Terrorists get off

From an interview with Frank Furedi, talking about the ideas in his new book, Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown.

I think that what we have today is a very formless, diffuse anger, which lashes out at certain symbols of modernity and the West, or against what these individuals think of as the Empire. And I certainly think it is a problem when this phenomenon is redefined as something with a coherent ideology, or when it is called ‘totalitarian’ and various other names. This endows the networks with a coherence that they otherwise lack. But what is interesting is that their incoherent rage is matched by an equally incoherent response from Western governments. You’ve got this kind of symmetry of confusion in the war on terror.

Today’s terrorist networks simply lack the intellectual resources to offer any coherent alternative. And therefore they opportunistically draw on all sorts of resources. They’re just as likely to draw on some anti-consumerist manifesto or anything else that represents some kind of alternative to the onward march of a modern, technologically advanced society, as they are to draw from the Koran. So in a perverse kind of way, although they often have Islamic convictions, their worldview is fuelled by ideals that are much more to do with a backward-looking anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-modernist imagination; an outlook that says: ‘Stop the world I want to get off.’

There's a lot of good stuff here and I could have chosen several other passages, among which, the feebleness of our elites and the lack of 'greater meaning' in our society. It's worth a read.

Barbarians inside the gates

Nouri of the moor next door mourns the murder by insurgents of Khalil al-Zahawi, one of the world's great calligraphers of Classical Arabic.

While there are despicable habits on the Americans' part (for instance turning tombs of historical figures into barracks and foosball rooms; or destroying the country's system of order all at once without planning out how to manage it) the insurgents seem to be more like a horde of barbarian locusts, sucking the country dry and contributing nothing. Killing, torturing, intimidating, maiming, and leaving nothing behind but scared children and hatred.

What, apart from their indestructable sense of spiritual superiority, do the Jihadists offer? All of them the products of failed cultures and economies, they can do nothing but destroy what others have built. Their only vision of the future is a fantasy with even less appeal than that of the communists of yesteryear; their only rallying cry that of the dying; their only path through their cult of death.

(via Pajamas Media)

Awaiting its return

You'll have seen this before, but given the ongoing 'surge' (I would prefer not to put into print what that word suggests to me) and the alternative course of action recommended by the Baker Study Group, I think it is salutary to remember how some of those on the other side interpret events; whether rightly or wrongly is yet to be seen.

After a little resistance [in Somalia], The American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in Allah The Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies. We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter were still there. If the U.S. still thinks and brags that it still has this kind of power even after all these successive defeats in Vietnam, Beirut, Aden, and Somalia, then let them go back to those who are awaiting its return.
Osama Bin Laden - Interview with Peter Arnett , late March, 1997

Note the date.

I found it here in Scott Malensek's reflections on the consequences of retreat.

Scary Jesuits go C of E

An extraordinary editorial in La Civiltà Cattolica, the magazine of the Roman Jesuits, displays the clarity and logic you expect of Jesuits with a spinelessness we have come to expect of the Church of England.

It states that any attack on a Muslim nation will be taken by fundamentalist Muslims as an attack on the Umma, and is therefore to be resisted by armed action, or Jihad. It supports this reading by quoting the Universal Islamic Declaration, approved in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe, thereby linking the Jihadis with that esteemed group of moderates. The editorial goes to maintain that an Islamic state cannot by definition be democratic or secular, nor can it fail to declare Islam the ‘state religion’. It notes the fear on the part of radical Islamic movements of the temptations that Western hedonism and liberty hold for the young, and that thus the West "represents a very serious – even deadly – threat against the very survival of Islam."

Little to disagree with there. But the unnamed writer then goes on to make some recommendations. The second of them is that, because of the reaction it would provoke, we must "avoid political and military gestures that could appear as actions meant to combat, humiliate, and deride the Islamic peoples." Note that "could appear as". God, it's difficult to find 5 things that don't appear as provocation to many Muslims!

Very worryingly, they follow this with

a fair solution must be sought for the volatile Israeli-Palestinian question, which, according to the viewpoint shared by the entire Islamic world, is a serious wound, because the West has appropriated and given to the Jews an Islamic territory that is ‘sacred’ to Allah and belongs to Muslims ‘by divine law’ until the end of time.

They acknowledge that some Muslims don't think this, but then quote the Hamas Charter, which, as I am sure you do not need reminding, starts off with the demand that Israel be liquidated, and lays upon every Muslim the duty to work and Jihad so that that day come. The good writer then explains

This can require, not suicide – which is prohibited by Islam – but ‘martyrdom’, which, unlike suicide (held to be an egotistical act), is an altruistic action, carried out to defend the honor of Allah and the trampled-down rights of Islam: it is a ‘religious’ action which Allah repays with paradise.”

To apply the logic of this second recommendation: since it is a religious duty to wipe out Israel, and we must avoid any act that even appears to "combat, humiliate, and deride the Islamic peoples", it therefore follows that we must do nothing to impede the rightful duty of Muslims to wipe Israel off the map.

Sandro Magister has a fuller summary and comment on this ridiculous editorial.