We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Robert Alderson writes about what Islam really needs and has an interesting idea how to nudge things along
In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand – just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible.
I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the ‘Arab Street’ The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them.
The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions – straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago.
The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion.
Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:
Senior Muslims have warned the Government that it needed to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to the violence. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq. He described the July 7 bombings and the attempted attacks in London on Thursday as “horrifying” but said it was not enough to simply unite in condemnation of the bombers.
People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an ‘anti’, make no mistake, what these ‘senior Muslims’ are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up.
And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:
we know this wasn’t a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it’s urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.
He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the ‘underlying factor’ that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word ‘but…’). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period.
Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
British police shot dead a man strongly suspected to have been one of yesterday’s would-be suicide bombers as he tried to board a train full of people at Stockwell Tube station.
It has also been reported that British Muslims are worried there is a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in force. However contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, anytime a policeman shoots someone, they are prepared to kill them (the usual policy is to shoot at the ‘centre of mass’). Technically they are ‘shooting to incapacitate’ and that often means killing the target. If a person who has been shot and incapacitated subsequently survives, that is a bonus.
However in the case of a suspected suicide bomber, once the decision to shoot has been made, taking the extra step of a bullet through the brain of a fallen suspect who under other circumstances would not be shot again may well be justified, given that the ability to so much as touch a button makes them a continued threat. This is particularly true if they have gone down near a number of civilians as was indeed the case this morning.
I am only surprised it has taken Al Qaeda this long to get around to attacking us here in London, given that they thought nothing of slaughtering hundreds of African civilians in Kenya and Tanzania and dozens of Australian civilians in Bali over the last few years since 9/11. We are in a war against an implacable enemy and although we have every right to demand our security services only use appropriate force in our defence, unless the facts turn out to be quite different than so far reported, this looks like it was a ‘clean shoot’.
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.
We maintain that the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ is not only inevitable but imperative.
– Hizb Ut Tahrir (as quoted by the Daily Ablution)
And there we have it: something that a radical Islamic group has said that I totally agree with.
Washington DC’s Heritage Foundation has sent out a remarkably stupid e-mail today telling us how to deal with terrorism:
the British government must strengthen its anti-terror laws, from suspect detention to intelligence.
It is bad enough having Charles Clarke fighting against civil liberties in Britain without having the American Right poking its nose into our affairs. I am reminded of the words Charles Fox who in 1794, when warning against the suspension of Habeus Corpus, wrote:
The bill was characteristic of those violent times when, instead of being guided by reason, we were to be put under the dominion of wild passion, and when our pretended alarms were to be made the pretexts for destroying the first principles of the very system which we affected to revere.
We do not need right-wing opportunists from America campaigning against our civil liberties. Someone, please tell them to put a sock in it.
“It is our obsession with avoiding any occasion for embarrassment which has rendered us virtually incapable of expressing any national feeling without apologising first. In a supposed age of uninhibited self-expression, this is the one emotion that dare not speak its name. And this repression, I think, bears hardest on those who have fewer other consolations in their lives. The snobbish refusal of the bourgeoisie to share in the patriotism of the lower classes is one more estranging element – and not the least important – in the growing gulf between them.”
Mind the Gap, page 306, by Ferdinand Mount.
A quote which I cannot help but feel applies in particular to our current concerns about alienated young men turned on by the nihilist posturings of radical Islam.
It could have been so much worse. Another sunny day in London and another series of attacks. Mercifully, as far as I know, no-one has been killed. My fellow Pimlico friend, Andrew Ian Dodge has a good take on the details. Tim Worstall has views here, including ideas on what the motivation of the attacks were in this case.
It appears that at least one person involved in the attacks has been arrested. Perhaps CCTV recordings of the attacks could yield more evidence. What this latest incident suggests is that CCTV, long bemoaned by us libertarians, can certainly record valuable evidence after a crime has been committed but that is not much consolation to the victims. The outrages are certainly going to give further ammunition to the police in arguing that every cubic metre of London needs to have a camera in it. I think that in public spaces that are paid for by the public and clearly key potential targets for terror groups, CCTV has its uses and it is pretty silly to get oxidised about it. But, and it is a big but, such things are clearly no deterrent. (Thanks to U.S. libertarian blogger Jim Henley for prodding me to write about this).
I was in the Aldwych area of London – near the London School of Economics, when the attacks happened. I first heard by a mobile call from my fiancee. Walking back to the office, it was remarkable how relaxed everyone was. In fact, the strained looks on some people’s faces had more to do with the English batting implosion against Australia at the cricket.
Meanwhile, in reflecting on the cultural issues prompted by the current mayhem, go read this fine and no-holds-barred article in the Spectator.
I attended the GI launch last night, and Alex Singleton turned me loose as the kind of semi-official photographer of the event, and has used some crowd shots I took, and also pictures I did of Bill Emmott and Alan Beattie (who is also quoted here).
Glad to be of use. But what really got my attention last night was the number of nice looking women who were present. Johnathan Pearce is fond of mentioning P. J. O’Rourke’s Law of Babes, or whatever it is called, which goes something like: Wheresoever the Babes are, there shall also the Action be. Tom Wolfe’s description of how the Babes managed to track down the men test flying jets in the top secret desert of western USA in the early 1950s, in The Right Stuff, is an earlier exposition of the same law.
Judged by this standard, the GI Institute is doing pretty well. Here are eight nice looking ladies, and one genuine baby type babe just for good luck, and because he/she was there. (Cranking out more of those being a lot of what this is all about, after all.)
And those are only the ones I got reasonably good photos of. I can recall at least two more ladies who only missed the cut because I did not get good photos of them. So if you are a fully certified Gorgeous Babe and you were there, please do not be offended. You just came out all blurry in all my photos, on account of my chin hanging down and hitting the focussing nob.
Click to get bigger pictures, some of which include extraneous males of the species. Cropping such photos is always a controversial matter.
“…my great grandparents who were Manchester free-trade liberals who read the Manchester Guardian, which was a liberal free trade newspaper, would I think be astonished to pick up the modern version of the Manchester Guardian to find that it has leapt the fence from being a free trade newspaper to being a luddite newspaper.”
– Alan Beattie, World Trade Editor of the Financial Times, in this speech.
I cannot claim to have been brave very much in my life. And I do not know that I am being brave now. But I do know that I am now committed along with more than 10,000 others to refuse to register with the National Identity Register, whatever the Government may now choose to do to me.
The first NO2ID “Refuse” pledge through the MySociety PledgeBank site has been successful. 10,000, and counting, British people value freedom enough that they are prepared to become an un-person, rather than submit to lifelong supervision under the fallaciously named “ID card” system that the Government hopes to introduce. In four weeks we have raised promises of £100,000 for legal defence. And people are still joining in.
In a few days we will launch a bigger pledge, a million-pound-plus fighting fund, for everyone to subscribe to who supports the refuseniks, but cannot (because they have dependents or professional obligations) join in the identity strike. We need 50,000 people willing to pledge £20 if the bill passes. Look out for it.
And to the American readers of this blog I say: Help us now. If we go down, you are next…
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.
My life is my own.”
A figure from the youth wing of the Tory Party, no less, claims that the powers that be need to talk to Muslim extremists in order to bring them into the mainstream political process, otherwise the poor diddums, obviously so sensitive about their plight, might go beserk again and start interrupting our peaceful existence as happened on July 7.
You have got to hand it to the Conservatives. We tend to think of the party as being the party of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Peel. It is also, as this moron demonstrates, the party of Neville Chamberlain.
As I said in a rather angry comment the other day: Britain is a country, not a hotel.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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