I arrived in London the morning after the bombings. I wasn't there to do any reporting, but when a city is attacked in such a way, every stroll amounts to newsgathering. All in all, the city was pleasantly empty and the people didn't seem particularly terrorized. Then again, the fact that the city was pleasantly empty was perhaps the best proof that the "7/7" murderers had some of their intended effect. This was a Friday in a normally bustling city and many Londoners simply opted to wait until Monday before trying the bus or subway again.
Obviously, modern terrorism is a psychological weapon more than an overtly military one. Its aim is to persuade civilian populations to surrender where military forces never would.
And alas, it often works. Europe has become steadily more pro-Palestinian in no small part because of Palestinian terrorism. The French abandoned Algeria because of terrorism. The Irish Republican Army has had mixed success from terrorism. And of course the most strikingly successful terrorist attack in recent years was the Madrid bombing which â accompanied with some political incompetence â resulted in the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq.
And here in the United Kingdom, there are those who believe Tony Blair should have followed Spain's lead into similar retreat. George Galloway, the British MP who has been embroiled in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, immediately called on the British to follow Spain's example and respond to the bombings by immediately pulling all of its troops out of "harms way" in Iraq. It was unclear whether he thought Tony Blair should bend over and let Osama Bin Laden smack him with a paddle while the Prime Minister shouted "Thank you sir! May I have another?"
The peculiar irony of the British Left's position is that they are so keen to "blame the victim" â normally a major left-wing no-no. Gary Younge, a writer for the execrably anti-American newspaper The Guardian, proclaimed that the attacks were a direct result of the war in Iraq and that they never would have happened otherwise. The war, Younge writes, "diverted our attention and resources from the very people we should have been fighting â al-Qaida." So Al-Zarko-Boy represents who, again?
Of course, the same Mr. Younge believed that the invasion of Afghanistan was unjustified and, after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote eloquently about why so many Arabs, Muslims and anti-American Europeans had legitimate reasons to cheer. How many folks do you suppose will cheer when you die, weasel? How about you come to Ground Zero and cheer, eh?
In their caricatured asininity, Young and Galloway are extreme examples of a more widespread mindset which assumes that America (along with Britain and its other allies) is the problem. And if we would just stop bothering the beehive, the bees would just stop stinging us. I can understand that. Works with bees.
This is nonsense. Everything we've learned about the Jihadis in recent years points to the fact that they are more like killer bees than conventional ones. They spread. They're aggressive. And they seek to replace the traditional population wherever they appear.
Regardless, the real danger isn't from a tiny rabble of Jihadi-useful idiots, but from the great mass of the British public. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, The Independent ran a splashy frontpage story on the "backlash" against Muslims. Keep in mind that this was the worst assault on London since the Blitz and the "backlash" amounted to little more than a broken window and a man getting roughed up in a pub. One has to wonder how many more pub-beatings took place that same weekend because some idiot said something unkind about Manchester United.
The scandal wasn't that there was a "backlash" against the Muslim community; the outrage was that there wasn't more of a backlash within the Muslim community. We now know that the attackers were British-born and raised Muslims. And yet, there's precious little evidence that the Muslim community is eager to turn on the enemy within with any admirable enthusiasm. And there are even fewer signs that the British media has any interest in contributing to a "climate" which would encourage such a development.
This is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. Obviously, it makes terrorism more likely. And it also creates precisely the sort of climate the press and moderate Muslims fear most. If normal Muslims can't be counted on to turn in terrorists in their midst, how can a nation avoid taking measures which will seem unfair to normal Muslims? Already, nine out of ten Brits support sweeping new powers for the police. If Jihadists can hide among the larger Muslim population, it's obvious that the larger Muslim population will come under greater scrutiny. The logic of the cancer cell kicks in and even more young Muslims feel "oppressed" and the number of Jihadis will grow. It's called positive feedback, I think.
But even if the number doesn't grow, the danger is already enormous. The official number of British Muslims is 1.6 million, although most observers say it's closer to 2 million or so. The "official" guess at how many of these Muslims are Jihadists is 16,000, based on the assumption that no more than 1 percent could be extremists.
This, of course, could be wishful thinking. And wishful thinking is the enemy's greatest asset.
Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is editor at large at the National Review Online and a syndicated columnist.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/15/2005 06:55 ||
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Please Sandy, don't leave. It just won't be the same without you. What can we do to get you to stay? Better parking space? Free gas? How about Chief Justice for a year? Well, two out of three she already has. It is the third carrot that liberals and left-leaning Republicans are dangling in front of Associate Justice O'Connor if she stays on pending the retirement of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
WASHINGTON - Four female senators called Thursday for retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to stay on the court and try for chief justice if the ailing William Rehnquist steps down.
Once again, those who lean to the left like to call for things "if" something happens.
In a letter to O'Connor, Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Barbara Boxer of California asked the nation's first female justice to consider staying on the high court if Chief Justice Rehnquist relinquishes the top spot.
The last I checked, Rehnquist wasn't too eager to retire. In fact, he reminded me of that old Master Chief who had to be dragged down the brow.
Rehnquist was discharged Thursday after two nights in the hospital for treatment of a fever. O'Connor announced her retirement on July 1, but has made it conditional on a replacement being confirmed.
"We urge you to reconsider your resignation and return to the Supreme Court to serve as chief justice, should there be a vacancy," the senators said in the Thursday letter.
There is a vacancy and she created it. Has Justice O'Connor ever indicated that she would like to serve in a leadership capacity. Has she authored a significant number of opinions -- dissenting or otherwise?
The four senators also said they will "strongly recommend" to President Bush that O'Connor become the next chief justice if Rehnquist steps down.
"We believe such a history-making nomination by the president would demonstrate leadership that unites Americans around the shared values of liberty, the rule of law and the preservation of our constitutional freedoms," they said.
Any nomination to the land's highest court is history-making. The Senate Judiciary Committee is the body that has the chance to unite Americans around the values we cherish. Simply do what you are supposed to do -- vote -- and be done with it.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and top Judiciary Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont first publicly stoked speculation about a possible O'Connor candidacy for chief justice on Sunday.
"I think it would be quite a capping to her career if she served for a time, maybe a year or so," Specter said.
Given the praise O'Connor has received since her retirement announcement, she would be a lock to be confirmed as chief justice, Leahy said. "I think it would be a very doable thing," he said Sunday.
Twenty-plus years on the bench and no one mentions her name and the word chief in the same sentence.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, argued in a speech to the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society that Bush's team will probably conduct an ideological examination of the prospective nominees in private before sending a candidate to the Senate.
Schumer acts as if an ideological assessment of a candidate for the highest office in the land is something strange. Charlie, haven't you and your cohorts been conducting just such an examination of the yet to be named justice since Associate Justice O'Connor announcer her retirement?
"If a nominee's ideology, judicial philosophy, constitutional views are central considerations in a president's decision to nominate, as they inevitably are, and if such questioning is going on in private, I dare say that the American people have an absolute right to have those questions answered publicly," Schumer said.
I couldn't agree more. Now stop your posturing, take a nap if need be and be prepared to do the one thing a Senator is expected to do. Vote (it's that little button by your right hand).
#1
Yeah, cool! Make her Chief for a year of two. Ya think there will be a different prez in a year or two? Morons.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/15/2005 11:45 Comments ||
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#2
Their hubris is breathtaking. And disgusting.
They assume to tell the President not only who to nominate to the Supreme Court, but who he will name as Chief Justice. It's like they never heard of a little thing called separation of powers.
In addition, as I understand it (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), Justice O'Conner is stepping down because of her husband's ill health. For these selfish, self-centered bitches to insist she stay on the Court instead is self-centered arrogance beyond belief.
The whole crew of them, including the "Republicans," can rot in hell.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/15/2005 23:30 Comments ||
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A great essay, as always. I'm EFL-ing it down to what I consider the most salient point.
Why does [the Left's] false narrative[ of the GWOT], then, persist â other than that it had a certain political utility in the 2002 and 2004 elections?
In a word, this version of events brings spiritual calm for millions of troubled though affluent and blessed Westerners. There are three sacraments to their postmodern thinking, besides the primordial fear that so often leads to appeasement.
Our first hindrance is moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power.
Taking back Fallujah from beheaders and terrorists is no different from bombing the London subway since civilians may die in either case. The deliberate rather than accidental targeting of noncombatants makes little difference, especially since the underdog in Fallujah is not to be judged by the same standard as the overdogs in London and New York. A half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo are the same as the Nazi death camps or the Gulag.
Our second shackle is utopian pacifism â âwar never solved anythingâ and âviolence only begets violence.â Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle â whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul â is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.
The third restraint is multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.
These tenets in various forms are not merely found in the womb of the universities, but filter down into our popular culture, grade schools, and national political discourse â and make it hard to fight a war against stealthy enemies who proclaim constant and shifting grievances. If at times these doctrines are proven bankrupt by the evidence it matters little, because such beliefs are near religious in nature â a secular creed that will brook no empirical challenge.
These articles of faith apparently fill a deep psychological need for millions of Westerners, guilty over their privilege, free to do anything without constraints or repercussions, and convinced that their own culture has made them spectacularly rich and leisured only at the expense of others.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/15/2005 12:01 ||
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Alexandre del Valle le 06/12/2004
[translated from the French by Erich von Abele]
Since the instigation of the second Intifada al Aqsa, in September of 2000; since September 11, 2001, which marked the end of the inviolability of America's strategic sanctuary; and, above all, since the second Iraqi crisis, which has resulted in the dismantling of the regime of Saddam Hussein, one has been able to note throughout the West the emergence of a Red-Green-Brown Axis (the Red of the extreme left, the Brown of the extreme right, and the Green of Islamism). The different components of this Axis have for a common objective the struggle against the new faces of Evil: America , Israel , âImperialismâ, and even the West in its entirety.
The objective alliances among these three ideologies, we will see, did not begin just yesterday. But it is undeniable that the events since the beginning of the new millennium have contributed particularly to their collusion. In effect, the use of the term âcrusadeâ by George W. Bush on the day after September 11 has been seen as a provocation, as much among the anti-clerical extreme left and extreme right as it has among the Islamic milieusâwhence the evermore revealing convergence among, on the one hand, those nostalgic for the first two totalitarianisms (the Browns and the Reds) and, on the other hand, the protagonists of revolutionary Islamism. These latter affect to defend the Arab masses who are âoccupiedâ as much as the poor, the weak, and the âhumiliatedâ of the Third World, the victims of the new Judeo-Christian âimperialistâ Crusaders. The recent public standpoints expressed by the famous terrorist Carlos, among others, lead quite clearly in this direction (1).
It is evident that Islamism, the third totalitarianism after Nazism and Communism, echoes to a definite extent the aspirations of its two predecessors: seizing the struggle of civilizations and religions, then declaring war on the Judeo-Christian world in the name of the âdispossessedâ of the rest of the planet, Islamism seduces as much those nostalgic for the pagan Third Reich, resolved to eradicate Judaism and Christianity, as it does those partisans of the hammer and sickle, determined to come to blows with the âbourgeoisâ and âcapitalistâ West. The nerve center of this despised system: Manhattan , âthe planetary district of mercenaries of the economic and financial war that America wreaks on the worldâ, according to the words of Carlos (2). It was no surprise, then, to see the Browns, the Reds and the Greens rejoice together at the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and to identify bin Laden as a new David against an imperial âAmerican-Zionistâ Goliath. It was no surprise, either, to witness the enthusiasm of these three totalitarian movements converge around the âheroicâ struggle conducted since March 2003 by the remnant Baathist rebels and Islamist Shiites of Iraq against the American occupation of Mesopotamia .
#2
I've always wondered where AC's stroke of genius occured. I'd like to think he was on a cable car headed up Telegraph Hill when the various insane dins merged into one pure screech of lunacy.
#3
Blair's Law⢠â the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force. Tim Blair stated it first, I believe.
#4
I think Tim rocks, awright. Does he expound on what this useless (I prefer a characterization which includes pointless and perfectly round, smooth-brained like a cue ball, lol) force will end up doing? Lemmings? Future Wireheads? Or just continued loud gnashing of teeth and hand-wringing? It's like walking under a streetlight in early summer in Texas - you squish 10 June bugs with every step. Not a problem, just a little disgusting, y'know?
I know Atomic Conspiracy (AC) has been all over this and related topics for at least 2 yrs here at RB - with special focus on the propaganda aspects (See: The Conquest of Cool). And he is The Troll Exterminator Extraordinaire, as well. Kinda like a King Croc - if he decides to chew on you, it's all over, man, lol. "Genius" works for me, too, Ship - AC's a maniac or a wizard, or both, lol.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
