No time to analyse or respond to most of the great tsunami of media coverage in the aftermath of last Thursday’s London bombings. A few mentions, though, of some of the more outstanding or egregious candidates for praise or shame.

In the former category, Nick Cohen in the Observer lays into the vicious and delusional myopia of those who said from the moment the Twin Towers were hit that America ‘had it coming’ to them and following last week’s London atrocities have merely added Britain as the other nation to blame for its own atrocity:

‘In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought. All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him...

‘The only plausible excuse for 11 September was that it was a protest against America's support for Israel. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden's statements revealed that he was obsessed with the American troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and had barely said a word about Palestine. After the Bali bombings, the conventional wisdom was that the Australians had been blown to pieces as a punishment for their government's support for Bush. No one thought for a moment about the Australian forces which stopped Indonesian militias rampaging through East Timor, a small country Indonesia had invaded in 1975 with the backing of the US. Yet when bin Laden spoke, he said it was Australia's anti-imperialist intervention to free a largely Catholic population from a largely Muslim occupying power which had bugged him.

‘East Timor was a great cause of the left until the Australians made it an embarrassment. So, too, was the suffering of the victims of Saddam, until the tyrant made the mistake of invading Kuwait and becoming America's enemy. In the past two years in Iraq, UN and Red Cross workers have been massacred, trade unionists assassinated, school children and aid workers kidnapped and decapitated and countless people who happened to be on the wrong bus or on the wrong street at the wrong time paid for their mistake with their lives.’

Cohen is excellent at savagely deconstructing the moral idiocy of his comrades on the left, whose position on the war on terror has made a total mockery of everything for which they purport to stand and which, in the fullness of time, will be seen to have wrecked what was left of their principles as surely as the blind support for Stalin exhibited by a previous generation.

Thank goodness some commentators get the point, even if they are on the other side of the world. A very sound analysis in The Weekly Australian on what this thing is really all about cuts to the chase:

‘This is a terrorist attack, but the conflict is not really a war against terrorism. Its sources lie in religious fundamentalism and an ideological perversion within Islam. The enemy is not a nation but a global movement embedded within religion and this explains its formidable and elusive nature. It is a civil war within Islam that runs from Morocco to Indonesia, with its epicentre in Saudi Arabia. It is not a clash of civilisations but a crisis within one great civilisation. The geopolitical aims of the jihadists are vast: the overthrow of moderate Muslim governments, the liquidation of Israel, the removal of US influence from the Gulf and the Middle East and the strategic eclipse of the West. Bin Laden declared after September11 that the world was divided "into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels". He says every Muslim has an obligation to take up arms. Like all political madmen, it is the purity of bin Laden's extremism that attracts fresh recruits and disarms Western opinion because it finds such extremism so incomprehensible.’

That last phrase might be a kind way of explaining the thinking processes of Sir Simon Jenkins, who proclaimed in the Sunday Times:

‘The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident...’

Not many take quite such a sanguine view of the world war that is raging. Victor Davis Hanson understands the shrewd calibration being made by the jihadists to strike an infernal balance between terrorising a population and motivating them to all-out war:

‘Train bombings in Madrid and bus explosions in London, like the carnage in Iraq, are preferable, since they are enough to terrify and demoralize the Westerner but not quite enough to knock sense into him that only military resistance and victory will save his civilization. So the attacks will never quite be of such a stature to convince Western voters that one more such explosion will destroy their societies. The trick is instead to wage war insidiously, incrementally, and stealthily to avoid an overwhelming response. A cooling-off period in between 9/11 and 7/7 in which Western apologists, pacifists, and Islamist sympathizers go to work is essential for the terror to continue.’

Thus a society is de-moralised, in every sense of the word, an essential precondition for weakening it to the point where it can finally be finished off. We can see much of that demoralisation around us, and it is a moot point whether it will triumph in Britain over the resolution displayed by a previous generation. It’s a hard thing to say, but the heroic Blitz spirit evoked by memories of World War Two – and which was unquestionable – came very late in the day, since the predominant mood in Britain during the 1930s and indeed even after war was declared was support for appeasement, a pervasive conservative isolationism that underestimated the threat posed by Hitler until it was almost too late.

The similarities with today’s mood in Britain are very striking. Yet now the stakes are as high and maybe even higher. Efraim Halevi, the former head of Mossad, warns in the Jerusalem Post of what we need to do to win this war for civilisation:

‘There will be supreme tests of leadership in this unique situation and people will have to trust the wisdom and good judgment of those chosen to govern them. The executives must be empowered to act resolutely and to take every measure necessary to protect the citizens of their country and to carry the combat into whatever territory the perpetrators and their temporal and spiritual leaders are inhabiting. The rules of combat must be rapidly adjusted to cater to the necessities of this new and unprecedented situation, and international law must be rewritten in such a way as to permit civilization to defend itself. Anything short of this invites disaster and must not be allowed to happen. The aim of the enemy is not to defeat western civilization but to destroy its sources of power and existence, and to render it a relic of the past. It does not seek a territorial victory or a regime change; it wants to turn western civilization into history and will stop at nothing less than that.’

The British government, however, has seemed remarkably happy to help this process along. The New York Times (even) ran a valuable and well-informed story on the astounding laxness and indifference to terror that have turned Britain’s capital into ‘Londonistan’:

‘For a decade, the city has been a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base, where they could raise money, recruit members and draw inspiration from the militant messages… Among them were terrorists involved in attacks in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Israel and in the Sept. 11 plot. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, both prayed at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. The mosque's former leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached violence for years before the authorities arrested him in April 2004. Although Britain has passed a series of antiterrorist and immigration laws and made nearly 800 arrests since Sept. 11, 2001, critics have charged that its deep tradition of civil liberties and protection of political activists have made the country a haven for terrorists. The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.

'For years, there was a widely held belief that Britain's tolerance helped stave off any Islamic attacks at home. But the anger of London's militant clerics turned on Britain after it offered unwavering support for the American-led invasion of Iraq. On Thursday morning, an attack long foreseen by worried counterterrorism officials became a reality. "The terrorists have come home," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe, who works often with British officials. "It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain."'

Now, a courageous Muslim has spoken out against the British Muslim community’s state of denial as well as its tacit and not so tacit support of the terror in its midst:

‘Tariq Al-Humayd, editor-in-chief of London-based Al-Sharq Al Awsat (The Middle East), claimed that collections were frequently solicited in London's Arab neighborhoods for terrorist causes in the guise of charities. In a strongly worded editorial, he said that those enjoying the freedom of life in Britain had a "responsibility" to scrutinize such collections carefully, and if necessary prevent them from taking place. "In London, we have seen, and are seeing, the money being collected in the streets, and the conventions under various titles, and everyone is inciting jihad in our Arab countries and cursing the land of unbelief in which they live," he wrote. "When you express amazement [at this], they tell you that this is freedom. Has freedom no responsibility? No one answers." Mr. Al-Humayd added: "When you tell them, 'Stop being so tolerant of the incitement that comes from your own country, from your skies, and from your Internet' ... they turn away. And what happened? The terror struck London, indiscriminately. ... For the sake of freedom of all of us, stop the ones who are attacking our freedom."'

Mr. Al-Humayd might address similar sentiments to those brand leaders of the quisling tendency, Associated Press and the BBC. AP distinguished itself by putting out two gross falsehoods within a short time of each other. The first was a totally false story that Britain had given Israel advance notice of the London bombings before they happened. This turned out to be totally untrue, but not before it had sent a ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ story round the globe. Then it put out a report of Tony Blair’s remarks on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme where he made some observations about the root causes of terrorism, in which it invented a comment about Israel and the Palestinians which he did not make. This is what he actually said:

‘As well as dealing with the consequences of this - trying to protect ourselves as much as any civil society can - you have to try to pull it up by its roots… Ultimately what we now know, if we didn't before, is that where there is extremism, fanaticism or acute and appalling forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent.’

And this is what AP put out:

‘That meant boosting understanding between people of difference religions, helping people in the Middle East see a path to democracy and easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, he said.’

But Blair hadn’t said a word about Israel and the Palestinians. Subsequently, AP issued a correction to this end – but not before the lie had reverberated around the world, having been incorporated into many staff-bylined press reports of Blair’s speech and drawn angry and bewildered responses from Israel to the implication that Blair was apparently blaming the London bomb on their own conflict. No doubt these two errors reflect the belief at AP that wherever terror occurs, the Jews are somehow behind it.

Meanwhile, on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week this morning, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner -- who was shot by Al-Qaeda terrorists last year -- delivered himself of the following apercus:

•that what the Wahabis found ‘offensive’ about the west were its policies in Muslim countries and its ‘harassment’ of suspected Islamists in Britain and Europe
• that it was extraordinary that they had panted a bomb in Edgware Road since this was a centre of Muslim population
• that if Islamists who supported terrorism in London had realised London was such a multicultural place they would no longer support it, because the real target was the government not the millions of British people who had opposed the Iraq war
• and that the bombings were ‘doubly tough for Britain’s Muslims…it’s more of a blow for them than for everyone else’ – to which another guest on the show, the Culture Secretary the Rt Hon Tessa Jowell, replied fervently: ‘That’s absolutely right; absolutely right’.

Presenter Andrew Marr saw no reason to point out, for example, that what the Wahabis found principally offensive about the west was that it existed; or that the bomb was not placed in Edgware Road but on a tube train deep below it; that just perhaps it might not be entirely appropriate either to murder government ministers or those British people who had supported the Iraq war; and that the people for whom these mass murders were ‘more of a blow than for everyone else’ might just have been the families of the murdered, rather than adherents of the religion in whose name this depravity was committed.

They just don’t get it, do they. How many more thousands will have to die before they do.

Posted by melanie at July 11, 2005