Bizarre British reaction to London bombings: Two stellar commentaries

Here are two thoughtful comments on the somewhat bizarre British reaction to the London bombings (and one might add, the same reaction to the previous underground bombings):

In The strategy of consensual dissimulation  Melaine Phillips wrote:

 

... The capacity of the human mind to delude itself never ceases to amaze. How can such educated individuals be killers? people exclaim. Have such people really learned nothing from history? Have they forgotten the Nazis, forgotten Dr Mengele, forgotten that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by people who delighted in Goethe and Mozart? Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden's number two, is a paediatrician. Yet he is responsible for the deliberate mass murder of thousands of people.

On BBC Radio Four's Today programme this morning (0755 approx), the reformed Islamist extremist Hassan Butt patiently spelled out to presenter Jim Naughtie that Islamist terrorists carry out their acts of mass murder as an expression of religious faith and fervour. They do it, he said, `for the pleasure of God'. Far from being acts of despair, these terrible atrocities are acts of religious exultation.

If we don't understand, even now, that what we are facing is a religious war, a jihad against the unbeliever and backsliding Muslims across the world, we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves against it. Yet while former Islamist extremists such as Hassan Butt and Ed Husain are urgently telling us the truth, Gordon Brown's new administration ...has decided to deny the religious element of this jihad altogether, to redefine Islamic terrorism as mere criminality and to ban all terms that call this horror by its proper name. From the Daily Express today, we learn:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word `Muslim' in ¬connection with the ¬terrorism crisis. The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase `war on ¬terror' is to be dropped...`There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. `It is important that the country remains united.'

For `consensual', read bowdlerised, censored and dissimulatory; and for `united', read defeated. This is a disastrous beginning to Brown's premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn't mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth. That is why it is not enough for British Muslims to condemn these acts of terror...

And from Christopher Hitchens, who explains that the terrorists (oops - there's the T word) want to kill women:

Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

Instead, almost every other conceivable explanation was canvassed. The June 30 New York Times report managed to quote three people, one of whom attributed the aborted atrocity in London to Tony Blair's foreign policy; one of whom (a New Zealand diplomat, at that) felt "surprisingly all right about it"; and one of whom, described as "a Briton of Indian descent," was worried that "if I walk up that road, they're going to suspect me." The "they" there was clearly the British authorities, rather than the Muslim gangsters who have declared open season on all Hindus as well as all Jews, Christians, secularists, and other kuffar or infidel filth.

On the following day, July 1, the same newspaper informed us that Britain contained a "disenfranchised South Asian population." How this was true was never explained. There are several Muslim parliamentarians in both houses, often allowed to make the most absurdly inflammatory and euphemistic statements where acts of criminal violence are concerned, as well as several districts in which the Islamic vote keeps candidates of all parties uneasily aware of what may and may not be said. True, the Muslim extremist groups boycott elections and denounce democracy itself as profane, but this does not really count as disenfranchisement.

Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

Never fret, in the end Britain will settle on the obvious explanation - it is not the fault of Muslims or Arabs. It is the fault of the Jews. Of course it is not a religious issue, you see.

Ami Isseroff