2005-07-10

Tanweer’s uncle, Bashir Ahmed, has no doubts that it was faceless figures in Pakistan who radicalised his sports-mad nephew.
“He was such a calm, loving normal boy. Extremists must have got their hands on him,” the 65-year-old Leeds businessman said yesterday.

“We all thought he had gone to continue his education. I thought he just wanted to improve his pronunciation.
“It wasn’t him.

It must have been forces behind him.
“Today the camps are more like youth hostels,” one young activist who attended a madrassa in southern Pakistan told .
“Recruits don’t spend hours scrabbling about on outward bound courses.

It is more like being in a school room.”
“Organisers don’t want to turn out warriors who can strip down a Kalashnikov rifle blindfolded. They want to shape the mind, not the body.

“They want their recruits to embrace the idea of giving their lives for their cause, and doing nothing more technical than triggering the bomb they carry.”
There are long periods of Koranic study but also what organisers call “the evolution of the jihad”, which teaches how wars are no longer a battle between rival armies.

The modern Islamic terrorist understands the concept of ' ' (I'll say more on this shortly) and he understands the true nature of sacrifice -- or at least he does after he's been indoctrinated in a philosophy of hate.

"They want to shape the mind, not the body" -- remember that phrase, because whatever else this struggle is, at root it is a battle of ideas we are engaged in.

So who encouraged these lads to blow themselves up in pursuit of mass-murder? What sort of person were they, and what sort of a philosophy were they peddling.

has an example here: Egyptian-born Professor Tariq Ramadan, described as "an Islamic academic who justifies suicide bombings," and booked to speak in the UK soon.

As one of the good guys, says, "draw your own conclusions about the nature of the moral and intellectual status of what passes for the Muslim intelligentsia, and the academic culture hospitable to it." Irfan has a go at the western apologists for the terror in a piece called .

It's good reading, and he poses a challenge to the apologists:

So which policy do you want? The one that led to London, the one that led to 9/11, the one that would have led to a nuclearized Iraq, or the one that might well have led to the Iraqi hijacking of the Saudi oil fields?

Or is it that you want the policy option that consists in the fantasy that you don't have to think about stuff like this?

moral inversion [in the West] fueled by toxic philosophy. Thanks to a long gray line of ideological dope-pushers, Western intellectuals, politicians and cultural leaders are addicted to the self-destructive hallucinations of moral relativism, altruistic self-sacrifice, cultural self-loathing and political appeasement of sworn enemies.

Self-blame, along with cowardly calls for more 'understanding' and 'restraint,' are their only knee-jerk responses in the face of each new outrage.

I am by no means an expert on Islam.

But since 9/11, and during the countless terrorist incidents that followed, I have been patiently awaiting evidence that the majority of Muslims worldwide repudiate the premises and tactics of Islamic terrorists.

Well, I'm still waiting. And there comes a time when one must finally draw conclusions, however painful, from the facts presented.

If there really is some sort of ongoing war between "extremists" and "moderates" for the soul of Islam, it appears to be one of the quietest contests in the history of ideological warfare.

The BBC take the above exhortation as in invitation to airbrush history.

on Thursday night, as the weblog has observed, the BBC website ran an article headlined “Bus man may have seen terrorist”. By the next morning the headline appeared as “Passenger believes he saw bomber”.

Another page on the site referred to “the worst terrorist atrocity Britain has seen”. By Friday lunchtime these words became “the worst peacetime bomb attacks Britain has seen”.
And this wasn’t an accident.

Editors were following Section 11 of the BBC’s editorial guidelines which read: “The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term.”

reports that an un-named BBC spokesman said in response to these airbrushing accusations last night: "The word terrorist is not banned from the BBC.

" Bollocks, says the rest of us.

...

London is part of a great civilisation.Yet there seems to me to be a radical disjunction between our heroic capacity to deal with the immediate effects of terrorism and our collective refusal to confront what lies behind it. The effects of this disjunction are, literally, fatal.

[Hat tip ]

Al-Qaeda is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal. A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.

Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.

And a crucial lesson to be learned from the latest terror attacks is that "terrorists are not afraid.

"

President Bush keeps repeating that we're not going to ever give in. No matter what they do to us, we'll stay firm. Firm in what way?

In Iraq? Terrorism isn't merely about Iraq. Terrorism happens because some people want to destroy life on earth while others want to live it.

Notice how terrorists don't usually go after soldiers (although they do this). Their primary targets are working people, people on buses and people on subways. Or people in airplanes.

They want to terrorize "regular people" so that regular people will, in turn, compel their leaders to cave in.

Therein lies the terrorist contradiction. If we give in to terrorism more and more, then what do we get in return?

In the end, a society run by religious fanatics who choke any tiny ounce of joy out of living. Why would any remotely rational person ever give in to this? This is why sooner or later (and usually sooner, rather than later), people get back onto the airplanes, buses and highways.

They always have and they always will because civilization, on its worst day, beats a typical day in the life of a terrorist (or a terrorist state, such as Iran) hands down.