis to failure — it is the fact that its whole premise is a piece of grossly distorted reasoning.
For Annapolis, read the entire Middle East tragedy -- and the west’s key role in ensuring that it goes on and on.
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Thursday, 22nd November 2007
3:10pm
A little bird tells me that the Conservative party whips' office is festooned with campaign posters for Hillary Clinton.
Can this be true?
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2:59pm
Admiral Lord West, the UK’s security minister, is fast developing into a national treasure. After first saying that he was ‘not totally convinced’ it was necessary to increase the 28-day pre-charge detention limit for terrorist suspects but after a little chat with the PM declaring an hour later that he was now thus convinced, and then contradicting the head of MI5 by saying that the terrorist threat against Britain would soon be ‘steadily declining’ and that Britain’s counter-terrorism defences were ‘ahead of all countries in the world on the protection front’, he came up with the following yesterday in a House of Lords debate on the impact of the electronic border on the British Isles common travel area:
My Lords, we are maintaining the common travel area, which is recognised by the EU. We are applying a sensible way forward to identify the loophole that existed of people moving in through the Republic of Ireland, into Northern Ireland and then travelling across to the United Kingdom.
Whoops! Northern Ireland is of course part of the United Kingdom, a fact over which loyalists and Republicans have been at war -- endangering the security of the province and the UK -- for so many years. As Lord Trimble was quick to point out:
My Lords, does the Minister not realise that, when he spoke a moment ago of travelling from Northern Ireland to the United Kingdom, he demonstrated clearly his lack of understanding of the basic concept?
Lord West of Spithead: My Lords, it was a slip. I certainly understand it. As I said, I have served in Northern Ireland. It was rather like the slip that people make when they forget that the United Kingdom is in Europe. It is a slip that is made sometimes.
Yes, but not by ministers of the Crown.
Man overboard again!
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Wednesday, 21st November 2007
3:18pm
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an interesting article about the Tories’ opposition to extending pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects beyond 28 days. This proposal has provoked claims from the civil liberties lobby that it betrays the principle laid down in Magna Carta that no-one can be imprisoned without a fair trial. So I was particularly interested to read, in the NYT story, the words of Magna Carta:
No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we pursue him or send after him, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
Note that no-one shall be imprisoned except by jury trial
or ‘by the law of the land’. It is clear that the protection being offered here to individuals was against the arbitrary use of power by the King. The protection against such an arbitrary use of power was to be found both in trial by jury
and in the law of the land. The law was itself a protection against such power. So it would seem to follow that if Parliament passes a law enabling the pre-charge detention of suspects, that is itself a protection against arbitrary power by the government, the modern equivalent of the medieval King. Far from betraying Magna Carta, therefore, extending pre-charge detention would seem to be expressly
permitted by it.
They weren't fools in the 13th century.
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2:58pm
A propos Britain’s lunatic abasement before the Islamist extremism that threatens it, David on Harry’s Place brings news of an astounding line-up that is planned for a Global Peace and Unity Event (sic) this coming weekend in London supported by — wait for it — the Muslim Council of Britain, the Mayor of London, and the Metropolitan Police. As David reports, the speakers who stand for peace and unity include:
Dr Abdul Bari, of the MCB
- Dr Jamal Badawi, one of the most senior Muslim Brotherhood activists in the USA.
- Dr Israr Ahmad, who left Jamaat e Islami to form a new political party when it began to contest elections, declaring it insufficiently "revolutionary".
- Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah, a leading Salafi jihadi cleric who was the "leading figure" behind an important fatwa, requiring muslims to "join the jihad in Iraq", and who has "heavily financed Saudi insurgents in Iraq and other locations"
- Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistani religious affairs minister, who this year said of the Rushdie knighthood:
"The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."
- George Galloway, leader of RESPECT-Jamaat UK
- John Rees, leader of the Zionist-RESPECT
- Salma Yaqoob, former campaigner for the freedom of the Yemeni Jihadis
You can also catch speeches by the following mainstream politicians and public figures:
- Jack Straw
- Sadiq Khan
- Lord Nazir Ahmed (who hosted the racist, "Israel Shamir" at the House of Lords)
- Sir Ian Blair (if he hasn't resigned)
- Robert Fisk (if he hasn't beaten himself up too badly)
- Simon Hughes (if he isn't executed for homosexuality)
- Vincent Cable (if he doesn't decide to boycott the event)
Oh, and Jermaine Jackson.
Happy days!
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2:23pm
There was a riveting discussion in London yesterday evening, hosted by the Centre for Social Cohesion, between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ed Husain. Both of these courageous people have been warning the world about the dangers of Islamic extremism, but there is a crucial division between them. Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP who has lived in acute fear of her life ever since speaking out forcibly against the treatment of women in Islam (and whose disgraceful abandonment by both the Dutch and American authorities has been recorded here) believes that Islam is intrinsically totalitarian and violent and accordingly thinks that the distinction between Islam and Islamism (or political Islam) is a false one. Ed Husain, who chronicled his embrace and subsequent repudiation of Islamic extremism in his book The Islamist, firmly believes by contrast that Islamism is but one interpretation of Islam, and that the Islamic world can and must have a ‘renaissance’ in which it rediscovers its own religious traditions of peaceful co-existence which have been all but buried by the recent dominance of Wahabbism and other extremist interpretations.
This division of opinion, about whether or not Islam has the capacity to accommodate itself to the fundamental requirement to separate mosque from state and thus turn away from violence, is dividing the anti-jihadi world. Husain’s argument was plausible and attractive. It was only by drawing upon precepts within Islam’s pluralist tradition, he said, that he and others like him had been able to repudiate Islamism through grasping that the jihadis who once recruited them had sold them the falsehood that their Wahhabi doctrines were the only authentic version of a monolithic Islam. To his argument that Islamic theology was in fact pluralist, Hirsi Ali did not have a conclusive rejoinder. She stated that Islam meant submission to the will of God, pointed out the extremism of the Islamic world which largely accepted the primacy of the precepts of jihadi Medina over the more pacific Mecca, and drew attention to the global terrorism being perpetrated in the name of Islam. All this was true enough. But it did not answer the claim that there was a pluralist religious tradition on which the Islamic world could draw.
For his part, however, Husain did not answer the flip side of this question — that if such pluralist traditions had the authority he was claiming for them, how come the history of the Islamic world has been largely one of violent jihadi conquest whenever it has had the opportunity, not to mention the violence and oppression it practised towards other faiths (although not as bad as Christian upon Jew). He also said a few troubling things, claiming that the Muslim world had been anti-Nazi — thus obscuring the alliance between the Nazis and the Arabs of Palestine — and supporting on its face value the recent ‘peace’ letter from 138 Muslim scholars to the Christian churches, about which I have written
here as a threatening ultimatum demanding ‘peace on our terms’.
Recovering Islamists have much baggage to jettison, and it can take time to throw it all overboard. The great question is whether they can do so without losing their faith: whether intellectual honesty can enable decent Muslims to follow the path taken by Ed Husain and others, as Muslims desperate to assert a civilised religious tradition, or must force them onto the path taken by Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of the religion altogether (and, in her own case, out of all faith).
I find Ed Husain’s arguments more persuasive. Although last night Ayaan Hirsi Ali acknowledged the distinction between Muslims and Islam and accepted that Muslims can achieve reform, the logic of her position is surely that there can be no space for Muslims like Ed Husain. But we know that there are and always have been Muslim individuals and communities who live peaceful and unthreatening lives and derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith. We know that religions which claim to rest on the immutability of God’s word nevertheless depend on human agency to interpret that word, which opens the way to alternative interpretations. And we also know that the history of a culture is no predictor of its future. Before the Reformation, Christianity was a savage religion that burned heretics and put meek Jews to the sword; in medieval times, who could have possibly envisaged that Christianity would come to underpin the central Enlightenment doctrine of the separation of church and state that gave rise to individual freedom and liberal democracy? As circumstances change, so people change. None of us is a prisoner of the past. There is currently a great debate raging within the Islamic world about all this. Who can say how it will end?
It is vital that this debate continues. And it is vital that both Ed Husain and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, along with both Muslims and ex-Muslims who take their lives in their hands to fight this fearsome threat that we all face, are properly supported, promoted and protected --and actually listened to. We have a duty towards such people no less than towards dissidents in the former Soviet Union. It is on the stand that they are taking, and the desperately important debate they are helping promote, that the future of our world depends.
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Tuesday, 20th November 2007
6:36pm
There has been a clutch of good pieces in the last couple of days about the forthcoming Annapolis farce by Bret Stephens, Hillel Halkin and Frank Gaffney.
To all these, I would merely add the following observations. The Annapolis conference (meeting?) is grotesque because Israel is being dragooned into ‘negotiating’ and making ‘painful sacrifices’ with an Arab side which is quite explicit that Israel should not exist at all (see chief negotiator Saeb Erekat’s statement, reported in my earlier post, that the Palestinians will never agree to Israel remaining a Jewish state). The very fact that America is forcing this meeting to take place regardless of this position is to legitimise and thus strengthen the terrorist Palestinian entity that has never stopped trying to wipe Israel off the map.
The apparent belief that a Palestinian state would a) rescue Mahmoud Abbas’s ‘moderate’ Fatah and b) be a bulwark against the threat from Iran is risible. There is only one thing which is currently preventing Hamas from taking over the West Bank just as it took over Gaza. That is the presence in the West Bank of Israeli troops, which are acting against Hamas and saving Abbas’s skin. If Israel were to withdraw tomorrow, Hamas would take over and Abbas would be history. A Palestinian state in the West Bank would turn into Hamastan and, just as in Gaza, would become a proxy for Iran and quite possibly also an incubator for al Qaeda. If no Palestinian state is established, Abbas will be history anyway. Either way, this is not good news for the region.
If the moderate Arab states want to avoid this terrible development on their doorstep — and they do — there is only one way forward. Jordan must legally take control of the West Bank that it formerly illegally occupied, thus subsuming the Palestinians into the state that was always effectively ‘Palestine’ and finally bringing about the two-state solution.
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5:45pm
The sinister police response to Islamist incitement (see post below) in which they tried to suppress the evidence of it in the interests of ‘community cohesion’ is unfortunately part of a far larger picture of terminal British cultural cringe and abasement in the face of the threat to Britain and the west. Following the statement by the head of MI5 that we should ‘pay close attention’ to the language used to talk about such matters, the Guardian reports that counter-terrorism officials are abandoning ‘offensive’ ‘inappropriate’ and ‘emotive language’ when talking about, er, Islamic terrorism. So no more ‘war on terror’; the ’battle’ against extremist ideology becomes a ‘struggle’ (hello? isn’t that what 'jihad' actually means?); and terrorist plots and conspiracies will be described as ‘criminal’ instead. ‘
We hadn't got the message right,’ said one senior official. He added: ‘We must talk in a language which is not offensive.’ Another said that the terrorist threat must not be described as a ‘Muslim problem’.
Later on in the story, however, we learn that the geniuses in the Home Office Research, Information, and Communications Unit, which was set up to counter al Qaeda propaganda and ‘win hearts and minds’, will draw up
‘counter-narratives’ to the anti-western messages on websites designed to influence vulnerable and impressionable audiences… to explain what one official called the government's ‘foreign policy in its totality’, counter the accusations made by al-Qaida sympathisers and extremist groups and pinpoint the weaknesses in their arguments. The unit will also support ‘alternative voices’ in the Muslim community.
So how precisely are they going to do this if they won’t even acknowledge that the words ‘Muslim’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘problem’ might go together? Since the driver of I*****c t*******m is the I******t injunction, mandated by leading M****m religious authorities, to wage war against western civilisation in the name of I***m, restore the M****m caliphate and subjugate unbelievers and M****m backsliders everywhere, just how is the HORICU going to ‘pinpoint the weaknesses in their arguments’ if they refuse even to use these words? On what basis will they single out the Muslim community for the encouragement of ‘alternative voices’ if they say the problem is nothing to do with that community? And just what is the government’s ‘
foreign policy in its totality’? Does this involve saying less than fulsome things about George Bush, perhaps, and more fulsome things about the Palestinians in their historic ‘struggle’ against the Zionist entity? I’m sure that we’d all love to know.
Last week, London Mayor Ken Livingstone published a report about ‘Islamophobia’ which damned pretty well every factual reference to Islamic extremism, terrorism or intended genocide as ‘Islamophobic’. This risible document was said to have been written by ‘
leading academics and experts’; but one of its main targets, the television journalist John Ware who made an exemplary documentary exposing the extremism of the Muslim Council of Britain, quickly discovered at the press conference that one of these alleged luminaries wasn’t an academic or expert at all but Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB, whose form in the field of prejudice and extremism has been well documented (see here, for example) and that two other MCB people were also among the authors.
As Ware wrote in the
Sunday Telegraph, the purpose of this travesty was to suppress legitimate discussion of such issues by putting political Islam beyond the scope of media inquiry. There is already alarming evidence that this is happening. The British libel laws have been successfully used by a Saudi banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, to suppress evidence about the alleged links between Saudi financing and terrorism. More than 30 publications, authors and publishers have been successfully sued in Britain, with only one author, the terrorism financing expert Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld, fighting a lonely battle against such ‘libel tourism’. A nine-minute video documentary on this can be viewed
here.
Meanwhile, the Times reported yesterday that the prize-winning artist Grayson Perry had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise highly provocative body of work because of the threat of reprisals.
‘I’ve censored myself,’ Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. ‘The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.’
Far from upholding and protecting the culture that is under attack, the British government and counter-terrorism establishment are instead pushing us all further down this dark path. The lights are going out in Britain. This is the way freedom dies.
To read a response to this post from the solicitors of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, click here.
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Monday, 19th November 2007
11:52pm
The
Ofcom ruling today totally exonerating the Channel Four Dispatches programme
Undercover Mosque should not be the end of this disturbing episode. The programme exposed the preaching of extremism and hatred in a number of British mosques, several of them supposedly ‘moderate’ and mainstream. In any rational society those preachers, who were inciting hatred against gays, Jews, women and non-Muslims, would have been arrested and prosecuted. But this is Britain, and what happened after
Undercover Mosque was transmitted was an object (or should that be abject) lesson in how to hand victory to the Islamists on a plate.
First, West Midlands police investigated whether any offences had been committed at these mosques and presented their findings to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against anybody. Then the West Midlands police decided that the real villains of the piece were the makers of the Dispatches programme itself for stirring up racial hatred. This astounding view was dismissed by the CPS. Undaunted in its determination to find the Dispatches team guilty of something, the police then referred the programme to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, claiming that it had distorted various speakers’ comments, edited material in a manner likely to
undermine community cohesion
and was
likely to undermine feelings of public reassurance and safety of those communities in the West Midlands for which the Chief Constable has a responsibility.
Now Ofcom has robustly rejected all these charges and concluded:
Undercover Mosque was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest. Ofcom found no evidence that the broadcaster had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity. On the evidence (including untransmitted footage and scripts), Ofcom found that the broadcaster had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context.
Questions must now be raised in Parliament about the behaviour of the West Midland police. By their actions, they have made the people of Britain signally less safe. The Dispatches programme performed a public service in exposing sources of the kind of extremism that threatens the safety and security of this country. For the police to turn on this programme with patently implausible charges against it is deeply sinister and against the public interest. As Channel Four
said after the ruling, the police action had given
legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate.
The West Midlands police appear to have turned themselves into a mouthpiece for Islamists trying to shut down legitimate and necessary debate. The idea that the police should believe that ‘community cohesion’ — aka the sensitivities of the Muslim community – should trump the need to identify those endangering not only the cohesion but the security of the whole country suggests that the police have totally lost the plot here. There is also something badly wrong with a system which is unable to act against those identified on this programme inciting hatred in this way. Is this because of the pusillanimity of the CPS? Is it the inadequacy of the law? Whatever the reason, this is the way a culture offers up its own throat to the knife.
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