Western Society & Home-grown Terrorists.

[Acorn]

Changed my mind about involvement in this contest. Infanteer is so much better at it than I am, so I'll let him handle it.

Acorn

 

[Britney Spears]

Or maybe paracowboy should hit the gym.

(What, still no response from the FN C1 appreciation club?)

I should add that the brand of Wahhabiism which we all know and love is a fairly recent phenomenon, and only really got off the ground with the counquest of Mecca and Medina by the House of Saud in the 1920s.  The fact that the fundamentalist state of Saudi Arabia seemd to do better than secular, Western oriented states like Iraq, Egypt and Syria(well, image is everything, and being bitchslapped by the Israelis every other year didn't inspire a lot of confidence in secular Arab nationalism) was a real boon to the spread of Wahhabiist  ideology.

 

[paracowboy]

gym? What is zis, "gym"? G-y-m. Gime? Gim? Jime? Jim? Plis to be hexplaining to me, plis.

 

[a_majoor]

Fine post on the difference between "Pluralism" and "Multiculturalism"

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007824.html

Defending western civilisation
Perry de Havilland (London)  Opinions on liberty
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A commenter in an earlier article here responded to someone arguing that Muslim immigrants should never have been treated as 'immigrants' in Britain but as 'guest workers' the way the Germany treat Turks in their country, making them much easier to deport when the powers-that-be decide it is time for them to go. His reply was:

    ...but removal of those guest workers is one hell of a job isn't it?

Quite so. Moreover it seems obvious to me that a significant number of Muslims in Britain have successfully integrated into British society just fine and I see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet clearly we do have a major problem with an equally significant number of Muslims who have not assimilated, show no sign of doing so and are manifestly a source of recruits for Al Qaeda.

Endlessly blathering on about how "Islam is a religion of peace" or alternatively to call for expelling 'Muslims', simply because they are Muslims, is the sort of wilful blindness and one size fits all collectivism of a sort I would rather leave to socialists of both left and right. Anyone who values western liberal civilisation needs to think a little harder than that, avoiding both atavistic collectivism and a head-in-the-sand refusal to see we have a serious problem that will not go away on its own.

If what we are trying to defend is a pluralistic tolerant society, then we have to make sure that the message is not just "throw the wogs out!" but rather "You are welcome here if you are willing to assimilate to a sufficient degree."

But how does one define what that 'degree' is exactly? I am not talking a Norman Tebbit style "cricket test" but rather a willingness to tolerate 'otherness'. We do not need Muslims to approve of alcohol or women in short skirts or figurative art or bells or pork or pornography or homosexuality or (particularly) apostasy. We have no right to demand that at all and obviously not all Anglicans approve of some of those things, so why require that Muslims must? No, what we do have the right to demand (and that is not too strong a word) is that they tolerate those things, which is to say they will not countenance the use of force to oppose those things even though they disapprove of them. In fact it is not just Muslims from whom we must demand such tolerance.

If we can get them to agree to tolerate those things, then it does not matter if Muslim women wear burquas because as long as they are not subject to force, a woman may elect to say "Sod this for a game of soldiers!" and cast off that symbol of misogynistic repression... and if she does not do so, well that is her choice then... but she must have a choice. They do not have to look like us (I do not hear calls for Chinatown to be razed to the ground), they do not have to share our religion(s), or lack thereof, but they do have to tolerate our varied ways and if by their actions or words they show they do not, we have every right to regard them as our enemies and take action to defend ourselves.

For decades the supporters of multiculturalism have used tax money and government regulations to actively discourage assimilation of immigrants into the broader society, preferring to see communities develop which favour 'identity politics' better suited and more amenable to their own collectivist world views. And now we are paying the price for that. We will not be able to defend ourselves physically or preserve our liberal society unless we stop tolerating intolerance, and that includes not just fundamentalist Islam but also the anti-western bigotry of the multiculturalists.

 

[Dare]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/23/npoll23.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/07/23/ixnewstop.html

"Small" minority, indeed.

One in four Muslims sympathises with motives of terrorists
By Anthony King
(Filed: 23/07/2005)

The group portrait of British Muslims painted by YouGov's survey for The Daily Telegraph is at once reassuring and disturbing, in some ways even alarming.

The vast majority of British Muslims condemn the London bombings but a substantial minority are clearly alienated from modern British society and some are prepared to justify terrorist acts.

Click to enlarge

The divisions within the Muslim community go deep. Muslims are divided over the morality of the London bombings, over the extent of their loyalty to this country and over how Muslims should respond to recent events.

Most Muslims are evidently moderate and law-abiding but by no means all are.

YouGov sought to gauge the character of the Muslim community's response to the events of July 7. As the figures in the chart show, 88 per cent of British Muslims clearly have no intention of trying to justify the bus and Tube murders.

However, six per cent insist that the bombings were, on the contrary, fully justified.

Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do.

Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent.

A substantial majority, 56 per cent, say that, whether or not they sympathise with the bombers, they can at least understand why some people might want to behave in this way.

YouGov also asked whether or not its Muslim respondents agreed or disagreed with Tony Blair's description of the ideas and ideology of the London bombers as "perverted and poisonous".

Again, while a large majority, 58 per cent, agree with him, a substantial minority, 26 per cent, are reluctant to be so dismissive.

The responses indicate that Muslim men are more likely than Muslim women to be alienated from the mainstream and that the young are more likely to be similarly alienated than the old.

However, there are few signs in YouGov's findings that Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are any more disaffected than their co-religionists from elsewhere.

The sheer scale of Muslim alienation from British society that the survey reveals is remarkable. Although a large majority of British Muslims are more than content to make their home in this country, a significant minority are not.

For example, YouGov asked respondents how loyal they feel towards Britain. As the figures in the chart show, the great majority say they feel "very loyal" (46 per cent) or "fairly loyal" (33 per cent) but nearly one British Muslim in five, 18 per cent, feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all.

If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country.

The proportion of men who say they feel no loyalty to Britain is more than three times the proportion of women saying the same.

Equally remarkable are YouGov's findings concerning many Muslims' attitudes towards Western society and culture.

YouGov asked respondents how they feel about Western society and how, if at all, they feel Muslims should adapt to it. A majority, 56 per cent, believe "Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end".

However, nearly a third of British Muslims, 32 per cent, are far more censorious, believing that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end".

Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims should only seek to bring about change by non-violent means but one per cent, about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence.

Yet again, far more men than women and far more young people than their elders evince this kind of hostility towards the world around them. In addition, tens of thousands of Muslims view the whole of Britain's political establishment with suspicion.

More than half of those interviewed, 52 per cent, believe "British political leaders don't mean it when they talk about equality. They regard the lives of white British people as more valuable than the lives of British Muslims".

Almost as many, 50 per cent, reckon the main party leaders are not being sincere when they say they respect Islam and want to co-operate with Britain's Muslim communities.

Despite Tony Blair's well-publicised efforts to reach out to Muslims, fewer than half of those interviewed, 42 per cent, approve of the way he has handled Britain's response to the July 7 events.

Many British Muslims are probably reluctant to give Mr Blair credit for anything at all following his complicity with America, as they see it, in launching the invasion of Iraq. Just more than half, 52 per cent, are impressed by the performance since the bombings of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain. Some Muslims' discontent with Britain clearly extends to discontent with the existing moderate and pro-British Muslim leadership.

A cloud of suspicion also hangs over Britain's judicial system.

YouGov asked its Muslim respondents whether or not they thought anyone charged and taken to court in connection with the July 7 attacks would receive a fair trial. Only 37 per cent said yes. The rest reckon he or she would not or were doubtful that they would.

Despite these widespread doubts, a large majority of Britain's Muslims clearly believe the time has come when Muslims must shoulder their share of the responsibility for preventing and punishing terrorist crimes such as those in London.

As the figures in the chart show, roughly a third of Muslims reckon they should assume "a great deal" of the responsibility and another third reckon they should assume at least "some" of it.

Even more impressive in some ways is the fact that large numbers now say they are prepared to put their mouth where their feelings are.

As the figures in the chart show, almost three quarters of British Mulsims, 73 per cent, say they would inform the police if they believed that someone they knew or knew of might be planning a terrorist attack.

Nearly half, 47 per cent, say they would also go to the police if they believed an imam or other religious person was trying to radicalise young Muslims by preaching hatred against the West.

Not only that but 70 per cent of Muslims reckon they have a duty to go to the police if they "see something in the community that makes them feel suspicious".

Taken as a whole, the findings of YouGov's survey suggest that, although large numbers of British Muslims dislike British society and in some cases may be tempted to attack it, the great majority are loyal and law-abiding and are unlikely to provide the radicals with moral support, let alone safe havens.

YouGov interviewed 526 Muslim adults across Great Britain online between July 15 and yesterday. The data were weighted to reflect the composition of Britain's Muslim population by gender, age and country of birth.

YouGov abides by the rules of the British Polling Council.

# Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University.

 

[Edward Campbell]

We, if the Saturday papers are any reflection of 'we,' are still, I think, focused on the wrong thing.

"Islam,â ? says everyone and his brother, knowledgeable on the subject or not, "is a religion of peace.  Murder is contrary to Islamic teaching.â ?

"Fine,â ? I reply, "that's nice; totally irrelevant, but nice all the same.â ?

What is relevant?

There are, according to some Muslim organizations*, nearly 700,000 Muslims in Canada.  If only 2% are disaffected then we have 13,000+ bitter Muslims in Canada, if only 2% of those are willing and able to step down from bitter and become violent jihadis then we have 250 (mostly) young people willing to carry bombs onto the Montreal Metro or Toronto subway or Vancouver Skytrain.  If only 2% of those actually make the descent into madness then about 50 people will be killed in Toronto and 50 more in another city - maybe Calgary or Ottawa.

In today's Globe and Mail (See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20050723.BLASTMUSLIMS23/TPStory ) AP reporter Scheherezade Faramarzi says:

,,,
Since the July 7 attacks, the Muslim community and the council have been scrambling to come up with a broad plan to find ways to channel the anger and frustration of Muslim youths to more positive use ... Already, local mosques and youth centres in the Muslim-populated neighbourhoods of London are teaching young men and women that Islam doesn't condone terrorism.

In one gathering, several young men wanted to know if the action of the bombers was right.

"They were confused," said Abu Zubeir Islam, a 24-year-old school teacher in Tower Hamlets, an East London neighbourhood near Aldgate Station, the site of one of the July 7 bombings ...

... his mosque, the largest in London, is organizing activities such as seminars, field trips and soccer matches for youths -- under the supervision of imams, or prayer leaders.

In May, the Muslim Council launched a books-for-schools project providing mainstream schools with books, CDs, DVDs, videos and accompanying teaching aids. The project is designed to facilitate teaching of Islam within the school curriculum.

This is more pussyfooting around the problem.  There is not much point in â ? providing mainstream schools with books, CDs, DVDs, videos and accompanying teaching aids ... to facilitate teaching of Islamâ ? if the aim is to stop Muslims from bombing trains and school-buses.  (That being said, I think we should teach everyone about different cultures and religions - if only to remind the silent majority that the yobs and yahoos who vandalize and desecrate synagogues, mosques and churches and snarl "Paki!â ? at a Sikh are ignorant, substandard human beings.)

If the aim is to protect innocent people and to preserve our way of life in what Thomas Homer-Dixon (see below) describes as our brittle cities then we must take a wide range of active and passive measures, on several different levels, including:

"¢ Changing what young Muslims are taught about the West in schools and mosques here, in Canada - that may mean deporting sheiks and imans and the like and prosecuting religious leaders for hate crimes (those laws are on the books to 'protect' everyone) and incitement to violence.  Some religious leaders/teachers may just have to disappear;

"¢ Putting explosive detectors at every door on every bus and subway car and the entrance to every Metro station and department store, library, supermarket, theatre, office building and so on and so forth;

"¢ Addressing low achievement in our ghettos - black, aboriginal and Muslim, too.  That may involve a little affirmative action which gets everyone's back up but racism is alive and well in Canada and some people do suffer more than others.  It may also involve a bit of tough love while we break up the self imposed isolation which exists within poor, poorly educated, poorly integrated minority communities;

"¢ Carrying the war into the lawless North-West Frontier regions of Pakistan - despite the very real problems this will cause for President Musharraf;

"¢ Increasing law enforcement budgets by up to an order of magnitude - at the expense of single payer health care, I expect, so that we quintuple the number of eyes and ears, human and electronic, on our streets and, indeed, albeit surreptitiously, in mosques, too;

"¢ Hardening and dispersing nodes and links of our major vital utility systems: water, electricity, etc - to make them more survivable;

"¢ Insisting that Canadian universities train Muslim clerics here and disallowing work permits for foreign sheiks and imans;

"¢ Slowing immigration from Mulsim regions; and

"¢ Many others which you can think about.

We are not at war with Islam or with Muslims, in general.  Some people are at war with us - they declared war on us many years ago.  Almost all of those people are Muslim and many, probably a large majority are:

"¢ Fanatical - as only those who believe in a righteous cause can be;

"¢ Only dimly aware of our society and its values and accomplishments; and

"¢ Committed, without earthly fear, to their cause, to the death, because they believe that they will be rewarded, soon and in paradise, for their sacrifices here and now.

Arresting these people and hauling them into a court of law is not going to slow, much less prevent their attacks.  They believe they are doing the right thing - many believe they are doing their god's will.  That's powerful stuff - arresting one true believer doesn't deter the others.  We need to destroy their will.  First we need to destroy their will to attack us; then we need to destroy their will to resist our attacks on them and their leaders and their â ?baseâ ? or bases, in several so-called friendly states.

----------

* See: http://muslim-canada.org/muslimstats.html

 

[Edward Campbell]

From today's Globe and Maiil.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050723/COCITIES23/TPComment/?query=Brittle+cities

Brittle cities are easily broken
The rigidity of our financial, energy and transport systems make them prime terror targets, warns conflict analyst THOMAS HOMER-DIXON. Let's stay flexible

By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

Saturday, July 23, 2005
Updated at 12:07 PM EDT

'If there's another major attack, people will leave the city in droves." Andrew, a colleague of mine in New York City, was sitting in his office in a building not far from Grand Central. It was October, 2001, and I'd phoned him from Canada to discuss some business. But our conversation quickly turned to the city's fevered mood. After the attack on the World Trade Center and a string of anthrax letters, New York's normally thick-skinned inhabitants were near their tipping point.

Of course, another attack hasn't occurred, so we'll never know just how close New Yorkers came to leaving the city en masse. But Andrew clearly thought that the psychological pressure on the city's people had reached a critical threshold.

I've been reflecting on Andrew's comment since learning of the second round of subway bombings in London on Thursday. His comment highlights, I think, the first of three factors that together make modern societies increasingly vulnerable to terrorism: how we define or "frame" these attacks in our minds. The second is the increasing brittleness of the hyper-complex technological and social systems. And the third is the rising technological power of terrorists to hurt us.

We can do a lot about the first factor; we can do quite a bit about the second; but there are only a few things (albeit critically important) that we can do about the third. Unfortunately, the third factor may turn out to be most important, and ultimately it may override the other two.

In the past 15 years, researchers have learned that the way we frame events in our minds crucially shapes how we respond to these events. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, many New Yorkers were terrified. Little was known about the attackers or their methods and capabilities. So people filled in the blanks and jumped to the conclusion that their lives and the city as a whole were in imminent mortal danger. Across the country, the attacks primed Americans to interpret the small number of anthrax letters that were later sent through the postal system as the precursor of a devastating bio-weapon attack. The result was near hysteria, as people besieged their doctors for antibiotics and buildings were evacuated at the sight of anything resembling a white powder. Because people had framed the danger in such extreme terms, another terrorist strike in New York in late 2001-- an attack on the scale of 9/11 or larger -- would likely have caused huge numbers of people to leave the city.

The same could happen in London if the current attacks continue and escalate in severity, and if the attacks are framed in the wrong way. News reports on Thursday's bombings indicate that Londoners didn't respond with the calmness they'd shown two weeks previously. "Witnesses spoke of a panic," The New York Times reports, "after passengers smelled something burning on one subway car and rushed onto another to escape it, abandoning bags and shoes."

Many terrorism experts say we need to learn a lesson from Israel, a society that frames terrorist attacks as horrible but nonetheless manageable instances of chronic, low-level conflict. Even at the height of the suicide bombings in Israel, the country's citizens for the most part went about their daily lives. The attacks led Israelis to adopt a range of procedures to protect themselves -- they inspect bags at the entrances to restaurants and nightclubs, for example -- but the attacks weren't showstoppers and they didn't induce panic, because most Israelis didn't frame them as a cataclysmic threat.

The second thing that's increasing our vulnerability to terrorism is the rising brittleness of many systems critical to our well-being.

Our financial systems, manufacturing industries, transportation networks, information systems, and energy grids are, in some cases, extremely susceptible to attack. Some of these systems have critical "chokepoints" -- like a key tunnel in a subway system or a high-voltage line in an electrical grid -- where flows of people, materials, or energy can be easily disrupted.

Also, in our endless quest to maximize efficiency and to squeeze out the last bit of waste, we've reduced inventories, buffering capacity, and slack within all our economic and technological systems. We've made them "tightly coupled," to use the jargon of systems analysts. At the same time, our demand for services from these systems has soared, as we've seen with our hunger for electricity. This combination of factors sharply boosts the risk of cascading breakdowns.

People in southern Ontario were rudely introduced to such brittleness in the August, 2003, blackout.

We learned that, especially in our cities, we've become so specialized in our abilities and so dependent on complex systems for survival that when things go wrong (when portable phones, ATMs, water systems, subways, traffic lights, and the Web stop working) we can find ourselves in desperate straits.

If the blackout had persisted longer than it did, the situation could have become grim, especially for seniors living in condominium high rises. Many of these buildings are 30 or more stories high, and some don't have windows that open. With the power off, many residents had no elevators, air conditioning, or water. After a couple of days of 35-degree temperatures, we would have been taking some of them out in body bags.

There's much we can do to increase the resilience of our cities and societies in the face of sudden shock, by loosening coupling within critical systems, increasing inventories (which means reducing our reliance on just-in-time production), and making it possible for individuals to help themselves when systems break down.

But almost without exception, we aren't doing these things. Despite the lesson of the blackout, and even though we've been warned that Ontario faces a critical electricity-supply shortfall in coming years -- a shortfall that makes repeated brownouts and blackouts more likely -- few if any high rises are being fitted with standby generators.

The third thing that's increasing our vulnerability is the rising power of terrorists to hurt us. Londoners were lucky that the recent attackers used only conventional explosives, and that Thursday's terrorists were apparently incompetent. But our luck won't last forever, especially given the rapid diffusion of knowledge about how to make devices that can kill large numbers of people. Most experts believe that sooner or later, a terrorist group will succeed in using a non-conventional biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear device.

The most appalling possibility is, of course, the detonation of a nuclear bomb in major city. Even a relatively small nuclear explosion would do catastrophic damage. It's hard to make such a bomb, so the probability of this kind of attack is low, perhaps very low. But it's still vitally important for nations to gather up and render unusable the world's huge stockpile of fissile material, especially highly enriched uranium, much of it sitting in insecure facilities in the former Soviet Union.

As long as terrorists continue to use conventional weapons, our best response is to frame the danger appropriately: These attacks are not a mortal threat, and they don't pose a great risk to any one individual.

We can adapt to the risk, as we go about the tasks of tracking down and eliminating the perpetrators and making sure our vital infrastructure and technological systems are more resilient. But if and when terrorists start using non-conventional weapons, these responses won't be enough.

And if terrorists get hold of the bomb, it could well be game over: It's hard to imagine how Western societies could sustain their liberties, institutions, and economic vigour in the face of such a threat. We should be doing everything we can to make sure it never happens.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is author of The Ingenuity Gap.

© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.​

 

[Edward Campbell]

OK, the iman of one (of about 30 (?) - http://www.arabtoronto.com/arabcommunity/mosques2.htm ) Toronto mosque says a half dozen young men have come to him asking about fighting.  Maybe that means there are as many as 150 young men in Toronto who want to do something to strike a blow for Islam; let's say there are only 1/3 that many: 50.  Suppose just 2% - 1 of those 50 - decides that the best place to strike a blow is somewhere in Toronto; what do we protect?  How do we prevent the attack?  What do we do after the fact - besides reaffirming that Islam is a peaceful religion?

From today's Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050725.wxthreats25/BNStory/National/

Imam warns Ottawa to back off Muslims
By COLIN FREEZE

Monday, July 25, 2005
Updated at 5:15 AM EDT

From Monday's Globe and Mail

A controversial Toronto imam warned Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan at a closed-door meeting to stop "terrorizing" Canadian Muslims.

"If you try to cross the line I can't guarantee what is going to happen. Our young people, we can't control," Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre, recalls telling the minister at the May meeting she held in Toronto with dozens of Muslim leaders.

The meeting was part of an effort by Ms. McLellan to reach out to Canadian Muslims amid complaints that the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service are engaging in racial profiling.

The minister and her officials have been meeting community leaders to explain they are not targeting Muslims generally, only individuals with possible terrorist links.

By many accounts, the meetings have been positive and are contributing to a thaw in relations between Muslims and security agents, even if the exchange in May was a little heated.

Mr. Hindy, who has long complained that CSIS is spying on him, his family and his mosque, told Ms. McLellan that a young Muslim woman complained to him she was roughed up by Canadian spies while her husband was away at prayers. This allegation could spur reprisals because "our women are the most valuable thing to us" and "for a Muslim, honour is more important than his life," Mr. Hindy said in a recent interview.

He made the point to the minister. Several people who attended shrugged off the imam's remarks, but some Muslims and government agents later approached Mr. Hindy asking him to explain himself.

"The police came to me and said, 'This is a kind of threat,' and I said yes," he said. "But it's for the good of this country.

"And they said, 'Do you know some of the names of those people you expect to cause some problems?' And I said, 'You just open the telephone directory.' "

While government investigators probing the woman's complaint told Mr. Hindy they have not found evidence of wrongdoing, he isn't giving the spy service the benefit of the doubt.

"We believe CSIS should stop terrorizing us," he says in a flyer he is circulating to mosques. "CSIS is powerless. CSIS has no authority over you. If CSIS agents come to your door, do not open [it] for them."

Toronto's Coalition of Muslim Organizations arranged the meeting, and said about 100 Muslim leaders attended. While COMO president Adam Esse noted that, "some people, when they talk, they get a little heated," he said the ministerial visit was "a sign of respect" and was worthwhile overall. "If you talk, you remove a lot of misconceptions, a lot of misunderstandings."

A spokesman for Ms. McLellan agreed. "We feel it was constructive, positive," Alex Swann said.

Even Mr. Hindy said that despite his differences with security agencies "the Deputy Prime Minister, she was very understanding."

In the wake of the London bombings, Ms. McLellan has said that Canadians must become "psychologically prepared" for such an attack.

She has also suggested such strikes are not related to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, in which Britain is a strong partner. Mr. Hindy believes the war in Iraq has caused young Muslims to want to fight against the United States and Britain. "I always say the No. 1 recruiter of al-Qaeda is George W. Bush," he said.

The imam said six or seven young men have approached him to discuss "fighting overseas" in place such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said he told them "people fighting in Iraq, they don't need more people."

Instead, Canadian Muslims can wage non-violent jihads (holy struggles) at home. "You have a very good chance to serve Islam here," he said he told them.

© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved. ​

 

[Britney Spears]

I'm as left wing as you can get around these parts, but if the Muslim community knew what was good for them they'd send guys like this back to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or whatever, since he's being "terrorized" so much in Canada. Does he even know what that word means? :

 

[Andyboy]

"'Our young people, we can't control," Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre"

Personally I take this as a threat. He and the rest of the Muslim leadership in Toronto better start controlling their young people. They may want to start by speaking out publically about non-violence such that when something happens they can at least say they did all they could to prevent it, assuming of course they do want to prevent it.

I live pretty close to a couple of Mosques...and I take the subway.

Edited to add: Perhaps someone should remind the various Muslim leaders that if they think getting "terrorized" by the RCMP and CSIS is bad, the alternative would be much worse. I want to be clear. I'm not advocating violence against muslims, but there can be no doubt that if pushed hard enough Canadian citizens will push back. By definition vigilantes operate outside of the law.

 

[Britney Spears]

Personally I take this as a threat. He and the rest of the Muslim leadership in Toronto better start controlling their young people. They may want to start by speaking out publically about non-violence such that when something happens they can at least say they did all they could to prevent it, assuming of course they do want to prevent it.

I live pretty close to a couple of Mosques...and I take the subway.

Exactly. Can't "control" your young people? Stop whining when we do it for you then.

Sometimes I wonder if these guys are working for Karl Rove too. 

 

[Andyboy]

I heard Karl Rove invented militant Islam.

 

[Edward Campbell]

"'Our young people, we can't control," Aly Hindy, the head of Scarborough's Salaheddin Islamic Centre"

Personally I take this as a threat. He and the rest of the Muslim leadership in Toronto better start controlling their young people. They may want to start by speaking out publically about non-violence such that when something happens they can at least say they did all they could to prevent it, assuming of course they do want to prevent it.

I live pretty close to a couple of Mosques...and I take the subway.

Edited to add: Perhaps someone should remind the various Muslim leaders that if they think getting "terrorized" by the RCMP and CSIS is bad, the alternative would be much worse. I want to be clear. I'm not advocating violence against muslims, but there can be no doubt that if pushed hard enough Canadian citizens will push back. By definition vigilantes operate outside of the law.

I don't think its his job to control his young people any more than I think a parish priest or a rabbit are responsible for controlling members of their congregations.

I do think he is responsible to teach them that killing people here in Canada in order to seek revenge for perceived (or real, take your pick) Western sins in the Middle East and West Asia is both a sin (for which they will, presumably, rot in hell, without benefit of three-score plus virgins) and a crime for which they will, hopefully, rot in jail â “ maybe a jail in some dirty, sadistic third world backwater.

I also think it is time that we, Canadian society at large, made this responsibility crystal clear to Muslim leaders and teachers all across Canada.  Those who cannot see it our way should be shown the highway â “ some judicial use of the 'notwithstanding clause' to give effect to that will be immensely popular amongst 90% of Canadians.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This, from today's Globe and Mail is, in my view, good stuff.  (My emphasis added)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050725.wxcospector25a/BNStory/specialComment/

Lessons from London
By NORMAN SPECTOR

Monday, July 25, 2005
Updated at 8:17 AM EDT

From Monday's Globe and Mail

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Having lived in the Middle East when suicide attacks were just coming into vogue in certain circles, I've found coverage of the terrorist attacks in Britain to be both excessive and clichéd.

Excessive, because the murder of 52 people -- each a deplorable tragedy -- pales in comparison to the 800 civilians killed every month in Iraq alone. Clichéd, because while it's true the Brits stood steadfast against the German Blitz, their record against terrorism -- be it in Palestine in the 1940s or Northern Ireland more recently--is not nearly as impressive.

While some attribute the intense coverage to the concentration of journalists in London, even particularly gruesome events, reported by more than 1,000 foreign correspondents based in Israel, are generally one-day wonders quickly consigned to the newspapers' back pages. In theory, all men are created equal; in practice -- it seems -- we feel a special concern for the lives of our British cousins.

Still, out of this coverage of carnage and continuing threats, some good might come -- on both sides of the ocean. Regrettably, it's taken a tragedy, but at least now a real debate has finally broken out over the roots of the post-9/11 conflict, and how to win it.

Judging from the tabloid-talk of Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier, Canadians need this debate more than the Brits do. One understands the General's desire to motivate his troops prior to their dangerous mission. However, who would have known that Prime Minister Paul Martin would be comfortable with the view that terrorists detest Canadians because of our freedoms, our society and our liberties? And, even more surprising, who would have thought that NDP Leader Jack Layton would not dissent from Gen. Hillier's assessment that hunting down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan will prevent terrorist attacks such as those in London?

While the British newspaper Daily Mail fronted a banner headline calling the perpetrators "bastards" -- a close relative of Gen. Hillier's calling them "scumbags" -- the British debate has, in general, risen above that level. Within days of the July 7 attack, many began to blame Prime Minister Tony Blair for sending British troops to war in Iraq -- a view subsequently endorsed in a report from the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Yet, if you believe Gen. Hillier, hunting down al-Qaeda in Afghanistan will not increase the risk of an attack on Canadian soil.

With London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone tracing the London attacks to a century of British Mideast policy -- which sounds about right to me -- Mr. Blair has gradually abandoned simplistic talk about terrorists being mad or evil. Though his arguments against the Iraq link are weakened by an unwillingness to look back more than a decade in history, he's right in suggesting that ultimately the question comes down to whether you can appease terrorists or must fight them.

Assisting the debate, the British media have stopped tip-toeing around the role of Muslim extremists in the mayhem, showing a new aggressiveness in sweeping away the usual platitudes about a religion of peace. After the Muslim Council of Britain issued a fatwa against terrorism, The Independent newspaper repeatedly pushed the council's general-secretary, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, to state: "There can never, ever be justification of killing civilians, full stop. . . . Israeli innocent civilians are in exactly the same category as innocent Palestinians, as innocent Britishers. They are innocent civilians."

Meanwhile, the BBC has come under intense pressure to use the t-word in its reports. For a brief moment on the day of the attacks, reporters began following Mr. Blair's lead in referring to acts by "terrorists."

However, editors soon put a stop to it, and ordered the re-editing of old copy to expunge references.

When pressed at a public meeting to say whether the perpetrators of the attacks were terrorists, BBC Chair Sir Michael Grade replied: "Yes, and the BBC had been describing them as such . . . there was some subediting on a couple of pages of a website that I haven't got to the bottom of yet, but which the director-general I am sure will tell the governors about." Subsequently, the BBC issued a statement that the broadcaster had not banned the use of the term "terrorist."

Here at home, the CBC, which also has rewritten old copy, argues that to use the t-word would be to "take sides." However, only one side -- the side looking to recruit new suicide bombers -- has an interest in terminological confusion. In June, according to a Le Devoir report, Radio-Canada refused to go along, choosing to employ the terrorist term, leaving CBC English-speaking reporters increasingly isolated -- in Canada and around the world.

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© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved. ​

Lots of meat here.

 

[Scoobie Newbie]

Whatever happened to disenfranchised youth getting their frustrations out by spray painting the side of a building?

 

[Britney Spears]

Yeah, line those cockroaches up on the side of the ditch too.


I HATE HATE HATE vandals. 

 

[a_majoor]

There is that mindset out there "If we pretend it isn't there, it won't hurt us". Mohammed Atta sounds like the sort of person who made the hair stand up on the back of people's necks, yet look at the response he got from an American government officia. The Australian hostage being upbraided by a newspaper editor for characterizing his captors as "arseholes" seems to ba another sigh of dementia:

Mark Steyn: Mugged by reality?

25jul05

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely - to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant - Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the "root causes" (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace". Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles".

Until the London bombings. Something about this particular set of circumstances - British subjects, born and bred, weaned on chips, fond of cricket, but willing to slaughter dozens of their fellow citizens - seems to have momentarily shaken the multiculturalists out of their reveries. Hitherto, they've taken a relaxed view of the more, ah, robust forms of cultural diversity - Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings - but Her Britannic Majesty's suicide bombers have apparently stiffened even the most jelly-spined lefties.

At The Age, Terry Lane, last heard blaming John Howard for the "end of democracy as we know it" and calling for "the army of my country ... to be defeated" in Iraq, now says multiculturalism is a "repulsive word" whereas "assimilation is a beaut" and should be commended. In the sense that he seems to have personally assimilated with Pauline Hanson, he's at least leading by example.

Where Lane leads, Melbourne's finest have been rushing to follow, lining up to sign on to the New Butchness. "There is something wrong with multiculturalism," warns Pamela Bone. "Perhaps it is time to say, you are welcome, but this is the way it is here." Tony Parkinson - The Age's resident voice of sanity - quotes approvingly France's Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

And yet, The Age's editor Andrew Jaspan still lives in another world. You'll recall that it was Jaspan who objected to the energy and conviction of certain freed Australian hostage, at least when it comes to disrespecting their captors: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the 'arsehole' word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

And heaven forbid we're insensitive about terrorists. True, a blindfolded Wood had to listen to his jailers murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's captors? A few months after 9/11, National Review's John Derbyshire dusted off the old Cold War mantra "Better dead than red" and modified it to mock the squeamishness of politically correct warfare: "Better dead than rude". But even he would be surprised to see it taken up quite so literally by Andrew Jaspan.

Usually it's the hostage who gets Stockholm Syndrome, but the newly liberated Wood must occasionally reflect that in this instance the entire culture seems to have caught a dose. And, in a sense, we have: multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. Instead, it just involves feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance. And one notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists". "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves. We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lop-sided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. I would like to think that the newly fortified Age columnists are representative of the culture's mood, but, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on Kennedy: anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Mark Steyn is a regular contributor to The Australian.

And Steyn is right of course, multiculturalism, as practiced, really has nothing at all to do with understanding other cultures. That gang rapes and "honour killings" take place at all is horrifying enough, to have these acts passed off with a shrug only emboldens the perpetrators to continue with even less restraint, or call for bigger and better atrocities, since "we" evidently don't care....

 

[tomahawk6]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050725.wxthreats25/BNStory/National/

Canada remains one of the few havens left for islamic radicals. To keep it that way Canada has been warned by the radicals.

 

[paracowboy]

well, they don't have to concern themselves. We're not about to show a spine, now.

 

[a_majoor]

When the shoe finally drops, the Iman and his friends may find themselves being "warned" by the 10th (Mountain) Infantry division out of Fort Drum, since American tolerence for this kind of crap is rapidly declining.




edited to correct the Divisional title. Thanks for the reminder Brittney