A year ago, Britain suffered Islamic terrorist bombings. This week, British authorities busted up more Muslim terrorists within days of what might likely have been far worse attacks on passenger airlines.
Given that, one might expect the local Muslim community to be jumping through hoops to separate themselves from any association with this wickedness and depravity. At a minimum, you'd expect circumspection.
Here's the response from the British Muslim community within a few hours of the latest terrorist ring being broken up, from The Independent:
Tony Blair has been warned by leading British Muslims that the Iraq war and the UK's failure to use its influence to end Israeli attacks on civilians are fuelling extremism at home. Their views are set out in a letter as a full-page advertisement in newspapers.The letter warns: "The debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists who threaten us all."
It was signed by three of the four Muslim MPs - Sadiq Khan, Shahid Malik, and Mohammed Sarwar - as well as three of the four Muslim members of the House of Lords - Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, and Baroness Uddin. It was also backed by 38 Muslim groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, and the British Muslim Forum.
Mr. Khan said the Government's Middle East policy was seen as "unfair and unjust" by many people. "Whether we like it or not, such a sense of injustice plays into the hands of extremists," he said.
Personally, I'm not sure what to think about this. Should I take more offense at the unbelievable damned gall of these Muslims, or at the weakness and cowardice of Westerners who would act as if this was any kind of vaguely acceptable response from the Islamic community?
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Article comments
1 - Bliffle
"Personally, I'm not sure what to think about this. Should I take more offense at the unbelievable damned gall of these Muslims, or at the weakness and cowardice of Westerners who would act as if this was any kind of vaguely acceptable response from the Islamic community?"
Agreed. I think you've nailed this one, Al.
2 - Peter J
Good article Al,
You made a very valid point, one no one seems to address for fear of being labeled. As though that were the worst thing that could happen to one.
We have a disease in the western world which has engulfed us, is chewing us up, and is ready to digest and shit us out. This being 'political correctness'.
Two crappy little words which have been digging in for years now, usually only affected by numb nut yuppies to mask their chickenshit fears or appease their feelings of guilt over racial injustices perpetrated by their ancestors.
Two words which have turned our society into Stepford people. Afraid to voice our feelings or accusations at a group of people who mean us great harm lest we hurt their feelings.
The response to such a letter, a condescending, veiled threat from the British Muslim leaders, a statement which does no less than aligns them with the actions of Hezbollah should be a curt 'Fuck You' and, as you stated, 'thank your Allah that they did not succeed in last weeks plot'.
I never was for going to Iraq and as far as I'm concerned we should pull our troops now but I know that will never happen. What would all of Cheneys' and Bush's buddies at Halliburton, Chevron, Lockheed, and the Carlyle group, among others, do for their quotas? Shit, they may actually have to go out and drum up business with their inflated proposals and charming personalities.
Sorry, I didn't mean to stray.
Bottom line is we are not Jamaica, nor are we Rhode Island. Our message should be firm and clear;
We are the United States of America! If you fuck with us we will blow your ass to hell!
Why do we have to coddle to these ass holes?
50 years ago the Towers would have warranted an Atomic Bomb!
It doesn't matter how strong we are but how weak we are perceived.
Do we really believe all of these talks and treatys are going to get us anywhere?
Are we really going to wait for a major calamity, loss of a couple of hundred thousand Americans before we 'demonstrate' our strength?
It's time for Bush to back up his tuff talk, his 'bring it on', it's time to prevail, it's time to 'show our ass'!
What in God's name has happened to us? We're getting pissed all over.
Maybe that's good enough for Tony Blair but it's not for us.
3 - Al Barger
Thanks Peter. Besides everything else, the thing that's most frustrating about this is how backwards this PC stuff is from doing what it's supposed to. People think that they're for the preservation of human life, keeping people from getting killed, or even getting their itty feelings hurt because we've spoken harshly of their miserable excuse for a God. But this namby-pamby stuff ends up having very much the opposite effect.
Partially of course this nicey-nice fetishization of empathy enables the bad guys to further kill more of US infidels. That's real bad, and I'd favor getting much tougher just on those grounds.
But this enabling of nonsense will end up causing far worse tragedy even within the Muslim world. We could grasp the bull by the horn, and do some hard but carefully measured destruction now, figuring that a stitch in time saves nine. Instead, we're going to wait until we get hit with something really awful, and then we'll end up going apeshit in a wave of emotion and necessity.
But the important thing is that we feel good about ourselves and our exquisite empathy and compassion NOW. Screw what it predictably means for our people and theirs a year or two out.
In fairness though Peter, I have to give significant credit to Tony Blair. He's wrung his hands about it pretty much, but he's been our main ally these last five years actually willing to help US do something.
4 - Peter J
I'll give you that on Tony Blair, even though he reminds me of the little kid in the gang who wanted to fit in with the big boys (not a perfect analogy ,as I don't consider Bush a 'big boy' but rather to hang with the U.S.) and is caught up in it with no way out. Where's Bush? Rather than helping Tony out with some serious diplomacy issues he's back at the spread! Just how much brush has this guy got to clear?
Tony Blair was Bush's only ally going into this mess and now when England has a REAL terrorist alert, not one of Bush's colorful diversions, 'W' bows out. No glory to be found here, Scotland Yard, England's own Force, even Pakistan helped avoid what would have been a horrific attack.
I wonder, had those planes been scheduled to take off from U.S. airports would we have acted as effectively as our allies or would we be scraping bodies off of the landscape?
I applaud the efforts of all those involved in averting this disaster and makes me ponder our own 9/11. How much information was provided to the White House weeks and even days before the attacks which was completely ignored by our 'commander in chief'? Had he acted on that information as the British acted on theirs would the Twin Towers still stand?
But again, all of these questions fall within the realm of PC. I can't tell how many people have said 'he's our president and we should not question his decisions'! I say bullshit, he is in our service, not the other way around and he should be held accountable for every one of his actions.
I think political correctness has run its course and it's time to set it out to pasture.
It's time to 'call a spade a spade'(absolutely NO racial overtones, that cliche' is older than I)
and the next time someone gets their feelings hurt, give them a band-aid!
Get a life and don't dare take yourself so fucking seriously. Someday you'll be no more than a cup of dirt, just like the rest of us!
5 - Al Barger
Also keep in mind the local politics. From what I can tell, Britain is more liberal generally than America, and hawkishness seems like a tougher sell.
Now, Dubya can take a little slapping around. He's far from perfect. However, I'm inclined to somewhat give him the benefit of the doubt in some of this stuff on grounds that he does seem to have been trying to deal seriously with things rather than kicking the can down the road.
I credit him specifically that way with Iraq. It would have been easier to just take Afghanistan as the extent of our major response to the terrorist threat after 9/11, but he was probably right in judging that this was not yet sufficient response. Still, we'd be in a lot better shape there if we'd just killed 2 or 3 times more people our first month going in 2003.
That he's given in too much to world opinion and other such worthless things has given us a mess that we're stuck with. Still yet, I'm inclined to credit him for the effort- which so-far weak results are still better than what was there five years ago.
6 - Martin Lav
Al,
Good article and I agree with the original premise of the apparent refusal of the Muslim leaders to just flat out denounce the perversion of some of their followers actions in the name of Islam. Period end of story. No softening of their approach to appease their base, no yeah but's the bad bad Amrika made me do it. I agree.
However, you do virtually the same thing in your article by going on a tirade about PC Western appeasers and the war in Iraq and possible nuclear annihilation of Iran.
Before you criticize the British Muslim community for not calling a spade a spade and leave it at that, you should follow your own criticism in your own article and just leave it at that. Your own convictions would be more convincing.
7 - FOX
Al,
i cant believe what im reading here, i dont know if these are your actual views or you just buffed them up in order to get more responces and more comments!
First of all can i remind you all that we talked to sinn fein did we not and now we have peace in Ireland and the north.
why is it so hard to imagine that muslims can be talked to. Your sentence saying:
"these people are lucky they're not being deported wholesale or stuck in detention camps"
Was more offensive than anything, the british muslims are the people for whome life would have been made unimaginable if any of the terrorists had managed to blow up a plane!
I personnally would not have known where to hide my face for the shame that these people in the name of the religion i am part of coming from the same background as i do, living in this OUR country could have commited such an act!
Now there is an however, and its a big however, something that is believed by people throughout this country and throughout the world is the fact that injustice is being done and was done! In both Iraq and in places like palestine and Lebonon.
In Iraq we have civil war, no one is in charge but the oil is secure and pumping to maximum capacity and The reason the british government went to war was the WMD's!
Instead of shooting saddam in the head and then afew years later shooting his sons in the head untill a leader emerged that was reasonable what we the west did in a battle to free the hearts and minds of the Iraqi's was bomb them to bits, killing thousands and not giving a shit, oh and we managed to secure the oil fields!
Infact we watched video's on the news of men being blown up by jets with gung ho pilots screaming "yee haa" when targets were hit.Yet we know that most of Iraq is made up of Shia's who wouldnt actually want to fight for Saddam anyway.
What we need to do is sit down and talk to these people not blow to bits everyone that lives in a muslim country. The so called moderate muslims in this world have as much to fear from the fanatics as you do if not more.
In lebonon Hezbullah was born from the occupation by Isreal what we need to do is try not to swell the ranks of these groups but to peacefully negotiate, in Gaza and the west bank Hamas is only a credible force because the people are being persecuted, and as humans and animals our instinct is to fight for our survival.
If the people are given space to grow and to voice their opinions and be heard then they will realise that killing is not the only answer!
8 - Al Barger
Easy there, Fox. I'm not saying that we need to just start randomly killing Muslims, but just that we need to cut a considerably wider swath than we have.
I can't answer in too much detail, as I'm not that much of an expert in the all the finer points. But what I'm thinking of in Iraq, for example, is that we came in trying to kill absolutely the very, very minimum number of people to topple the regime. We probably SHOULD have taken the opportunity to destroy at least some of the more elite National Guard units rather than let them disperse- which would be most of Saddam's toughest loyalists most likely among the main people giving us grief now.
Also in Iraq, al Sadr had people in the streets firing at US. We should have greased him and as many of his people as we could identify, with extreme prejudice. Fallujah probably should have been dealt with much more harshly.
Those are things that seemed fairly obvious even to me at the time, but were probably mostly tamped down for political and PR type reasons.
Those failures of will give people so inclined to believe reason to think that we're paper tigers. If we're not willing to just goddam shoot an al Sadr, then we're not being serious in pursuit of victory.
Instead of doing that though, we're going to dick around until some of these people hit US with something really heinous- and at that point, the animal passions get unleashed and we will have neither the luxury nor the inclination to be that discriminating.
I'm all about sitting down and talking to someone to whom you can talk. The IRA on their worst day wasn't Hezbollah though. They weren't trying to blow up non-believers all over the world. They were after narrow and relatively reasonable, negotiable political ends- England out of Ireland.
That is as opposed to some of these Muslim fanatics who want simply to kill and destroy. They're basically mentally diseased rabid dogs, and they're getting their own people killed worse than ours.
Going on about Hezbollah having anything to do with Israeli occupation in 2006 is just nonsense, though. Israel wasn't in Lebanon, and had no desire to go there. Hezbollah went to some lengths to lure them back in.
There's no talking to the likes of Hezbollah or Hamas or the Iranian mullahs. Talk and negotiation to them means exactly one thing: time to re-load. With regards to Muslim fanatics, killing is in fact the only answer.
9 - zingzing
al--"With regards to Muslim fanatics, killing is in fact the only answer."
have we regressed all the way back to the crusades? that's not only the wrong answer, it's the absolute worst answer you could possibly think of. what will that do? why are these fanatics fanatical? now, what effect do you think killing THOSE WE CAN FIND will have on THOSE WE CAN'T or THOSE WE CREATE by doing such a foolish thing.
10 - FOX
No! No! No!
Im not a military man but for all the talk of this pin point bombing and this shooting this dude and shooting that dude it aint gonna work in the long run as we are no where as pin point as we are told there is always collateral damage and that shit is what sticks.
Example: If a british officer shot dead an IRA member dont you think his kid and wife and brother would grow up with just a little hate in there hearts. Now multiply that by thousands and then jumble it about a little ( i.e. the kid got shot and the father has a little hate,or the kid comes home from school and finds his mothers head (no body) being cradeled by his little sister cuz a bomb hit their kitchen and blew everything to shit etc etc)
If this sort of shit is mentioned it would be a general saying " there may have been some collateral damage"
It aint collateral damage for the little girl who's just got her mums bloody head to remember her by, this would be hard core life changing shit!
So we cant be going in shooting anything up, what we can do is follow the rules that have made our countries great, and respectable. what we need to do is treat that little girl as we would a little girl that was born in the UK or the US.
When a mass murderer or a serial rappist is caught and imprisoned ( or sent to death row) we normally find that this person as a child grew up with either a violent father or an abusive family or was sexually abused. What ever it was there was something that triggered hate in this individual.
i do not condone for one minute what these rappist and murderers are doing however i would say that we need to make sure other kids dont have such an awfull childhood that they grow up to carry out such acts.
It is the same in the case of terrorists of this sort, there is something that has triggered this hate and when Tony Blair swept to power many many years ago he said and i quote " tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"
now that may have just been slogan bullshit but if u think about it if we said the same about terrorism would we not be in a much better position " Tough on Terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism"
If we want to try and understand our own crimanals in order to bring peice to our streets why not try to understand those murderers and criminals that hail from different parts of the world , or those criminals that have names that are different to our own , or those criminals that have beards!
In the same way that the best way not die from Aids is too try your hardest not to get it, the best way not too die from diabetes is live a healthier lifestyle, prevention is better than cure!
" Tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism"
If i ever here those words coming out of George W's or Tony's mouth or words to that effect,and actions to suit. i will jump for joy at the prospect that all this fighting is not for political gain or world supremacy but its for the right reasons
(P.S. the saudi's the pakistani's to name a few are fighting terrorists you dont find them blowing the shit out of people and things indiscriminatley ( wow that was a long word)!)
11 - Martin Lav
How soon we all are detracted. Stick to the story, to Al's point. What are the non-Facists-Muslims doing/saying about the MusloFacists?
Just like the article strayed into the titFORtat who's right who's wrong.....why aren't the Fox's of the world denouncing the scum that have hijacked their religion. This topic is not about the scum in the whitehouse that have hijacked ours.
12 - FOX
well we got scum on both sides trying to kill each other what we gonna do!
we gotta get rid of ours and u gotta get rid of yours.
But i feel its easier said than done!
13 - FOX
99.9% of the muslims in the UK believe as i do its the tiny percentage that dont that make the headlines!
14 - Al Barger
Zing, re: your comment 9. Yes, yes, yes. Killing fanatics is the only answer. The question is exactly who and how many come under that umbrella, and how wide a swath of killing we end up having to do to get them. If we find it necessary, we could very well wipe out, say, Iran until there's not enough people left to even try to get a nuke. Rubble doesn't cause trouble.
Oh, and comparing this to "crusades" is obvious nonsense. I'm not talking about going to conquer lands and convert people from their religions by the sword. The current situation is maybe just SLIGHTLY completely different.
It's a damned shame, but sometimes whole cultures and societies go off the rail to the point that they pretty much have to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. Worked right well with Japan though, didn't it? Haven't seen any kamikazees lately, have we? They're some of our bestest and most reasonable friends now- but we absolutely had to nuke them to break through their cultural pathologies. I'm afraid we're heading in that direction with the Muslim community.
This Fox guy seems like a reasonable and decent fellow. I've got no blood lust to WANT to kill a bunch of people. But you need to address these words "what we can do is follow the rules" to the Muslim community, and make them stick. From my side, I'll tell you there is no legitimate rule that says we can't do whatever we have to do to stop people from killing US.
I am SO far past being willing to listen to one more goddam word about "the root causes of terrorism." The root cause of terrorism is shame-based losers seeking to bring down their betters. They can't possibly do it on the large scale. They will lose. It's just a question of how many people they get killed doing it.
But Brother Fox, you're pretty much in some denial here talking about "root causes" and "scum on both sides." No, there's not much in the way of "scum on both sides." The scum causing the problems are pretty much all on ONE side of the fence- Allah's side. Americans, Israelis and British are not just randomly flying planes into Arab buildings and trying to blow up passenger planes full of innocent Muslims. The "root cause" of a lot of the problem is Muslims in denial like this.
So then, per the original ending of my story, if all the lovely, nice, reasonable Muslims of the world don't want to accidentally get killed over the actions of a few then you need to take care of the problems more yourself. Take out your own garbage, or at some point we have no choice but to do it, and it will no doubt be far worse.
15 - -E
Congrats! This article has been selected as one of this week’s Editors’ Picks.
16 - Al Barger
Thanks for the editorial pick. Also, thanks to the folks commenting on this article, most especially Fox.
17 - FOX
pleasure!
18 - Dave
The appeasers will be the first to cry when they're standing in line with the rest of the Infidels to get their throats cut. Wake up people! It's time to deal with Islam on our feet, not on our knees.