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So now before British police will carry out raids on Muslim terror suspects, they will consult with a group of Muslim ‘community leaders’ before acting (i.e. they will in effect ask permission from the same people who have so conspicuously failed to prevent the need for such raids in the first place). And of course one can only wonder at the potential for the targets of such raids being tipped off.
So tell me, did the Metropolitan Police ask for permission from, oh I dunno, the Catholic Church maybe, before raiding possible IRA terrorist suspects in London for fear of upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the UK’s Irish community?
This is beyond parody.
I was all set to concoct a posting called something like “Why I am not a Christian – reason number seventeen” ho ho, about how you can’t expect much in the way of a robust defence of Civilisation against Islamic barbarism from people whose basic belief about their enemies is that they should love them, turn the other cheek, etc.
And then (via Instapundit) comes this:
THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.
Carey even launched a new word, or at any rate one I’ve not heard before: “Westophobia”.
Don’t get me wrong, Carey perpetuates as many clichés as he challenges. For instance:
He said he agreed with his Muslim friends who claimed that true Islam is not a violent religion, …
Perish the thought. But at least …
… he wanted to know why Islam today had become associated with violence. “The Muslim world must address this matter with great urgency,” he said.
Simple, I’d say. The founder of Islam believed strongly in violence, was himself very good at it, and recommended it enthusiastically to his followers. They have obliged, century after century after century.
But still, you can feel the Western brain cells being rubbed together. See also – another example among many – this rather blunter pronouncement along similar lines. And, for a response to all this moderate Muslim guff, see also this recent blog posting from Peter Saint André.
The idea that the West’s response to the Islamic challenge will only ever consist of the first hasty and opposed responses to 9/11, which were entirely what people already thought – “We all ought to get along better”, “We are provoking them”, “They must become more democratic”, and so on – is very foolish. The West – a vague label I know but it will serve – is the most formidable civilisation that the world has yet seen. It has faced down several recent and major challenges to its hegemony, and it will face down this one, I think, with whatever combination of sweet reason and cataclysmic brutality turns out to be necessary to get the job done. This challenge now seems bigger than the earlier ones. But they always do at the time, don’t they?
I cannot find on the internet the full text of Carey’s speech. If it can all be linked to, my apologies for suggesting otherwise, and could someone else please supply a link?. If it cannot be linked to, then, given the incendiary nature of this debate, this is an error that should be speedily corrected. The technology is now in place to spare us from having to rely on journalists to tell us what is in potentially important pronouncements of this sort, and it should be used.
UPDATE: Link to the full Carey speech. Thanks Julian.
Dealing with Islamicism is rather like playing chess with an opponent who randomly moves pieces about the board in the sure trust that a deity will confound his opponent.
– Julian Taylor’s friend, a comment on No tolerance for intolerance
The Pope Benedict XVI knew very well what he was doing quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologu. Once more, with feeling…
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
The BBC’s correspondent in Rome, David Willey, suggests that Pope Benedict may have not understood the potential implications of his remarks. I beg to differ. The Vatican spends a fair amount of time and effort on other religions, both as part of its institutions and as a continuation of ecumenism so dear to John Paul II. I therefore doubt that Pope Benedict would be oblivious to the Muslim ‘sensitivities’. I suspect he understands rather well how modern victimhood assists Muslims in the West. In short, he has done a great service to the public debate about Islam, such as it is, by holding a mirror to those whose only response is to strike at it violently.
I am disappointed that the public figures defending him cannot do better than saying his speech was misunderstood (re German Chancellor Angela Merkel). Catholic Church for all its vilification throughout the ages, some of it deserved and a lot of it not, is the last remaining Western institution that holds values to be above public opinion(s). One of the values that the Church has paid dearly for acquiring and upholding is the understanding that spreading the faith through violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul…
Interestingly Pope Benedict’s lecture was about faith and reason. It was based around one of the central beliefs of Catholicism – that God is knowable through reason. His intention was to broaden our concept of reason and its application… not contrary to the scientific nature of Western philosophy but as a matter of rational and practical approach to the cultural and social problems that the West faces.
A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.
I do not mean to exonerate the Pope from being ‘subversive’ of Islam as there is a bit in his lecture that I find more central to the debate than the infamous quote from 14th century:
But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
This is a far more damning statement than the one that caused all the commotion. There is not much tolerance these days in the Vatican for intolerance and, gasp, lack of reason.
Looks like the Holy War odds have just lengthened:
Pope Benedict XVI has said he is sorry that a speech in which he referred to Islam has offended Muslims.
Only fair, I reckon, given the superhuman levels of tolerance and generous spirit of the latter.
Weird echoes of the 12th Century in the 21st Century:
THE Pope’s visit to Turkey, which many hoped would herald a new era of improved relations between Islam and the West, was in doubt yesterday amid condemnation of remarks by the pontiff that appeared to link Islam and violence.
As Muslims all over the world protested, with effigies of Benedict XVI burnt during demonstrations in Pakistan, members of the Turkish Government urged the Pope to reconsider his visit in November. Senior officials in Turkey said that they could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead with the trip.
So, where is this going?
A. It will all blow over in a few days; or
B. One or other side will back down; or
C. We are headed for Holy War
Whilst travelling down towards the station in Brussels with some friends, one could not help noticing one street full of coffee bars, frequented solely by the male of the species, replicating a corner of Algiers or Tunis. Whilst new to me, this is not an infrequent encounter for the traveller in the Low Countries or France.
As vast portions of the urban geography continue to be recast in the Maghreb mould, and the demographics of immigration and indigenous wind down play out, I asked myself: which European Union Member State is most likely to join the Arab League (perhaps the Maghreb subset) or Organisation of Islamic Conferences in the next few years? Albania, Uganda and Guyana are members of the latter. This would be the predictable ‘next step’ for democratic structures with a large minority Arab electorate.
Dutch-born writer Ian Buruma writes about the issues stemming from the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. On the basis of his previous writings, I would have expected his account to be a compelling one. This reviewer of his book, however, gives a fairly harsh assessment. (Via Arts & Letters Daily).
Readers of Murder in Amsterdam are likely to close the book with a heavy heart. One reason is that the problem it addresses, the emergence of militant Islam as a divisive political/religious force in the West, is not going to go away soon. Another is that, though full of learning and skilled if tepid reporting, Buruma’s book often feels muddled, ungenerous and confusing. There is plenty of scholarship on display, but no compelling point of view.
There is, however, an off-putting strain of snobbery. Buruma, an Asia specialist and the author of Inventing Japan, Anglomania and, most recently, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, grew up in Holland but left it as a young man in the 1970s. Now a New Yorker, he clearly feels he’s gone on to bigger and better things. He rarely misses a chance to take a swipe at some aspect of Dutch life, whether it’s the “dank and gray” area of the Hague he was raised in or the “arrogance” of the great national soccer teams of the 1970s and ’80s.
Van Gogh’s murder followed the assassination two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, Holland’s flamboyantly gay, and very popular, anti-immigration politician who had also railed against the Islamicization of the Netherlands. Fortuyn was killed not by a Muslim, but by a white, left-wing vegan “activist”, who didn’t like the fact that the flashy politician wore fur collars and criticized immigrants. “The sobering truth,” wrote Rod Dreher in National Review shortly after Fortuyn’s death, “is that Europe – democratic, gun-controlling Europe – is a place where questioning the immigration status quo will not only get you branded a fascist by the news media, it will get you shot dead.”
Read the whole article.
There is an article in the Independent called Another fatal day in the ‘war on terror’ in which Patrick Cockburn, the “award-winning journalist and author” states:
The real reason of the increasing violence in the Middle East is the return to imperial control and foreign occupation half a century after the European colonial empires were broken up. This is the fuel for Islamic militancy. This is why fanatical but isolated Islamic groups can suddenly win broader support. Governments allied to the US and Britain have no legitimacy.
It seems to me that “the real reason for the increasing violence in the Middle East” is a bunch of Saudi Arabian Muslims hijacked several aircraft flying over the United States and used to to commit mass murder in 2001 and thereby caused the US to defend itself. Forget that and nothing makes sense.
The Taliban, the government who sponsored and facilitated Al Qaeda’s attacks on the USA, did not take control of Afghanistan because of a “return to imperial control and foreign occupation”, except in the sense that foreign Arabs did indeed occupy parts of Afghanistan.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and the Taliban all pre-dated the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Pretending they were caused by unwise actions of western governments rather than by the development of anti-modern Islamist ideology centred on Iran and Saudi Arabia, puts the blame in the wrong place. If the US and UK have made any major strategic mistakes, they were not intervening in more force in Iraq and to have not started working to encourage ‘robust’ opposition to Wahabbism in Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite fascism in Iran decades ago.
Robert Bidinotto has an interesting article up discussing the admission in the Washington Post that their reporting on the matter of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former US ambassador Joe Wilson was completely wrong.
Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had “debunked” White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.
Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program. So…where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush “conspiracy” stories? Don’t hold your breath.
I must confess when I quickly zipped through the specific WaPo article mentioned earlier today, I paid more attention to the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson aspects of this saga and not really pick up on what I now realise was the ‘bombshell’ aspect to all of this: it seems that Saddam really was shopping for uranium in Niger.
Interesting.
Michael Totten has another excellent and well illustrated article reminding us that rockets fired into Israeli civilian areas are not just launched from Southern Lebanon.
Israel scores a direct hit on the enemy.
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