Samizdata

It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam.

One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly ‘closed down’, though ‘re-branded’ would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight?

Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam’s savage excesses, then ‘Islamophobia’ (literally ‘a fear of Islam’) is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim).

Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves.

Alaa of the Messopotamian has some choice words about the hellspawn of Fallujah and how our troops should deal with them:

For the valiant soldiers doing battle in Falujah today: like the medieval knights, you have engraved on your shields severed heads of kidnapped victims, murdered children, the hundreds of thousands of the dwellers of mass graves. You are the instruments of the Lord’s retribution. Have no mercy on this vermin, they do not deserve any.

God bless you and protect you for you are doing his work.

It seems the enemy forces are turning more and more to Saddam’s old tried and true methods: threatening and killing children, the elderly and even pregnant women. Iraqi’s would like to see the lot of them off to a very deep location with an exceedingly tropical climate.

I well recall how, on the first day of the serious, large scale, televised bit of Gulf War 2, I watched, in Cracow (in Poland), the unfolding story on BBC News 24 and on nothing else. At first I was uncomfortable, as the allied forces were sucked forwards from catastrophe to catastrophe into the beckoning quagmire, like horror film extras emerging from their graves. It took me an hour or more to work out that what the pictures were actually showing (as opposed to what the BBC said they were showing) was an astonishingly rapid and almost completely casualty free (on the allied side) advance on Baghdad. The allied soldiers were not being made fools of by the ever-so-cunning Iraqi army; it was simply that the BBC were making fools of themselves.

But although the quagmire that the BBC prophesied, a cunning ambush in the streets of Baghdad, did not materialise, there was enough of a different sort of quagmire to keep BBC spirits up, in the form of lots of suicide bombings and rebellions and ructions.

At least this time it is being acknowledge that the USA is doing whatever it is that it is doing in Iraq just now on purpose. However, this time the anti-USA spin is that a significant proportion of the fighters who were supposed to be holed up in the place the Americans are taking possession of have already slipped away, and are causing mayhem elsewhere. Plus, of course, civilians are getting it in the neck too. Both claims make sense to me. But how true are they? I will be interested to see what, if anything, the Belmont Club says about this. They are covering the set-piece battle with enthusiasm. What, I wonder, will they say about the bigger picture, as the Independent is now describing it?

And if there is now a particular burst of mayhem, how long will it last? What I know about insurgency and counter-insurgency would fit snugly into one of these postings (without any MORE involved), but it is my understanding that insurgency is harder if you do not have a nice safe base, and the USA is now engaged in overrunning just such a base. So even if people are getting away and causing mayhem, it will be harder for mayhemmers to operate in the future. Yes? Or maybe: yes, but they will still find a way.

One other thing puzzles me which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. There seems to be no agreement about how to spell the focal point of all this drama. Should we spell it Falluja or Falujah?

Unless it turns out to be an artful fake, it seems that contrary to my long held views, Osama bin Laden may indeed still be alive.

Quite why it has taken this long for a video of him saying something timely is hard to fathom, but then many of the things the likes of bin Laden do defies rational analysis. I am astonished by this turn of events.