BBC News, once a mainstay of outstanding, no-nonsense journalism, has been on a rather embarrassing slide for years. I'm not talking about the occasional brainfreeze, such as the broadcaster requesting an interview with Bob Marley a quarter century after the music star's death. I'm afraid it's a little more serious than that.
The BBC consistently misrepresents and obfuscates the story of our time. That would be the spread of Islam that's being brought about by a ragtag coalition of Muslim firebrands and their naive Western enablers. The gamut runs from various Islamic pressure groups whose raison d'être is to pretend to feel insulted at every turn, to their rainbow-worshipping fellow travelers in Europe and elsewhere, to gangs of Muslim terrorists inflicting mass murder on innocents in countless countries.
Examples of Auntie Beeb's lily-livered attitude are here and here. (An aside: the organization has also decided that when its religion-covering news staff mentions the prophet Mohammed, the letters PBUH — "peace be upon him" — will be appended to his name, as a "mark of respect".)
Now, though, BBC News has outdone itself with an article about the Mumbai attacks entitled "The Age of 'Celebrity Terrorism'." The broadcaster's respect for the esteemed prophet's followers is so deep that every effort is made never to call a spade a spade (or a Muslim a Muslim, excepting positive mentions).
Follow along if you have the stomach:
"Certain nationalities." That would be Americans and, oh yeah, the BBC's own countrymen.
Really? Almost anywhere? They most assuredly didn't come from Japan's Shinto community, or from Mormon circles in Canada, or from atheist groups in the Netherlands. Nor were they spawned by Quaker quilting bees in Pennsylvania, or by evangelical church gatherings in the Congo, or by coteries of Romanian Rosicrucians.
Where they did come from, spiritually, is the much-vaunted religion of peace; where at least some of them did come from, geographically, is most likely Bradford or Leeds — just like the London subway bombers.
The BBC article never mentions this. In fact, neither the word 'Islam' nor the word 'Muslim' appears anywhere in the piece, presumably so as not to "offend" anyone.
But there's evidently another reason for the remarkable oversight. The BBC writer tries to get us to consider that maybe the 200 people who were brutally butchered in Mumbai, and the 400 who were injured, weren't victims of Islamic jihad after all.
Terrific question. Yes, surely the dozen terrorists who carried out their bloody handiwork in Mumbai were just a bunch of agnostic Dylan Klebold wannabes, sans the trenchcoats.
And perhaps so little is known of the terrorists' cause, because they simply did not feel the need to have one.
Except that they did. That cause is violent jihad. Only a blind or staggeringly dishonest person could reach a different conclusion.
Let's get real. The terrorists who paid Mumbai a little visit demanded that other mujahideen be released from Indian prisons. They attacked a Jewish center and killed a rabbi and his wife. In between the spraying of bullets and the cutting of throats, they shouted about injustices done to Muslims. They released a Muslim Turkish couple they'd captured, but killed their other (non-Muslim) prey. One attacker now under arrest is a self-confessed member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic terror group operating out of Pakistan. And on and on.
And still not a flicker of reality sets in at the BBC:
Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie. These individuals indulge in terrorism simply because they can, while their audience concocts a rationale on their behalf.
See? This is easy. "Generalised disaffection." Nothing to do with the tenets of radical Islam, then.
Clinging to the Pollyannish notion that, all evidence to the contrary, no Muslims — or at least, no 'real' Muslims — are responsible for a long string of terrorist atrocities (including the carnages in New York, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, and Mumbai) is to embrace a view of the world as you'd like it to be, not the world as it is. It is, therefore, the antithesis of journalism — a cowardly abdication of the tell-the-truth, publish-and-be-damned ethos that ruled the profession not so very long ago.
More importantly, the prestidigitation involved in making obvious culprits disappear behind a politically correct smoke screen is dangerous to our lives and well-being. That's because we can't defeat those who aim to destroy us if we don't first unflinchingly identify those enemies — enemies who, inspired by Mohammed's bloodthirst, number easily a hundred million, all of whom stand ready to either spill our blood and that of our children personally, or to roundly applaud such slaughter when others perform it.
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P.S. It occurred to me that that last sentence is easily misread. It doesn't mean that I consider Muslims to be our mortal enemies. Our mortal enemies, rather, are the seven percent of them — 90 to 100 million seething Islamists — who openly identify as radicals and supporters of violent jihad. See here and here.
P.P.S. Rohit Chopra eloquently rejects the feeble and ever-annoying argument that Islamic terrorists are not 'real' Muslims:
A [...] fairly standard Left-liberal line is that atrocities such as
the Bombay bomb blasts are merely the actions of a few individuals and
that Islam has nothing to do with these heinous acts. In this
perspective, Islam can never be criticized for any excess committed by
Muslims. Interestingly, the exact same argument is often made about the
Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists who destroyed the Babri Masjid:
that they were just a few misguided souls who do not have anything to
do with 'real' Hinduism and that other Hindus, even if sympathetic to
Hindutva ideology, would never really have destroyed a mosque, rioted,
or burnt Muslims alive.
But the problem with this line of
reasoning is that it rests upon a narrow, selective, and untenable —
even if laudable and idealistic — conception of Islam or Hinduism.
The mob that destroyed the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 consisted
of Hindus who were every bit as authentic as Gandhi or any other Hindu
who condemns religious violence in the name of Hinduism. The terrorists
who attacked New York on September 11, 2001 and Bombay on November 26,
2008 were Muslims, and they were every bit as Muslim as those Muslims
who condemn these actions.
The BBC also refrained from bashing the Pope at the height of the Troubles. Truly, they are lily-livered cowards desperate to appease their politically correct overlords.
Incidentally, if the Deccan Mujahadin aims to destroy us they, um, missed quite considerably. In fact, before blanket-criticising the BBC for not jumping on the OMGMUSLIMSGONNAGETWHITEY bandwagon, you might wish to do some research into the rather more complex Kashmiri situation, which has been ongoing for quite some decades now, and which has produced plenty of opportunities for the Indian government to blame "Pakistani terrorists" for every damn thing that happens in the country, not to mention taking the opportunity to enact more authoritarian policies themselves. Hmm, blaming Islamists for an encroachment of the authoritarian state onto civil life. My goodness, where have I heard that before?
I guess I must be "blind or staggeringly dishonest", because to me "violent jihad" is as useful a justification for violence as "they hate us for our freedoms!" That you are apparently incapable of appreciating that extremisms can arise under many different circumstances and have many different proxy causes, and that these causes may in fact be what people mean when they wonder what drives the formation and zeal of paramilitary groups. Religion isn't totally inconsequential, but it's a vehicle for extremism rather than a cause. You get extremists everywhere and they're all dangerous. Singling out Islam because their extremists target white people occasionally while overlooking the fact that white Christian extremists just barged into a Muslim country with a big fat army is a trifle biased, isn't it?
Shouting about how the Archibishop of Canterbury should roundly condemn Catholic child-molesting priests and abortion clinic bombers at every opportunity to ensure that nobody could ever get confused about supposedly "moderate" Christians' support for these things (how do we know that people in your local Presbyterian ministry are really opposed to paedophilia, hmmm? When was the last time you heard them denounce it?) might make you feel good, but it doesn't do any good. Pragmatists recognise that results matter much more than spittle-flecked rages.
But fuck it dude, if you want to say that it's all because Muslims are goddamned terrorist supporters and there's no complex sociopolitical backstory and or genuine material grievance underpinning anything that happens, you go right the fuck ahead. Blame the fact that cautious and nuanced approaches to the facts don't always line up how you want them to on political correctness all you want, everyone with sense knows that as soon as those words are mentioned it's game over for rationality. It's just shorthand for "mooom, make them stop telling me to think beyond my own preconceptioooonss!" So go right ahead and whine on the internet, but don't get the idea that you're preaching truth to power with this garbage, whatever you do. It's nothing but a self-indulgent whinge that people won't hate what you hate.
Posted by: McDuff | Monday, December 01, 2008 at 03:16 AM
McDuff:
Thanks for that perspective. I'm both flattered and impressed that you wrote and posted your response within about 20 minutes of my publishing my own little philippic. In the darkest of night, no less! Maybe your breathtaking and admirable speed is why the comment comes across as not quite as thoughtful as you apparently intended.
For one thing, it's a tad curious that you don't actually take on the substance of my argument -- that the BBC, in this case and others, has been remarkably reticent about even mentioning the involvement of Muslims in Islamically inspired atrocities. You skip right on past that, hellbent on espousing your OWN preconceptions about Muslim bloodshed -- and about me.
"Singling out Islam because their extremists target white people occasionally while overlooking the fact that white Christian extremists just barged into a Muslim country with a big fat army is a trifle biased, isn't it?"
Ah, you want to go THERE, do you?
Look man, I've been on record from BEFORE DAY ONE with my opposition to the Iraq war. In fact, I was one of half a million people who braved the cold in New York, on February 15, 2003, to protest the imminent U.S. invasion. I've since written dozens of times against the incompetence of the White House and the Pentagon, about the Abu Ghraib abuses, about America's rendition and torture policies, about the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars, and about the fact that the war made matters worse globally.
Simultaneously condemning radical Islamists -- terrorists, to call the worst ones by their proper name -- doesn't seem incongruous to me. The core fallacy in your statement is that the war was perpetrated by "white Christian extremists," as if it's a continuation of the Crusades of a thousand years ago. Much as I loathe this war, it clearly wasn't started out of religious fervor, and it isn't fought for religious reasons now.
Even if I were to concede the notion that Iraqis and Afghanis now have plenty of reasons to hate the West in general and America in particular, what's the beef of Indonesian Islamic firebrands -- or those from Leeds and London for that matter? Their beef is, of course, wholly religious. They don't identify with oppressed or attacked people per se; they identify with their religious brethren. They're closing the ranks based on what they believe some desert-dwelling child-marrying warlord said more than a dozen centuries ago.
As for "singling out Islam," apparently I still don't get it. What other group is there to blame that mindset on? Islam is not the reason these terrorist evils exist, but Islamists are -- and many regular, truly peace-loving Muslims are complicit inasmuch as they fail to condemn the slaughter of innocents anywhere but in their own backyard.
One final thing: I think you misunderstood my use of the noun "cause" as applied to the Mumbai attackers. I meant the word to signify their commitment to a principle -- an abhorrent one, but a principle nonetheless. I didn't intend it to mean that their reason for violent jihad is violent jihad. That would make me guilty of circular reasoning, and of the kind of facile, empty rhetoric that is indeed evident in the nonsensical Bush assertion that "they hate us for our freedoms."
Posted by: Rogier van Bakel | Monday, December 01, 2008 at 04:21 AM
Google reader being what it is, sometimes the RSS stars just align like that.
"Complicit" is a lovely word, especially when one can be complicit through "failure to condemn". Like I said, the Archibishop of Canterbury routinely "fails to condemn" child abuse by Catholic priests. However, only someone either intent on grinding a particular axe or suffering from a total lack of perspective would say that Rowan Williams was therefore "complicit in the abuse of choirboys." I take exactly the same line with self-important folks who try and hold everyone within Islam to standards nobody within Christianity is expected to maintain.
As far as the people in charge of the US not being "Christian extremists" just because they aren't specifically and emphatically following on from the papal injunctions to storm the holy land, it's a distraction and a wilful one, and not one that I'd expect from someone with a supposedly keen eye for these things. Extremists look different depending on where they are, what they're doing and what the context is. The Pope doesn't bomb people, but he sends people to lie about condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa. The Taliban don't bomb people, they stone them. Bush and the neocons are constrained domestically by a democracy and a competing mythos of "freedom and liberty," but there's no doubt that the government of the USA has for the last eight years been held hostage by a particular kind of American Quasi-Christian extremist. You don't have to look far to find someone with Fatwah envy propping up a desk somewhere in the still-active and very malevolent conservative inner circle.
"But," you argue, "that's not what the Iraq war was about" and then go on to talk about terror and border disputes and imperialist desires and ideologies and water and oil and other kinds of resources, not to mention boneheaded nationalism. Which is precisely the point. Islamic radicals may have carried this out but that fact is as relevant as Bush's Americianity - not irrelevant, instructive in analysing how the mindset filters and synthesises information, but only ultimately useful as one part of a much larger analytical framework. An understanding of Islam is instructive because most militants in that region are Muslims. But Islam can't explain suicide bombings any more then Christianity can explain firebombing civilian targets.
That you don't know what other than Islam you could possibly blame violent extremism on speaks more to your lack of experience and imagination than anything else, I'd say. Your picture makes it look as if you must remember Shankhill in the 70s. Similarly, last I checked there were no Mullahs in ETA. Until the Americans stormed onto the scene post-9/11 it was well understood that there is more to terrorism than Islamism. We'd do well to get past that particular Atlanticist distortion of the facts.
When you rail and rage against the BBC's failure to say MUSLIM over and over again, you're merely asking that they pay attention to the part you think is important, based on your biases about "complicity", at the expense of factors which are arguably not only more important but also more interesting -- a twofer of reporting. They're not failing to report when they talk about Pakistani-based Kashmiri Separatists and leave out the word Muslim. Nor are they failing to report when they discuss that even Jihadi Extremism contains a wealth of variation within it and may well attract disaffected young men after A Cause who don't necessarily care what the cause is. For God's sake, one of them was wearing a Versace t-shirt! Even if it's wrong it's a valid line of enquiry, one that we gain nothing by shutting down and shouting "don't be stupid, it's all because of Islam! Fear the religion! Pay no attention to the socio-political context behind the curtain!"
Posted by: McDuff | Monday, December 01, 2008 at 06:01 AM
McDuff:
Thanks again. You make some good points. I love the term "fatwah envy" and know exactly what you mean.
Now, while I'm half-swayed when I carefully consider your arguments, I ultimately swing most of the way back. I don't think it's because I'm stubborn or myopic, though my wife might disagree. It's because your honorable desire to see shades of gray leads to the evaporation of any moral culpability on the part of Islamist terrorists. We can get so busy trying to understand murderers' ostensibly complicated minds that conclusions about their "real" motives become impossible to draw. It ends up with "There but for the grace of god..." And ultimately, I don't believe that. I don't believe that hard-to-pin-down "circumstances" would cause me or any of my friends and relatives to shoot our way into a school in Beslan and use grenades to turn 400 kids and adults into bloody chunks of flesh. I don't believe that you or I could someday find ourselves in a Mumbai hotel room and shoot a 13-year-old girl in the back of the head while joyously praising Allah -- or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Maybe my imagination is lacking, as you say. It could be true that I fail to take the full "socio-political context behind the curtain" into account. But doing the opposite -- looking at everything, from a killer's childhood to his political views, and all the way to what it reveals about him that he wears a Versace T-shirt -- renders us incapable of ever passing judgment.
I'm not as big on passing judgment as MOST Americans, I think, but I do believe there are things that are inherently wrong, and I won't excuse them by subjecting them to relativism of the kind you seem to advocate. (I'm not saying YOU're excusing those acts, either -- I assume you absolutely don't -- though perhaps some clarification about how you see the subject of culpability is in order.)
Also, the Archbishop Williams analogy. It doesn't hold water. I'll take it, um, on faith that Christians of any stripe are overwhelmingly opposed to child rape. I'd say, 99.9% or more (I assume you won't contradict that point). As a result of that, I have no business asking Christians how they feel about priests reaming little boys up the popo, and to ask them to publicly condemn the clergy's sexual violence.
Now let's contrast that with Islamic terror. According to a major Gallup poll released at the beginning of the year, 35 percent of the world's Muslims (455 million people) think the 9/11 savagery was wholly, mostly, or somewhat justified. Maybe they're all nuanced thinkers, like you. I don't know. Anyway, if close to half a billion people of a certain faith condone or justify mass murder, I think it is entirely reasonable to ask the believers who DON'T to stand up and be counted. If half a billion Catholics were self-confessed pedophiles, or supporters of pedophilia, I'd ask the same of Catholics.
Remember when Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks? He wasn't being a smartass when he replied, famously, "Because that's where the money is." I take Sutton at his word. And I'll take Muslim terrorists at their word when they tell us why they kill: because their God and their radical clerics command them to. Everything else is just -- OK, not noise, but, I submit, of secondary relevance.
Forgive me, but I keep picturing Kia Scherr (see the AP photo above) and the moment she received the news, last Friday, that her husband, Alan, and their 13-year-old daughter, Naomi, had been murdered by Muslim terrorists, execution-style. Given her apparent spiritual leanings, she might ultimately be more forgiving/understanding than most. And yet I wonder what she -- and the mothers and fathers and siblings and friends of all those who've been butchered by Allah-worshipping terrorists -- would think of exhortations to heed the "socio-political context" and the "larger analytical framework" behind the ongoing Islamist carnage.
Posted by: Rogier van Bakel | Monday, December 01, 2008 at 02:09 PM
> It's because your honorable desire
> to see shades of gray leads to the
> evaporation of any moral culpability
> on the part of Islamist terrorists.
With all due respect, does it fuck.
My argument isn't that individuals that shoot people aren't morally responsible for their actions. My argument is that you cannot realistically get into some kind of essentialist argument about the violent nature of philosophy X without noting that all philosophies have their violent adherents, including many which do not make the front page news. Also, religious fundamentalisms are a lot more similar than you might imagine, and the difference in behaviour between, say, an American Dispensationalist and a Kashmiri Jihadist can mostly be put down to social and geographical differences more than religion. Drop the seed of a Baptist preacher into Waziristan and you won't find space to fit a playing card between him and the Imams.
It's not about culpability or whether the terrorists are bad people. I'm just not fucking interested in passing moral judgements, because it's useless. Saying "the people who bombed that cafe are Teh Evilest Monsters!" is all well and good but unless it stops more people dying in cafe bombings then it has absolutely zero practical use.
You say there's no way you'd do the things these people do, and I believe you. Most people wouldn't. But then when New York got hit a lot of people went straight down their army recruiting office. Nationalism is a powerful force. You'd say that these guys are Bad People for following the orders of Imams or Pakistani Generals (Significantly likely given what we know, far more likely than radicalised Yorkshiremen to be fair) but I'm sure you'd be more understanding of US soldiers who blew up a wedding party in Afghanistan because there might be a "radical militant" there.
You might not find yourself in the Taj, and I'm sure you'd not find yourself in My Lai either. But a culture of violence doesn't need to get everyone in the population to pick up a gun, it just has to get the people to stay quiet and remain patriotic while others do it.
War makes people do fucked up things, and there's no point saying that the individual soldiers, be they legal military or paramilitary, are some kind of crazy bastards. Frankly, the idea that anybody would kill for something so abstract as a nation state appals me, either to get one or to defend one they've already got, but that's what we get for being barely-evolved plains apes, ain't it?
> According to a major Gallup
> poll released at the beginning
> of the year, 35 percent of the
> world's Muslims (455 million people)
> think the 9/11 savagery was wholly,
> mostly, or somewhat justified.
How many Americans think that the invasion of Iraq, which killed far more people, was at least "somewhat" justified? How many White, Christian Europeans think that? How many people who are ostensibly Christian in the American South still fly the Confederate flag? How many apologists do we still have for the French, Dutch and British empires? For the Vietnam war? For the bombing of Nagasaki? For the firebombing of Dresden? How many people believe that Iran is made of pure evil because it's pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the fact that there's a belligerent nuclear power invading all the countries around it and threatening it? And on that note, how many people in Iran believe that nuclear power is justified even though what they are seeking is the means to kill hundreds of thousands of people in one blast?
Everyone in our Christian, imperialist culture needs to look at the planks in their own eye before they preach at the Muslims about their specks.
> And I'll take Muslim terrorists
> at their word when they tell us
> why they kill: because their God
> and their radical clerics command
> them to. Everything else is just
> -- OK, not noise, but, I submit,
> of secondary relevance.
You've obviously never really listened to a Muslim cleric then. Some of them are all about re-establishing the Caliphate - violent Muslim nationalism is bad, wheras violent Jewish nationalism is good? - but most talk about western imperialism and violence, about redress for ills, about Israel and Palestine, imperalism, wars-waged, governments overturned, etc etc. The groups these particular terrorists are associated with are tied in with the Pakistani State, with a list of grievances against India going back to partition. You might as well say that the IRA bombed buses in London "because their priests told them to". The fact that the priests were firey hellfire nationalists in the pulpit every Sunday might have helped, but it wasn't the reason Irish Nationalism existed, nor the reason many took up arms for that cause.
>And yet I wonder what she -- and
> the mothers and fathers and siblings
> and friends of all those who've
> been butchered by Allah-worshipping
> terrorists -- would think of
> exhortations to heed the "socio-political
> context" and the "larger analytical
> framework" behind the ongoing Islamist
> carnage.
I don't know. Why not look at this picture as well:
http://paulflynnmp.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8346d963f69e200e55446a5b78833-800wi
Do you suppose those people give a shit about 9/11 and your War On Terror, about the sociopolitical context behind the military funded with our tax dollars bombing their kids? I reckon some of them probably do, there's people with a talent for introspection everywhere. But that's not the point, is it? We can tit-for-tat about emotionally harrowing personal anecdotes from people "the other side" has fucked in the ass for no good reason, but all that does is keep justifying why we can't possibly be thoughtful, we have to respond emotionally, viscerally, with judgement and anger and hate. If you want to stop the carnage you have to do more than cry over dead babies and say babykillers are bad men. You have to take a step back and be analytical about it.
It's a simple trade off. We can either grow up and get over our simple little need to blame the most obvious social grouping, to take out our anger and hurt on people in our society who happen to read the same sky fairy tome, or we can just keep fucking people up and making them want to fuck us up back. To me, that doesn't seem like a hard choice.
Posted by: McDuff | Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 12:02 AM
Also, in case it's not clear, I think this does apply to both sides, inasmuch as this thing can be realistically said to split into two opposing sides at all (which is, well, not very much really). But it's something that applies independently of the other side doing it, i.e. they should do it, but we should do it even if they don't.
Posted by: McDuff | Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 12:06 AM
I would point out that radical Muslim clerics didn't need the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to issue their sundry agitations and fatwahs. They've long seen a thousand things that occur in the West as a personal religious affront and as an intolerable provocation, no military action needed. Some of those things are as spectacularly innocuous as a British novel or a Danish cartoon. Cue the violence! Kill the infidels!
Their implacable attitude and violent revulsion toward the ostensible decadence of non-Muslim countries precedes ANY actual U.S.-led military campaign of which I'm aware. See also Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," which is, in part, a lucid narrative of the emergence of Sayyid Qutb and his Muslim Brotherhood as a political force.
If western forces withdrew permanently from their bases in and near the Muslim world, can you honestly predict that Muslim radicalism and violence would stop, even in 25 or 50 years? That their holy quest for re-establishing the Caliphate would fizzle and die? Me, I doubt it very much. The most valuable asset that a VERY large subset of the world's Muslims has created for itself is, simply, perennially hurt feelings. It's called "nursing a grievance" for a reason, and it's truly the gift that keeps on giving. David Aaronovitch's analysis seems on the money to me: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article545466.ece
But backing up here: How feasible do you suppose your foreign-policy guideline of "Not fucking people up" (NFPU) is? It sounds fantastic to me -- give peace a chance! -- but not fantastically PRACTICAL. (I will say that if you ever make NFPU ("no fucking people up") bracelets or wristbands, à la WWJD of course, I want one!)
Backing up even further: What should America's response have been to 9/11? Turn the other cheek -- i.e., send Bin Laden the blueprints of the Sears Tower?
And looking ahead: Now what? How does NFPU work under President Obama, who is surely a great not-fucking-people-upper?
Inquiring minds.
Posted by: Rogier | Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 01:28 AM
Barack "SecDef Gates" Obama, you mean? Barack "Nuclear attacks in Pakistan aren't ruled out" Obama? Barack "more troops to Afghanistan" Obama? Sure, he's sunshine and roses. Obama's restored class to politics, sure, but he never ran on being anything other than a competent manager of American interests and being Not George Bush. The way people talk over there you'd think that nobody in the US had ever invaded another country, overthrown its government and tortured its civilians until Bush 43 showed up on the scene.
The US-centricity of the analysis is part of the problem, as it always is with an imperial power. The US has got itself embroiled in regional civil wars because of a growing need for resources and the internationalist burdens of being a superpower (not to mention the domestic advantages of permanent war), taking the mantle of interference from the British empire. And the Brits screwed around in the desert for over a century.
The recent bombings in Mumbai are only vaguely linked to the USA at all, and only because the USA is so very militarily present in the region. Unless the USA was there at partition and had a hand in the total fuckup over Kashmir, relax, nobody's blaming you. Now, the fact that India has strong links with Britain (and partition happened at the end of British rule) and is therefore more politically western, tied in with the fact that the USA is unrepentantly bombing the shit out of Western Pakistan, means that people are going to draw lines - rightly or wrongly - and connect the government of India and the government of the USA. But was this an attack against "The West"? It's unlikely, despite the singling out of western targets. More likely is that the westerners were secondary targets, singled out because that makes the news. Terrorism is about noise, and every brown-skinned cynic knows that you can kill a hundred of your own and the world won't blink, but kill a white man and it's front page in Paris, London and New York City. Say that's racist if you like but it's the truth, and they know it as well as the rest of us.
So, you look at it and go "OH NO ISLAM", wheras I look at it and go "oh look, the ongoing Kashmiri crisis has been brought into the larger 'war on terror' bollocks". That could very definitely have been prevented by not chasing shadows into Pakistan, or by doing anything vaguely sensible in Afghanistan, or by generally keeping American Dicks in American Shorts all over the region.
You seem to think that the practical end-point of all this is an absolute eradication of terrorist violence. That's a silly goal - it won't ever happen. There will always be extremists, angry young men, border disputes, illegal paramilitary organisations, you name it. But there are ways of mitigating and insuring against these things, just as there are ways of dealing with rapists and child molesters that don't involve burning down the street the rapist lived on without even checking whether he's home first.
The fact is conceded that the radical Imams and Mullahs will always exist. The fact is not conceded that there is therefore an implacable war machine out to get us, and that we have no choice but to call every Muslim in our own countries constantly to account for the preaching of radicals, that we must live in constant paranoia, that we must live our lives as if this group are an existential threat. (Nor, you loutish oaf, does the opposite of this mean "sending OBL the plans to the Sears tower", and only someone wedded to farmer with an overabundance of straw would think that argument to be a worthwhile use of their brain.)
Look at it this way. If you've got land by the side of a river and every time there's a heavy rain the banks burst and wash away what you're farming, it's pointless to rage against the rain. There are solutions to the problem, but stopping the rain isn't going to be one of them. Similarly, getting rid of radical preachers is an impossible and counter-productive task - you haven't managed it in the USA, why should Pakistan and Iran be held to standards you can't meet yourselves?
No, just as the solution to natural crises of climate are to look at earthworks, relocation, technical solutions that won't stop the rain but will minimise its impact, so political solutions should not rage against evildoers or radicals, but instead look at why radicals get traction in the broader population and why that translates into violence.
There's also the other, much broader question, about whether we should be expected to oppose terrorists because they're killing people, or just because they're killing people who aren't on our side. If we're going to talk about the Islamist Carnage, I think it's perfectly valid to talk about the carnage wrought by western imperialist powers. If 9/11 was horrifying and demanded action, then why are none of the west's off-target responses to it similarly horrifying? Is it only the populations of the democratic western nations who are allowed to be shocked by the deaths of their countrymen?
http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/the-most-dangerous-woman-in-the-world/
Read that. Doesn't that sound like the kind of regime you could make a moral argument to rebel against? Does that sound like a sane, democratic system of laws and sound governance? Perhaps Muslims have been brainwashed into supporting violence by their religious leaders. If that's true, what excuse have the rest of us got?
Posted by: McDuff | Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 03:38 AM
BBC has a worldwide audience.(including the Arab world) Thus, they feel they have been very careful to to "offend" any members of their vast audience. This is not the result of any "left-wing" conspiracy, but rather cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness taken to absurd extremes.
Whether these terrorists are "real" Muslims is besides the point. They are a small minority outside of the mainstream of the Islamic world. They were from a lawless region of Pakistan far from the heart of Islamic societies. They are the misfits and losers of the Islamic faith. And the support of terrorism among Muslims seems to be declining.
Posted by: George Arndt | Tuesday, December 02, 2008 at 07:55 PM