Archived news and commentary: July 11 - 17, 2005

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Sunday, July 17, 2005

News and commentary:

"'He wasn't terrorist'" (Mahzer Mahmood, News Of The World, 2005/07/17)
7/7 ix: "THE uncle of suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer last night told the News of the World the 22-year-old's murderous act did not make him a terrorist.
In a searingly frank and shocking exclusive interview, Bashir Ahmed claimed Tanweer was a "desperate" young man "driven" to commit the atrocity by the West's treatment of Muslims.
And he BLAMED Tony Blair and George Bush for the July 7 bombings, warning: "There will be more."
"These (suicide bombers) are desperate people," said Ahmed. "They can see that their brothers are not getting their rights, so they take extreme action." ...
"I would not say that he (Tanweer) was a terrorist," said Ahmed.
"He was driven to this. He was desperate. He was driven to that by desperation because he couldn't find justice anywhere. This lad has made a name for himself in the world. Muslims call it a sacrifice, the Europeans call him a terrorist."
Cigar-smoking dad-of-four Ahmed describes the 55 lives taken by his nephew and his murderous pals as "a few".
"I'm sad about our child. At his hands a few people of this country have suffered. It's sad. We didn't want it," said Ahmed.
He laid the blame for the terror attacks firmly at the door of Tony Blair and George Bush, SLAMMING them for sparking the suicide bombings by "trampling over our human rights" and urging them to APOLOGISE for it.
"Britain and America are saying they will defeat terrorism. I am saying that terrorism can be finished in one second," said Ahmed.
'Why can't Blair and Bush apologise for the way they have abused the human rights of Muslims?'" (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)

"The challenge for British Muslims" (The Business, 2005/07/17)
7/7 VIII: "Barely 10 days since the terrible terrorist atrocities of 7/7 and it is already business as usual in Great Britain, where rational and robust thought has long since been replaced by mushy political correctness. According to the police, the BBC, government ministers and their chattering class allies - among whom we must now include a spineless Conservative Party - Islamophobia, not Islamic terrorism, is the main threat facing the country today. Even the advent of home-grown suicide bombers in the London Underground and on a Bloomsbury bus cannot snap the soft underbelly of British opinion out of its complacent torpor. It has been said that, after 7/7, Britain would never be quite be the same again. Sadly, it looks and sounds depressingly similar, leaving the country as vulnerable as ever to further attacks. ...
Expect much more mushy thinking in the weeks ahead. Already we are told that young Muslims are turned into suicide bombing by their "alienation", "marginalisation", "discrimination" and a host of other sociological buzzwords designed to show it is really our fault, rather then theirs, that they want to blow themselves up on the Piccadilly line. In today's Britain you will find proof positive that those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. The fact is that Britain is pockmarked by all manner of communities which feel alienated, marginalised and discriminated against, from East Glasgow to South London, but none become suicide bombers, bar those contaminated by a perversion of Islam. Nor were the London bombers particularly poor: some were university educated, most lived normal lower-middle class lives; the Egyptian biochemist suspected of being the bombmaster (and this weekend being interrogated in Cairo) had been granted £30,000 by the British taxpayer to continue his studies at Leeds University. So much for marginalisation or discrimination." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)

"When Denial Can Kill" (Irshad Manji, TIME, 2005/07/17)
7/7 VII: "I was surprised last week to learn how easily some Westerners believe terrorism can be explained. The realization unfolded as I looked into the sad face of a student at Oxford University. After giving a speech about Islam, I met this young magazine editor to talk about Islam's lost tradition of critical thinking and reasoned debate. But we never got to that topic. Instead, we got stuck on the July 7 bombings in London and what might have compelled four young, British-raised, observant Muslim men to blow themselves up while taking innocent others with them.
She emphasized their "relative economic deprivation." She emphasized their "relative economic deprivation." I answered that the lads had immigrant parents who had worked hard to make something of themselves. I reminded her that several of the 9/11 hijackers came from wealthy families, and it's not as if they left the boys out of the will. ...
By this time, the Oxford student had grown somber. It was clear I had let her down. I had failed to appreciate that the London bombers were victims of British society." (See also: "The lipstick lesbian daring to confront radical imams" (Jasper Gerard, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17))

"Provocation or genuine terror attack? The two views of George Galloway's Respect Coalition" (Eric Lee, ericlee.me.uk, 2005/07/17)
7/7 VI: "Under British law, political parties are obligated to inform us of the names of their major donors. A visit to the website of the Electoral Commission reveals that most of the money donated to George Galloway's Respect Party comes from one man, Dr Mohammed Naseem. Google searches quickly reveal that Dr Naseem, in addition to having been a Respect candidate for Parliament, is also a leading figure in the Islamic Party of Britain. And that party, whose website is largely dormant, did have some things to say about the recent terrorist bombings in London in a document posted yesterday (16 July).
That document, entitled "In Times of Terror the Truth takes a Tumble" makes the case that Islamic fundamentalists were not responsible for the terrorist bombings. The reasons given include:

* They could not have been Islamic fundamentalists because one of them was "married to a Hindu lady"
* The Israeli politician Netanyahu was warned not to leave his hotel before the general public was informed that there had been a bombing -- tipped off by the Mossad, which somehow knew what was really going on.
* Critical evidence, such as a CCTV camera on the number 30 bus, suspiciously disappeared from the scene.
* Finally, who benefits from the attacks? Why the Blair government, of course! ...

Dr Mohammed Naseem is a leading figure in the Respect Coalition. He is its single largest donor, providing more than 50% of the funds reported to the Electoral Commission. He was a Respect candidate for Parliament in the general election. The organisation he leads, the Islamic Party of Britain, is today saying that the attacks were a provocation, staged by the police, the Blair government, or the Mossad -- or all of them together." (Hat tip: Harry's Place. See also: "In Times of Terror the Truth takes a Tumble" (Sahib M Bleher, Islamic Party of Britain, 2005/07/15))

"The challenge to be civilized" (Andrew Martin, The Courier-Journal, 2005/07/17)
A review of "Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses", a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple:
'The fragility of civilization is one of the great lessons of the 20th century," writes British doctor Theodore Dalrymple in the preface to Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, a collection of essays written between 1996 to 2004. ...
Although civilization progressed materially and scientifically throughout the 20th century, Dalrymple argues, it has, in many respects, retrogressed culturally. Traditions and social institutions have been forsaken by modern intellectuals -- those who shape society's culture -- and replaced with a culture that eschews convention and worships novelty, giving rise to a chaotic erosion of civility. Thus, the crux of his work: "[C]ritics of social institutions and traditions . . . should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much -- indeed devastating -- harm." ...
In order to preserve civilization, Dalrymple believes that material progress must once again be wedded with the wisdom needed to promote and preserve social institutions and customs that promulgate virtue and build upon previous achievements." (See also: (See also: "By-products of Modernity" (Paul Hollander, New York Sun, 2005/06/13) and "The Doctor Is In" (David Pryce-Jones, National Review/Manhattan Institute, 2005/06/06))

"The bloody outcome of two worlds at war" (John Berger, The Observer, 2005/07/17)
We're all fanatics now. Moral equivalence doesn't come any more clearcut than this:
"Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma. The G8's dogma is that the making of profit has to be mankind's guiding principle before which everything else from the traditional past or aspiring future must be sacrificed as illusion.
The so-called war against terrorism is, in fact, a war between two fanaticisms. To bracket the two together seems outrageous. One is theocratic, the other positivist and secular. One is the fervent belief of a defensive minority, the other the unquestioned assumption of an amorphous, confident elite. One sets out to kill, the other plunders, leaves and lets die. One is strict, the other lax. One brooks no argument, the other 'communicates' and tries to 'spin' into every corner of the world. One claims the right to spill innocent blood, the other the right to sell the entire earth's water. Outrageous to compare them!
Yet the outrage of what happened in London on the Piccadilly Line, the Circle Line and the No 30 bus was the misadventure of many thousands of vulnerable people, struggling to survive and make some sense of their lives, being inadvertently caught in the global crossfire of those two fanaticisms." (Hat tip: Harry's Place.)

"Stop castrating the language" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2005/07/17)
"A misguided obsession with objective reporting is undermining the BBC's credibility as a news organisation":
"At the BBC and elsewhere, the pressure of events has pushed neutrality into euphemism and euphemism to the edge of outright falsehood. And nowhere more so than in the case of that pretty circumlocution - 'insurgent'. Imagine a totalitarian regime whose ruling party's ideology was inspired by the Nazis. Opposition or the suspicion of opposition means death. The leader is treated as semi-divine. His statue is in every town, his picture is in every newspaper and his pronouncements are hailed as the last word on every subject.
He has gassed an 'impure' ethnic minority in the north and used torture and murder to silence the country's majority in the south. After 30 years of pitiless rule, he is overthrown by a foreign invader. The men who served the prison system of his one-party state fight back and target civilians and occupying forces alike. They are joined by suicide bombers from the most extreme religious right of modern times. On the other side is every strand of opinion from traditional moral conservatives to communists. At enormous risk, they participate in elections to establish a representative government.
In theory, it would be clear to everyone that a struggle between fascism and democracy is underway, not a fight against 'insurgents'. But in practice, this is Iraq which was invaded by the woefully unprepared George W Bush. Solidarity with the victims of fascism was suspended as preparations for war began, which was understandable. But, with the honourable exception of the trade union movement, the indifference has continued, which is scandalous."

"The violence that lies in every ideology" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2005/07/17)
"The unpleasant truth is that there are considerable elements within Islam that are very useful to violent militants. As a result, Islam is an integral part of the threat we now face. This is difficult for a non-Muslim to state, and leaves me open to accusations of Islamophobia, but is true. And it needs to be admitted and discussed, not swept under a carpet by a politically correct broom.
It is interesting to compare the statements of many of our politicians and community leaders with those of opinion-makers overseas. I am writing this in Pakistan, the world's second biggest Islamic nation. Alongside the letters implying that 7/7 was the work of Mossad, there have been a number of articles which contrast starkly with the continuous mantra heard so often recently.
'It is no use saying that Islam is a religion of peace or that there is a foul plot afoot to blacken its name when from Bali to Madrid to London it is Muslims who are behind acts of terrorism,' said Ayaz Amir in Dawn, a Karachi newspaper. 'To outsiders, a religion is known by the fruits it produces and if the present brand of terrorism has a Muslim substance it becomes difficult to sell the true meaning of Islam.'"

"Iranian Lessons" (Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times Magazine, 2005/07/17)
"In south Tehran there is a huge walled cemetery dedicated to the martyrs, the young men who died fighting in the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. This vast city of the dead, complete with its own subway station and shops, does not share Arlington National Cemetery's sublimely stoic aesthetic of identical tombstones, row upon row. In Tehran's war cemetery, each of the fallen is remembered individually with his own martyr's shrine, a sealed glass cabinet on a stand. The cabinets are filled with faded photos of men forever young, some in helmets or red bandannas, some carrying their weapons, others at home stroking the family cat or grinning during a meal with friends. ...
The religion of Iran, Shiite Islam, is a martyr's faith. Shiite culture has aspects of a death cult, including an obsession with blood sacrifice. For some surviving veterans, the camaraderie they experienced on the Iraqi front epitomized not only the patriotic virtues of the revolution but also the self-sacrificing virtues of their faith. Any American neoconservative betting on the Iranian regime to crumble under the impact of isolation, blockade, sanctions or foreign condemnation ought to pay a visit to the martyrs' cemetery. Revolutionary regimes anchored in faith and blood sacrifice have good reason to believe they are impervious to outside pressure."

"Multiculturalism has failed but tolerance can save us" (Michael Portillo, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
"Tolerance was clearly never meant to mean that Britain should allow those with roots outside the country to flout human rights and the laws of the land on the pretext that things were done differently where they came from. The Ayn Rand Institute is right to say that it is dangerous nonsense to pretend that all cultures are morally equivalent. Such sloppy thinking corrodes our ability to distinguish good from evil.
It is tempting in a tolerant society to want to see other people’s point of view. If Islam has thrown up its extremists, we can recall the excesses committed over centuries in the name of Christianity. We can understand that a devout Muslim might find western society licentious and irreligious. But the time for sophistry has passed. Our citizens and our society are under threat from those who believe that difference is a justification for terror and murder. Our country has the right to assert its values and require from everyone living here compliance with our laws and respect for our standards.
Britain’s woolly thinking about multiculturalism has helped to make us vulnerable. We were reluctant to heed warnings passed to us by the French about the dangers of Islamic extremists settling here. Last week the Conservatives were in no position to criticise the government because the last Conservative government was no more inclined to recognise the perils." (See also: "Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism" (Kenan Malik, The Times, 2005/07/16))

"Let’s have Marxist Love Island" (Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
The Historical Inevitability Tour II: "Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together, please, for Mr Karl Marx, the sage of Trier, who has scooped the top prize in Radio 4’s exciting competition, Who’s the Bestest Philosopher Ever, Ever, Ever? Step this way, Karl, and collect from Lord Bragg your prize — a fabulous, all-expenses-paid trip through time to visit the Soviet gulags, Mao’s fabulous Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s wacky Year Zero, three days in a Düsseldorf basement with Ulrike Meinhof fiddling about with gelignite — and ending with the complete and utter defeat of every philosophical, political and economic idea to which you owe your reputation.
The trip is called — guess what? — the Historical Inevitability Tour. Pack your bags, dude." (See also: "I think therefore I am not voting Marx No 1" (Michael Gove, The Times, 2005/06/22))

"If they pass the 'cricket test', how do we stop the suicide bombers?" (Niall Ferguson, The Sunday Telegraph, 2005/07/17)
The Historical Inevitability Tour I. While Ferguson is right about the fact "that a pernicious ideology has been allowed to infiltrate Europe's immigrant communities. And that has happened because we have blindly allowed our country to be a haven for fanatics", he is surely wrong about the historical inevitability of Eurabia: "Such demographic shifts and processes of colonisation are the tides of history; mere laws and fences can no more halt them than Canute could stop the sea coming in.".
Just take a quick look at Finland and Sweden, two neighbouring countries with differing immigration policies the last decades.
Christopher Caldwell sums up the result in Sweden: "In a fit of absent-mindedness, Sweden has suddenly become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. Of 9 million Swedes, roughly 1,080,000 are foreign-born. ... The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I)."
Finland, on the other hand, is "Europe's most homogenous society": "Altogether, immigrants constitute barely 2 percent of Finland's population of 5.2 million. There were 108,346 foreign-born residents at the end of 2004, according to government statistics. Of those, fewer than 25,000 were born in non-white countries whose residents would look conspicuous on the streets of Helsinki. Russians, Estonians and Swedes together represent more than 46,000 people."
So much for historical inevitability. (See also: "A Swedish Dilemma" (Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/02/28 issue) and "A Blond Nation, in a Bind on Immigrants" (Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post, 2005/06/11))

"Suicide Bombs Potent Tools of Terrorists" (Dan Eggen and Scott Wilson, The Washington Post, 2005/07/17)
"According to data compiled by the Rand Corp., about three-quarters of all suicide bombings have occurred since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The numbers in Iraq alone are breathtaking: About 400 suicide bombings have shaken Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003, and suicide now plays a role in two out of every three insurgent bombings.":
"The boys all know the way to Ahmed Abu Khalil's house, tucked along an alley in a neighborhood of the West Bank town of Atil known as Two Martyrs. Abu Khalil, 18, became its third after he blew himself up Tuesday near a shopping mall in the Israeli city of Netanya.
It is safe to say Abu Khalil knew how he would be remembered here for his twilight attack outside the HaSharon Mall, which killed five Israelis, including two 16-year-old girls who were lifelong best friends. Scores more were injured in Israel's third suicide bombing this year.
The neighborhood is named for two local members of Islamic Jihad, the radical Palestinian group, who died fighting in the West Bank city of Jenin in 2003. The stylized posters of young men, posing with assault rifles and draped with ammunition belts, wallpaper the city. Graffiti urges uprising.
"This has given us a lot of pride, what he has done in Netanya," said Ibrahim Shoukri, 14, who used to follow Abu Khalil to prayer at the mosque. "We hope all of us will be like him." ...
One recent morning, Palestinian television crews filled the family courtyard. As more than a dozen teenage boys looked on, the reporters posed 14-year-old Mahmoud and 4-year-old Othman with their brother's picture, seeking their impressions. They put a black Islamic Jihad cap on Mahmoud's head.
"Put the picture here on your chest," the leader of a crew instructed Othman, the videotape rolling. "What did he tell you, what did he tell you?"
The boys looked nervous, confused. Finally, Mahmoud said, 'He told me to pray.'"

"The lipstick lesbian daring to confront radical imams" (Jasper Gerard, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
"No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats..." So serious death threats from Islamists are considered completely normal now and can even get a flippant "Ouch" treatment?:
"No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch.
Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award. Even at a conference in Oxford last week she felt unsafe — despite extra security — with police sifting through “disgusting e-mails” and threats after her appearance on Newsnight.
Doesn’t the violent Muslim minority show Islam is flawed? “I ask myself the same question,” she grimaces. Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran."

"Into the underworld" (Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
"Beneath the Israeli-Egyptian border is a secret world: a network of narrow tunnels, through which Palestinians smuggle weapons — and even wives — into the Gaza Strip. But these 'snake holes' also carry the risk of disaster and death. Marie Colvin enters the subterranean labyrinth":
"I had heard rumours of tunnels for years, but never really believed them, because there is nothing but white sand that runs through your fingers. How could you have a tunnel network in this flimsy sand? ...
But a chance conversation resulted in my living in Rafah for a week with the "tunnel people". It was like discovering a lost tribe in a city I had been visiting for 15 years. I found an extraordinary, secret tunnel culture known only to a few Palestinians. The tunnel people told me they originally smuggled in contraband drugs, women, cigarettes (5 shekels in Egypt, 12 shekels in Gaza), and even the python that still slithers around in the Rafah zoo, and the ostrich that escaped during the May 2004 Israeli incursion, to the great glee of Rafah kids, who rode bareback on the big bird until the zookeepers recaptured him. Since the second intifada began five years ago, however, the tunnellers have mostly smuggled weapons.
The profits are huge. A Kalashnikov sells for $200 on the Egyptian side, but fetches $2,000 on the Gaza black market. A good night's delivery is 1,200 Kalashnikovs — a profit of more than $2m. Bullets — 50 cents in Egypt, $8 wholesale in Gaza — are even more profitable. A standard one-night delivery returns a profit of $750,000."

"'Guardian' man revealed as hardline Islamist" (Shiv Malik, The Independent, 2005/07/17)
7/7 V: "The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain's most extreme Islamist groups.
Dilpazier Aslam, who has been allowed to report on the London bombings from Leeds and was also given space to write a column in last Wednesday's edition of The Guardian, is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical world organisation which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law.
It is understood that staff at The Guardian were unaware that Mr Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir until allegations surfaced on "The Daily Ablution", a blog run by Scott Burgess. Speculation is mounting that it may have been a sting by Hizb ut-Tahrir to infiltrate the mainstream media.
Late on Friday The Guardian released a statement to The Independent on Sunday saying: "Dilpazier Aslam is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation which is legal in this country. We are keeping the matter under review." The paper refused to comment further." (See also: "'Sassy' Suicide Bombers" (Scott Burgess, The Daily Ablution, 2005/07/13))

"The Pakistan connection" (Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
7/7 IV: "'Yet again with 7/7 we see all roads lead to Pakistan,' said M J Gohel, director of the London-based Asia- Pacific Foundation that monitors terrorism.":
"Madrasah is the Arabic word for religious school and the only lessons were Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence and learning the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Students are also taught the proper size for a beard and appropriate trouser length. There is no science, maths, literature or other languages and everything was by rote learning.
“Why do we need discussion?" asked my guide Rashid, the deputy director, when I questioned this. “What is written is written.” ...
The teenagers I spoke to were unable to do simple calculations and had never heard of dinosaurs. They laughed uproariously at the idea that man could walk on the moon.
When I asked what they wanted to be when they graduated, they talked of becoming mullahs. One or two spoke of embracing shahadat, martyrdom, and of going to paradise with its 72 virgins, almost as though this world was just a grade to get through.
My visit was short — as a woman, although clad in an all-encompassing burqa, I had been warned I might be stoned and my questions were clearly provoking some hostility."

"Teacher 'led terror attacks'" (Martin Bright et al., The Observer, 2005/07/17)
7/7 III:"Suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 30-year-old teaching assistant from Leeds, has emerged as the commander of the London terror attacks, with links to suspected al-Qaeda operatives across three continents.
As Khan's family came forward yesterday to make a public statement expressing their astonishment for his part in the 'horrific and evil' act that killed at least 55 people, security sources confirmed he was linked to a previous foiled terrorist plot in Britain. US reports also suggest that he had links to a second plot linked to an al-Qaeda cell in Pakistan. Khan is also believed to have been in telephone contact with a suspected al-Qaeda recruiter in New York. ...
The Observer can also reveal that one of the four London suicide bombers had telephone contact with one of the terrorist suspects controversially detained in Belmarsh prison without trial. The Belmarsh detainees were released last year after the Law Lords ruled that their imprisonment was illegal."

"Bomber's link to Al-Qaeda 'grass'" (Brian Brady and Fraser Nelson, Scotland on Sunday, 2005/07/17)
7/7 II: "Investigators have established a firm link between al-Qaeda and the London bombers after an Islamist terrorist in jail in America identified the British man who led the murderous attacks 10 days ago.
Security officials in the United States have confirmed that self-confessed al-Qaeda member Mohammed Junaid Babar had admitted knowing Mohammed Sidique Khan, the oldest of the British bombers who killed at least 55 people.
Babar, who was arrested after returning from an al-Qaeda "terror summit" in Pakistan early last year, identified Khan from photographs shown to him late last week.
The revelation that an al-Qaeda member was associating with one of the London bombers long before the July 7 bus and Tube blasts reinforces the growing impression that British intelligence failed to spot obvious warning signs of an imminent attack.
Other disturbing security failures are now known to include:

• The Leeds-based bombers, far from being quiet and law-abiding, had been banned from three local mosques for as-yet undisclosed unacceptable behaviour;
• The failure of a police anti-terror operation to pick up five of 13 suspects, among them, it is claimed, Khan;
• A known al-Qaeda operative suspected of masterminding the July 7 attacks visited the United Kingdom two weeks earlier but was not placed under surveillance; and
• The Aylesbury-based bomber, Germaine Lindsay, was - according to US officials - on a "watch list" but the British lost track of him."

"MI5 judged bomber 'no threat'" (David Leppard, The Sunday Times, 2005/07/17)
7/7 I: "One of the four suicide terrorists behind the London bomb attacks was scrutinised by MI5 last year, but was judged not to be a threat to national security, a senior government official said yesterday.
As a result, MI5 failed to put him under surveillance and his plans to become a suicide bomber remained undetected.
Mohammed Sidique Khan, a 30-year-old teaching assistant from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who killed six other passengers when he blew himself up on a Tube at Edgware Road, was the subject of a routine threat assessment by MI5 officers after his name cropped up during an investigation in 2004.
That inquiry focused on an alleged plot to explode a 600lb truck bomb outside a target in London, thought to be a crowded Soho nightclub.
This weekend, as the death toll from the terrorist attacks rose to 55 and Scotland Yard released the first CCTV image of the four bombers, it emerged that MI5 found out in 2004 that Khan had been visiting a house used by a man who had met one of the suspected truck-bomb plotters. However, MI5 officers subsequently decided that because Khan was only “indirectly linked” to one of the bomb suspects he was not considered a risk. The intelligence service took no further interest in him."

Saturday, July 16, 2005

News and commentary:

"In this CCTV image..."
(AP, 2005/07/16)
"In this CCTV image made available in London Saturday July 16, 2005, by the Metropolitan Police, the four London bombers are seen arriving at Luton railway station at 0721 local time on Thursday July 7, 2005. The image shows from left to right Hasib Hussain, Germaine Lindsay, dark cap, Mohammed Sidique Khan, light cap, and Shahzad Tanweer."

"Full text: Blair speech on terror" (BBC News, 2005/07/16)
Tony Blair's speech on the London bombings, delivered at the Labour Party national conference on Saturday:
"The greatest danger is that we fail to face up to the nature of the threat we are dealing with. What we witnessed in London last Thursday week was not an aberrant act.
It was not random. It was not a product of particular local circumstances in West Yorkshire.
Senseless though any such horrible murder is, it was not without sense for its organisers. It had a purpose. It was done according to a plan. It was meant.
What we are confronting here is an evil ideology. ...
This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past 12 years, Al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked 26 countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims.
They have networks in virtually every major country and thousands of fellow travellers. They are well-financed. Look at their websites.
They aren't unsophisticated in their propaganda. They recruit however and whoever they can and with success.
Neither is it true that they have no demands. They do. It is just that no sane person would negotiate on them.
This is a religious ideology... Those who kill in its name believe genuinely that in doing it, they do God's work; they go to paradise.
They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taleban states and Sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations."

"Indy Comes Out Swinging in Self-Blame Stakes" (Scott Burgess, The Daily Ablution, 2005/07/16)
7/7 VIII: "Seemingly stung by the Guardian's highly impressive initial efforts in the blaming-the-victim and apologia-for-mass-murderers stakes, the Independent comes out swinging today with several pieces that will give their rivals a serious run for their money. ...
After the news pages, columnist Paul Vallely really kicks things off with an analysis piece (paid link omitted). "Root causes" are of course the Holy Grail of the Indy mindset - and Mr. Vallely has discovered them. ...
And can you guess what that main cause would be? Well of course you can! It's us. Or, more specifically, the "alienation" we cause. Mr. Vallely explains (emphasis added):

"The real causes [of homegrown terrorism] are more worryingly complex.

"Alienation is a cultural rather than an economic process. It is rooted in racists who indiscriminately call out 'Bin Laden' or 'Taliban' to Asians in the street. It is there in media reports about forced marriages and honour killings. It is there in animal rights protests about halal meat. It is there in the sneers of liberals who mock that legislation outlawing religious hatred would stop Rowan Atkinson telling jokes." ...

While it may seem difficult to surpass Mr. Vallely's sterling example of left-wing thought expressed as classic liberal guilt, Deborah Orr (whose page discusses terrorism only briefly, being far more concerned with her attempts to impress George Monbiot by installing a compost bin) makes a valiant attempt (paid link omitted) from the bleeding-heart perspective, with a poignant expression of pity for terrorism's "victims," some of whom are more deserving than others of that emotion:

'Perhaps this [the fact that, in Ms. Orr's universe, nobody calls the bombers 'evil'] indicates that there is a broad consensus that these young men were victims too - of ideology, of hatred, of history, of modernity, of fanaticism, and mainly of their own malleable gullibility and lack of self-respect. They wanted, the fools, to be martyrs. Instead, they died as pawns and patsies, idiot victims far more pitiful than those they so blankly annihilated.'"

"Selling Hamas" (Norm, normblog, 2005/07/16)
"Here, yet once more, is the Guardian's Jonathan Steele:

It seemed bizarre at first, in the wake of the London attacks, to sit down with men whose organisation has sent hundreds of suicide bombers into Israeli cities. But it was a valuable reminder that the use of political violence on civilians, however brutal, always has a specific context. To respond by declaring a generalised "war on terror" or condemning "this assault on civilised values" obscures the problem and makes the search for solutions harder.

Most people know the aphorism 'To understand is to forgive'. Steele has evidently patented his own adaptation: 'To condemn is to fail to understand'. I would say this isn't necessarily so, or historians of Nazi Germany, the USSR, Pol Pot's Cambodia, would be in severe difficulty. Still, let's run with it; let's give Steele the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he does just want to refrain from condemning, in order to understand - in the interest of informational, non-partisan reporting. Except that, lo and behold, from the paragraphs imediately following what we get from him is not just non-condemnation of Hamas - his topic - but essentially a plug for its point of view:

Hamas... denounced the London bombs within the first hours. They give both moral and pragmatic reasons. The victims were not legitimate targets - too remote to bear any responsibility for the crimes the bombers were avenging. ...
Al-Bardawil talks of the "logic of war, which Israel imposed on us, forcing Palestinians to do the same". And he says: "When I see a bombing in Tel Aviv on TV, I sometimes cry. We have not lost our humanity." ...

This is what Steele means by 'context', by not-condemning in order to 'understand'. He means selling the point of view of Hamas to the Guardian's readership." (See also: "Ostracising Hamas will not help in the search for peace" (Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, 2005/07/15))

"As if there was..." (Franco Alemán, Barcepundit, 2005/07/16)
"As if there was still any doubt at this point, the Spanish press reports today on a document found in the computer of one of the key perpetrators of the March 11 terrorist attacks in Madrid (link in Spanish, my translation):

A document found in the personal computer of Jamal Ahmidan, "The Chinese", undersigned by the Abu Hafs al Masri brigades and dated March 15, 2004 declares that the March 11 perpetrators intented to remove [Aznar's] Popular Party from the government.
The document was recently found by police, according to the Cope radio network who has seen it. It says: "those who were suprised for our quick claim of responsibility in the battle of Madrid, let them know that there were other circumstances. In the case of Madrid, the time factor was very important in order to put an end to the government of Aznar the ignoble. ...

"Let all know that we're a part of the so-called world order. We change states, we destroy others with Allah's help and even decide the future of the world's economy. We won't accept being mere passive agents in this world", the text found in Jamal Ahmidan's computer, one of the main perpetrators of the March 11 cells and who blew himself up in Leganes a few days later together with other co-participants, warns. ...

ABC (the Madrid newspaper, not the American or Australian TV network) reports further (also in Spanish) and reminds a very telling detail: when he was brought before a judge after the first 72 hours in isolation (permitted by Spanish anti-terror legislation), the first thing asked by Jamal Zougam, another of the key suspects of March 11, was: "Who won the election?'" (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

"Iraq Suicide Blast Kills 54, Injures 82" (Robert H. Reid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/07/16)
To use the term "insurgent" for atrocities like this is just obscene:
"An insurgent suicide bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body Saturday, triggering a huge explosion at a gas station near a mosque south of Baghdad and killing at least 54 people. The attack capped a string of three major bombings over the past four days that killed at least 120. ...
Witnesses and police said the fuel tanker was moving slowly toward the pumps when an attacker ran to it and detonated his charge. A cluster of houses near the city-center gas station caught fire, the witnesses said. Gasoline stations in Iraq routinely include a number of small businesses selling tea, soft drinks and snacks and are often crowded with people.
Mussayib, a religiously mixed town along the Euphrates River, sits in the "triangle of death," an area so-named because of the large number of kidnappings and killings of Shiite Muslims traveling between Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. ...
Iraqi police also arrested a would-be suicide bomber in Baghdad before he could detonate an explosive belt among a crowd mourning victims of an attack Wednesday that killed 27 people, mostly children, an official said."

"Jihad Made In Europe" (Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/07/25 issue)
7/7 VII. Gerecht on the "Europeanization of Islamic militancy":
"Some of what the Europeans are now confronting -- and for the United States this is very bad news -- is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. "European Islam" appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe -- the folks French scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce "extraordinary progress in civilization," a new "Andalusia" (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden's jihad -- have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in "Londonistan" and elsewhere in Europe. ...
For organizations like al Qaeda, this may mean that the future will be decisively European. From its earliest days, al Qaeda viewed Europe as an important launching platform for attacks against the United States and its interests. Now, Western counterterrorist forces, which have traditionally tried to track Middle Eastern missionaries in Europe, would be well advised to start searching for radical European Muslim missionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere."

"A warning from the past that the BBC does not want us to hear" (Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/07/16)
7/7 VI: "What is happening to a religion when its scholars are telling people to kill others and themselves?":
"The Leeds Grand Mosque, for example, is, so far as I know, a mainstream institution. Its leaders have readily joined in the condemnation of the London attacks.
But if you read their Friday sermons you find that running through many of them is a constant streak of paranoia, dark talk of a wicked "Great Middle East Plan", of "threats and conspiracies which are devised against Islam".
One sermon on "youth", young men like the three down the road who planted the bombs, tells the teenagers at which it aims how marvellous were the military conquests carried out by the young followers of the Prophet and how today "Your Islam, your religion, is being targeted".
No, sermons like this do not say that the hearers should go out and kill people, and no doubt the preachers do not believe that they should, but they do not say that they should not kill, and they stoke up anger. How much can you incite anger, and then throw up your hands in horror when young men take their rage to a bloody conclusion? ...
On the Today programme on Thursday, Inayat Bunglawala appeared on behalf of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain. He condemned the "killing of all innocent people" which sounds fine, but leaves room for dispute about who is innocent and allows you to get in your pitch about other killings.
Sure enough, Mr Bunglawala's next shot, unprompted, was to attack Israel for making "nauseating" political capital out of the blasts. Asked about the support for suicide bombing by a leader of the Muslim Association of Britain (an affiliate of the MCB), he said that 'I understand why he feels such pain for the Palestinians.'" (See also: "A sermon of peace?" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2005/07/15))

"Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism" (Kenan Malik, The Times, 2005/07/16)
7/7 V: "Over the past week, much has been said about the strength of London as a multicultural city. What makes London great, Ken Livingstone pointed out, was what the bombers most fear — a city full of people from across the globe, free to pursue their own lives. I agree, and that’s why I choose to live in this city. Multiculturalism as a lived experience enriches our lives. But multiculturalism as a political ideology has helped to create a tribal Britain with no political or moral centre. ...
The very notion of creating common values has been abandoned except at a most minimal level. Britishness has come to be defined simply as a toleration of difference. The politics of ideology has given way to the politics of identity, creating a more fragmented Britain, and one where many groups assert their identity through a sense of victimhood and grievance.
This has been particularly true of Muslim communities. Muslims have certainly suffered from racism and discrimination. But many Muslim leaders have nurtured an exaggerated sense of victimhood for their own political purposes. The result has been to stoke up anger and resentment, creating a siege mentality that makes Muslim communities more inward-looking and more open to religious extremism — and that has helped to transform a small number of young men into savage terrorists."

"Tolerating a Time Bomb" (Leon de Winter, The New York Times, 2005/07/16)
7/7 IV: "For centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.
That Netherlands no longer exists.":
"Much of the electorate no longer feels any loyalty to the existing political parties. Many want to preserve the Dutch welfare state, but it's unclear how to maintain it in an aging nation that is absorbing immigrants. The Dutch "no" vote to the European Union Constitution last month was just one aspect of this frustration.
Without a radical change in direction, Dutch tolerance may become its own victim. The first step is enacting laws to curb immigration from Islamic countries. We must also consider ways to prevent arranged marriages between Muslims living here and people from the Rif (more than half of Dutch Moroccans marry a traditional partner from their parents' home village).
In the longer term, we must somehow stimulate young Muslims to identify with the Calvinist values of the majority. The radicalization among small groups of young Muslims, a threat that cannot be fought within Holland's borders alone, is a time bomb.
Perhaps what this country needs most of all is another unconventional, outspoken gay politician."

"Anger Burns on the Fringe of Britain's Muslims" (Hassan M. Fattah, The New York Times, 2005/07/16)
7/7 III: "LEEDS, England, July 15 - At Beeston's Cross Flats Park, in the center of this now embattled town, Sanjay Dutt and his friends grappled Friday with why their friend Kakey, better known to the world as Shehzad Tanweer, had decided to become a suicide bomber.
"He was sick of it all, all the injustice and the way the world is going about it," Mr. Dutt, 22, said. "Why, for example, don't they ever take a moment of silence for all the Iraqi kids who die?"
"It's a double standard, that's why," answered a friend, who called himself Shahroukh, also 22, wearing a baseball cap and basketball jersey, sitting nearby. "I don't approve of what he did, but I understand it. You get driven to something like this, it doesn't just happen."
To the boys from Cross Flats Park, Mr. Tanweer, 22, who blew himself up on a subway train in London last week, was devout, thoughtful and generous. If they understood his actions, it was because they lived in Mr. Tanweer's world, too. ...
"We know that the killing of innocents is forbidden," [Dr. Imram Waheed] said. "But we don't see two classes of blood; the blood of Iraqis is just as important to us as English blood." He emphasized that they in no way condoned the bombings. 'But when you understand things from that perspective, why should we condemn the bombing?'"

"Cleric who defended suicide bombers allowed into Britain" (Sean O’Neill and Richard Ford, The Times, 2005/07/16)
7/7 II: "A Muslim cleric who has defended suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq is to be allowed into Britain next month for an international conference.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 79, who has a visa to come to Britian but is banned from entering the United States, has been asked to attend the conference in Manchester.
The invitation will be seen as the first test of the Government’s promise after the London bombings to clamp down on hardline Islamic preachers and other extremist clerics. ...
Home Office officials are aware that he has been invited to the conference at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on August 7. Mr Clarke is looking carefully at the case and in particular at Dr Qaradawi’s public statements on suicide bombings; but it is understood that at present he will not ban him from coming to Britain. ...
He is among a number of controversial figures asked to speak at a Muslim Unity conference organised by the Ramadhan Foundation. ...
Dr Imran Waheed, the leader in Britain of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party, is another confirmed speaker.
Hizb ut Tahrir, which has a stated aim of establishing an Islamic state, is banned in Germany and many Arab countries but is flourishing among Muslim youth in Britain."

"Bomber was given House of Commons tour by a Labour MP" (Gethin Chamerlain and James Kirkup, The Scotsman, 2005/07/16)
7/7 I: "One of the London suicide bombers was allowed to tour the Houses of Parliament as the guest of an MP months after police and intelligence services became aware of his links to another alleged bomb plot, it emerged last night.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, was a guest of the Labour MP Jon Trickett in July 2004, four months after he had been identified by intelligence officials as a "criminal associate" of one of the subjects of a major counter-terrorism operation that had resulted in several arrests. ...
The astonishing revelation about the killer's Commons visit throws into question previous assertions that none of the bombers was known to police in connection with terrorist allegations and comes amid growing concerns about how the bombers were allowed to strike.
Britain's "slack" border controls were already in the spotlight after it became clear that a significant al-Qaeda suspect had entered the country undetected and slipped away again hours before the London suicide attacks, which claimed the lives of 54 people.
The suspected terrorist was not put under surveillance after entering Britain, but is now being urgently sought by the intelligence services in connection with the bomb blasts."

Added in archive:
"Rumsfeld and al-Jazeera: the wrong target?" (Carol Gould, current viewpoint, 2005/06/19)

Friday, July 15, 2005

News and commentary:

"A Palestinian security force armored carrier burns..."
(Hatem Moussa, AP, 2005/07/15)
"A Palestinian security force armored carrier burns in the street after it was set on fire during clashes between police and militants from Hamas in Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood, Friday July 15, 2005."

"Mideast Cease-Fire Deal Unravels; 8 Dead" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/07/15)
"GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - A Mideast truce was in tatters as
Israel killed six Hamas militants in back-to-back airstrikes Friday and early Saturday after Palestinian fighters unleashed a deadly barrage of rockets and mortars.
The violence also swept into a Gaza neighborhood, where militants took over after driving Palestinian troops away following a gunbattle that left two teenagers dead and 25 people wounded. It was the worst internal fighting among Palestinians in recent years. ...
The Gaza City clashes erupted after Palestinian security forces raided a neighborhood, searching for militants suspected of firing rockets.
Militants later torched a police station and set a police armored personnel carrier and three jeeps afire.
Thick black smoke from burning tires rose from the neighborhood, as masked Hamas gunmen stood guard outside the police station.
Two boys, ages 17 and 13, were killed in crossfire.
After heavy exchanges of fire, police pulled out of the neighborhood while masked gunmen took up positions on street corners and rooftops. Hundreds of civilians flocked to the streets, watching the fighting."

"Terrorist at journalists' party" (Yaakov Lappin, Ynetnews, 2005/07/15)
"Top terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi made a “guest appearance” in a video prepared by the staff of Reuters news agency in Israel and the Palestinian Authority as a “going away” gift for a colleague, Ynetnews has learned.
Zubeidi, who heads Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, has been named by security officials as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians. ...
The screening, which occurred in a Jerusalem restaurant last March, involved the showing of a video during a private party.
"The video's theme was what Israel would be like in 10 years," said an Israeli government official who attended the party and viewed the video.
"All of a sudden, at the end, there is Zakaria Zubeidi, playing the head of Reuters. Zubeidi was sitting in Reuters' Jenin office, saying he was Reuters’ chief,” the official said.
The party included guests from the BBC, ITN, the Independent newspaper, and French journalists.
"They all thought the video was hilarious," the official said. He added that only a few individuals did not seem amused during the screening.
"They were laughing; they thought it was very funny, he said.”
Reuters spokeswoman Susan Allsopp said in a statement to Ynetnews that the film “was a spoof video put together for a departing member of staff by a few of his colleagues in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It was shown at a private farewell party and was meant to be humorous."

"The beginning of the reckoning" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/07/15)
"On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report into the establishment and growth of the Islamic Center in Munich. As Stefan Meining, a German historian who studies the mosque, told the paper, "If you want to understand the structure of political Islam, you have to look at what happened in Munich."
According to the report, the Munich mosque was founded by Muslim Nazis who had settled in West Germany after the war. ...
As German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel chronicled in his work "Islamic anti-Semitism and its Nazi Roots," the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned the PLO's Fatah as well as al-Qaida, Hamas and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, owes much of its ideological success and pseudo-philosophical roots to Nazism. ...
As Kuntzel argues, the notion of a violent holy war or jihad against non-Muslims was not a part of any active Islamic doctrine until the 1930s and, as he notes, "its concurrence with the arrival of a newly virulent anti-Semitism is verified in no uncertain terms." ...
Hitler's obsession with the Jews as the source of all the evils in the world became so ingrained in both the Arab nationalist and Islamic psyche that it has become second nature.
At the 2002 trial in Germany of Mounir el-Moutassadeq, who was accused of collaborating with the September 11 hijackers, witnesses described the world view of Muhammad Atta who led the attackers. One witness claimed, 'Atta's [world view] was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that 'the Jews' are determined to achieve world domination. He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One.'" (See also: "A mosque for ex-Nazis became center of radical Islam" (Ian Johnson, The Wall Street Journal/post-gazette.com, 2005/07/12) and "Islamic Antisemitism And Its Nazi Roots" (Matthias Küntzel, matthiaskuentzel.de, April 2003))

"Homeland insecurity" (Ian Buruma, Financial Times, 2005/07/15)
7/7 XIII: "Some of the responses to the bomb attacks on London were predictable. Of course Tariq Ali, the journalist and former student agitator, would blame it all on Tony Blair. It’s Blair’s fault for backing the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s also Blair’s fault for supporting Israel. “The principal cause of this violence,” he wrote in The Guardian, “is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world.” And the “real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine”.
Tariq Ali, himself a secular member of the Pakistani gentry, finds ready support among the believers. In the same paper, Faisal Bodi, news editor at the Islam Channel, opined that “the bloody trail of blame leads straight to 10 Downing Street”, for when Blair “led us into the war on terror, he knew that a country with which Islamist networks had no immediate axe to grind would be drawn into their sphere of hate as a consequence”. ...
If only it were as simple as Tariq Ali seems to believe. If only western governments had the solution to this type of terror in their gift. In fact, there is no reason to think that the withdrawal of US, British or Israeli troops from Arab countries would solve the problem at all, for the religious war would continue. And the assumption that Britain, or the US, are targets only because of the “war on terror” unleashed by George W. Bush, and backed by Tony Blair, is equally misconceived. In October 2000, when Bill Clinton was still in power, the USS Cole was bombed and 17 US sailors died, not because of any war on terror, but because Osama bin Laden opposed the presence of infidel troops on Arab soil.
Just imagine the results if the advocates of immediate western withdrawal from the Middle East got their wish. There would be a Hobbesian mayhem of battling warlords in Afghanistan and an all-out civil war in Iraq. This might well enable a small number of bloodthirsty religious fanatics to achieve what has so far eluded them, namely to grab the power of a major Arab state, with all its resources, to carry on their holy war against all those who do not submit to their totalitarian fantasies." (Hat tip: normblog.)

"Killers not Muslims, says sheik" (Trudy Harris, The Australian, 2005/07/15)
7/7 XII: "The country's most radical Islamic cleric said yesterday he doubted whether the London bombers were Muslim, saying their actions were un-Islamic.
Melbourne's Sheik Mohammed Omran said he would reserve judgment about the religious identity of the London bombers until more evidence emerged about them.
Sheik Omran said earlier this week that September 11 was not committed by Muslims and Osama bin Laden had no involvement, comments that John Howard branded yesterday "extraordinary and irresponsible".
While he described the London bombings as evil, Sheik Omran doubted they were carried out by true Muslims, since millions of Londoners marched against the Blair Government's involvement in the war in Iraq.
He said it was more likely the attacks were orchestrated by the US to justify its war on Islam. "That is absolutely what I believe it is," he said.
'It could be (to initiate a war) against Islam, it could be against Muslim countries, just to give them a free hand to do whatever they want.'" (Hat tip: Tim Blair.)

"Iran cleric says UK could have bombed own capital" (Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/07/15)
7/7 XI: "TEHRAN (Reuters) - A leading Iranian cleric said on Friday the British government could have orchestrated last week's bombings in London to stir up flagging enthusiasm for British military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan .
Four British-born Muslims blew themselves up in separate attacks on three underground trains and a bus during the morning rush hour, killing 54 and injuring hundreds.
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads Iran's top legislative watchdog the Guardian Council, said the British had themselves to blame.
"One possible set of culprits is al-Qaeda. But al Qaeda is Bush and Blair. Who launched al Qaeda? You must be tried, you who are the mothers of al Qaeda," he told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran, blaming British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush for the growth of Islamic militancy.
"The other likelihood is that the British regime may have carried out the attack itself ... because it benefits most... They want to justify their presence in Iraq and Afghanistan," he added."

"The eerily ordinary extremists" (Jonathan Guthrie and Chris Tighe, Financial Times, 2005/07/15)
7/7 X: "Nothing will be quite the same again for the UK’s 1.6m Muslims, or for 58m other Britons, the majority of whom are professedly Christian. A generously defined tradition of free speech that allowed extreme clerics to preach hatred, to the frustration of Muslim moderates and the incredulity of some western governments, is likely to be curbed. The attacks have also blasted a hole in multiculturalism: the idea that communities with separate identities can live together peacefully, united by the weakest of national ideologies. ...
No testimony from the men has yet been published. But they made clear the kind of society they despised by killing ordinary Britons: heterogeneous, pleasure-seeking and ethnically, ideologically and sexually tolerant. ...
Some extremist Muslims deny that moderates even follow the same faith. To them, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the establishment-friendly Muslim Council of Britain, is no more Muslim than the Pope. Some moderates say a man who commits terrorism cannot be a real Muslim. But the Koran, like the Bible, is a holy text sufficiently ambiguous to support a host of interpretations.
Another belief, less contentious to many ordinary Muslims but troubling to other Britons, is that the duty of loyalty between Muslims is greater than their loyalty to the UK. That view has underpinned the anger of young men such as Khan in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. To say, as some British Muslims do, that the crimes of the four were exceptional, is to miss the point. The bombings were extreme manifestations of ideas that are widely held."

"A sermon of peace?" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2005/07/15)
7/7 IX: "We have heard much from Muslim leaders about how Islam is a religion of peace, that it specifically rules against the taking of innocent life, that the word ‘jihad’ is a media invention, that imams preach only sweetness and light and that the terrorists who bombed London last week were acting so much against the tenets of the faith that they weren’t really Muslims at all. Well, here’s the text of a sermon delivered in March last year at the Grand Mosque in Leeds, the area from where three of those bombers came:

... If the forces of evil stop and intervene between the people and them entering this deen [religion] as Allah, exalted is He, loves for them, it is legislated for those who call, when they face these oppressive forces, to fight Jihad in the path of Allah, and it is legislated for them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of this deen and for the sake of making the da'wah of Islam reach every heart. (my emphasis) ...

Take up positions in the Jihad, don’t give in to sleep, and don’t give in to failure and disgrace. Be firm on the truth which you believe in and defend that which is sacred to you and your honour and your country.’

This sermon is on the Mosque’s website. Do our police or security services actually read open websites? If so, why wasn’t this preacher arrested and prosecuted for racial hatred and incitement to violence? Why isn’t anyone raising this now, after three local men committed their unspeakable acts in pursuit of the very objectives laid out in this sermon? How many other imams are saying similar things or worse? When will the mainstream media wake up from their ‘Islamophobic’ trance and start investigating what is happening here?" (See also: "Friday Khutbah (26/03/2004) delivered by Shaykh Muhammad Taher" (Leeds Grand Mosque, 2004/03/26))

"Chemistry student held in Cairo" (The Guardian, 2005/07/15)
7/7 VIII: "An Egyptian chemistry student has been arrested in Cairo in connection with last week's London bomb attacks.
Police sources unofficially confirmed today that Magdy Elnashar, an Egyptian PhD student at Leeds University, was seized this morning in a suburb of Cairo.
Earlier today the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said he expected the investigation into the London bombs to uncover a "clear al-Qaida link".
Mr Elnashar is thought to have rented a flat in the Hyde Park area of Leeds which police believe was used as a bomb factory in advance of the London attacks.
Mr Elnashar was awarded his PhD on May 6 and had not been seen by colleagues in Leeds since early July. His UK visa was updated by the Home Office earlier this year. ...
The suspect had been given financial support for his studies in biochemistry, including £30,000 from regional agency Yorkshire Forward.
A man who knew the scientist told the Yorkshire Post: 'He was extremely charming and very intelligent, a very typical Egyptian with perfect manners. He was obviously quite a brilliant chemist.'"

"Getting the right voices heard" (Harry, Harry's Place, 2005/07/15)
7/7 VII: "Tonight I watched two BBC programmes which both sought to discuss Islam and terrorism with people from the 'Muslim community'.
Newsnight's introduction promised a 'leading Muslim' would be presenting a short film looking at the situation with young Muslims in the UK in the aftermatch of the bombings. The man handed the microphone was Azzam Tamimi now being described as a representative of the Muslim Association of Britain - the UK wing of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. I recognised Tamimi because he featured on a recent series of BBC debates from Dubai on democracy in the Middle East - as a Palestinian supporter of Hamas. ...
Tamimi was in no position to deny being a supporter of suicide murders against Israeli civilians as on a previous BBC programme he said: "As a Muslim, martyrdom is an integral part of Islamic theology and these young men from the Islamic perspective are not committing suicide." ...
As if having a Palestinian Hamas supporter of suicide bombers as a 'leading Muslim' wasn't enough I then tuned in to 'The Week' with Andrew Neil, Ken Clarke and Robin Cook. We were treated to another little film from a guest presenter - this time the person chosen to represent the life and views of British Muslims was former Daily Mail journalist Yvonne Ridley. ...
A year ago Ridley said this about British Muslims who had fought on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan: One thing that struck me about these brothers was how principled they were ... going on jihad for ideals almost forgotten in a selfish world corrupted by greed and power. The driving force that led them into battle in the mountains and caves of Tora Bora was no different to that which propelled 2800 men AND women from the United States to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. ...
Now, anyone who has paid any attention knows about Ridley's enthusiasm for British men who went to Afghanistan and it should be no surprise that a friend of Hamas supports suicide bombings. The point is why does the BBC choose these people, at this tense moment, to be the voices of British Muslims? Why give them airspace to make mini-video films?"

"London's mayor: A terrorist puppet?" (David Gelernter, Los Angeles Times, 2005/07/15)
7/7 VI: "Our hearts go out to London — but not to its mayor. London's leader, Ken Livingstone, eloquently condemned the recent terrorist bombings. But in the past, he never seemed too concerned about terrorists murdering Israelis. The tale of Livingstone's ambivalence is a sordid kind of Greek tragedy.
Last year, he welcomed a violently Jew-hating Muslim preacher to London. In so doing, he became a silent partner of Islamic terrorism — which has now turned against his own city. Today, he is an updated Oedipus Rex, accessory to a horrible crime of which he himself is a victim.
Too many Europeans are ambivalent, like Livingstone. Terrorists, they figure, are evil; but if their preferred victims are Jews and Americans, how bad can they really be? As Europe prepares its own destruction, it resembles Germany in the early 1930s: Jew-hatred everywhere, on a low boil.
Last year, Mayor Livingstone welcomed Egyptian cleric Sheik Yousef Qaradawi — the "Theologian of Terror" — to London. The sheik has called suicide bombings "heroic operations of martyrdom" and has urged Muslims to "destroy the aggressive Jews." Livingstone called the sheik a man of 'moderation and tolerance.'"

"Will Britain face the threat?" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2005/07/15)
7/7 V. Taheri on "people who, although often atheists, are hooked to the concept of the original sin":
"Whenever Britain or any other Western democracy is attacked, they recall all the real or imagined wrongs that the West did to others as a justification for whatever wrongs that others may do in return. ...
To these people, it is enough to claim some grievance and pose as a victim to obtain a licence for imposing on others the worst kind of tyranny — the tyranny of the underdog. And when, as is the case of Islamist terrorists, the killers come from well-to-do families and countries, our apologist plays another tune: The murderers must be admired because they abandoned a life of luxury in order to fight for a cause that, in practice, means destroying the lives of innocent people.
As T.S Eliot put it: Blood of children must be spilt/To atone for the fathers' guilt.
The daily The Independent (which opposed the wars to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq) reminded its readers the day after the London attack of what Osama bin Laden had said a year ago: "If you bomb our cities, we shall bomb your cities." The writer added: There you go!
Was the confused writer referring to Afghanistan and Iraq?
If yes, did he not know that bin Laden could under no circumstances claim ownership of either Afghanistan or Iraq? No one in either nation, including those who might hate the West for whatever reason, would regard the Saudi-born fugitive as a compatriot, let alone a spokesman.
Twenty-four hours later, Ayatollah Imami Kashani used the Independent article in his Friday prayer sermon in Tehran to support the claim that the British deserved to die in large numbers."

"Europe's Native-Born Enemy" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/07/15)
7/7 IV: "The most remarkable discovery is that Europe's second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants are more radicalized than the first. One reasonably non-political and non-radical Muslim activist, raised in the suburbs of Paris, explained himself (to the Wall Street Journal) as having "immigrated to France at the local maternity ward."
The fact that native-born Muslim Europeans are committing terrorist acts in their own countries shows that this Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq, long predates Afghanistan and long predates Sept. 11, 2001. What Europe had incubated is an enemy within, a threat that for decades Europe simply refused to face.
Early news reports of the London bombings mentioned that police found no suspects among known Islamist cells in Britain. Come again? Why in God's name is a country letting known Islamist cells thrive, instead of just rolling them up?
British Islamists had spoken of a "covenant of security" under which Britain would be spared Islamic terrorism so long as it allowed radical clerics free rein. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, for example, a Syrian-born, exiled Saudi cleric granted asylum 19 years ago, openly preaches jihad against Britain. He is sought by the press for comment all the time. And, a lovely touch, he actually lives on the British dole -- even though he rejects the idea of British citizenship, saying, 'I don't want to become a citizen of Hell.'"

"It's paranoia, not Islamophobia" (David Goodhart, The Guardian, 2005/07/15)
7/7 III: "Britain has done much to help integrate Muslims. Now they must rise above their grievance culture":
"Britain's Muslims are among the richest and freest in the world and most of them are groping successfully towards a hybrid British Muslim identity, but when did you last hear a Muslim leader say so? Iqbal Sacranie is a capable leader who has helped to turn the Muslim Council of Britain into an effective lobbying body, but his organisation's default position remains grievance. Here he is in the introduction to a recent booklet for British Muslims: "The unleashing of a virulent strain of Islamophobia, inflammatory media reporting and the misconceived wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have all contributed to the undoubted increase in prejudice we face." ...
An undifferentiated rhetoric of grievance contributes to alienation, lack of integration and even indirectly to extremism. If you are constantly being told by even moderate Muslim leaders that Britain is a cesspit of Islamophobia and is running a colonial anti-Muslim foreign policy, you might well conclude, like one young Muslim quoted after the bombs: 'I would like to give blood but they probably won't want mine.'"

"Why blame the terrorists? Apparently we can agree that it's Britain's fault" (Gerard Baker, The Times, 2005/07/15)
7/7 II: "Right after September 11, a question widely asked in the American and European media was: Why do they hate us? ... A week after July 7, I have the same question. Why do they hate us? But the “they” of my question are not the al-Qaeda slaughterers, the jihadis from Leeds and elsewhere and their sympathisers across Europe. I think we know by now why they hate us. The “they” of my question are the massed ranks of so many British opinion-formers. ...
The common thought behind them is essentially this: our nation’s military action in Afghanistan and Iraq is morally indistinguishable from the terrorists, so don’t call one terrorism and not the other. Instead, say London and Baghdad have both been “bombed”.
Further, of course, since we have almost certainly killed more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than the Islamists have killed in the West, what happened to us last week is actually our own fault.
I would try to explain why this is dangerously flawed thinking but it’s been evident for some time now that any real effort to contradict this idea would be pointless. That is because this thirst for self-blame among this sizeable section of Britain’s thought-leaders is literally unquenchable. ...
And that’s the irony: the most painful irony of all in this English self-loathing is this simple truth. The beauty of human freedom that so many in the world now enjoy, the wonder of so much prosperity, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the very principles of cultural and political tolerance and free inquiry, owe more to Britain, and latterly our Anglo-Saxon allies who have taken on the baton in the past century, than to any other country on Earth."

"'University of Jihad' teaches students hate and bigotry" (Zahid Hussain, The Times, 2005/07/15)
7/7 I. Not surprisingly, it turns out that Peter Bergen's "Madrassa Myth" is just a myth:
"Sporting black turbans or skull caps, the young men squat on a carpet in a crowded classroom and listen in silence to a lecture given by a thickly bearded, middle-aged cleric.
The students are at the final stage of their religious education at Darul Uloom Haqqania, one of Pakistan’s leading institutions of Islamic learning. Situated in the town of Akora Khatak, near Peshawar, the radical seminary is often described as the “University of Jihad”.
At least two of the London suicide bombers attended such a school. ...
“The bomb attacks in London are the reaction against the British Government’s support for America’s war against Muslims,” said Maulana Samiul Haq, a fiery, black-turbaned cleric who is head of the seminary. He is also an MP in Pakistan. “The loss of innocent lives is regrettable, but the British Government should think why it all happened. It is time to review its policy on Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The school teaches the concept of jihad to prepare students to fight for the cause of Islam. “Jihad is an essential part of Islam,” said Mr Haq.
The proliferation of jihadi organisations in Pakistan over the past two decades has been the result of the militant culture espoused by radical madrassas, the hardline religious schools, like Darul Uloom Haqqania." (See also: "Attacker 'was recruited' at terror group's religious school" (Gethin Chamerlain, The Scotsman, 2005/07/14))

Thursday, July 14, 2005

News and commentary:

"A handout of Closed Circuit Television footage..."
(Reuters, 2005/07/14)
"A handout of Closed Circuit Television footage dated July 7, 2005 and released by London's Scotland Yard on July 14, 2005 shows London bombing suspect Hasib Mir Hussain at Luton train station in central England."

"London Bombers Tied to Al Qaeda Plot in Pakistan" (Brian Ross, ABC News, 2005/07/14)
7/7 XII: "At least two men who have connections to last week's London bombings are alive and still at large.
The first is a man, who was seen on surveillance tapes at Luton station, located outside of London, as he bid farewell to the four bombers the morning of the attacks. The other is Magdy El Nashar, an Egyptian chemist, who attended and received training at North Carolina State University.
British police think El Nashar may have helped the London group build their bombs before leaving England two weeks before the attacks. They have since issued a worldwide alert for him. ...
Officials tell ABC News the London bombers have been connected to an al Qaeda plot planned two years ago in the Pakistani city of Lahore.
The laptop computer of Naeem Noor Khan, a captured al Qaeda leader, contained plans for a coordinated series of attacks on the London subway system, as well as on financial buildings in both New York and Washington."

"Support for bin Laden falls in Muslim countries" (Alan Elsner, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/07/14)
"Support for Osama bin Laden and suicide bombings have fallen sharply in much of the Muslim world, according to a multicountry poll released on Thursday.
The survey by the Pew Research Center examined public opinion in six predominantly Muslim nations: Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan and Lebanon. ...
In Morocco, 26 percent of the public now say they have a lot or some confidence in bin Laden, down from 49 percent in a similar poll two years ago.
In Lebanon, where both Muslims and Christians took part in the survey, only 2 percent expressed some confidence in the Saudi-born al Qaeda leader, down from 14 percent in 2003.
In Turkey, bin Laden's support has fallen to 7 percent from 15 percent in the past two years. In Indonesia, it has dropped to 35 percent from 58 percent.
However, in Jordan, confidence in bin Laden, who took responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and many other attacks, rose to 60 percent from 55 percent. In Pakistan, it went to 51 percent from 45 percent.
A similar picture emerged when respondents were asked whether suicide bombings were justifiable. In Morocco, 13 percent said they often or sometimes could be justified, down from 40 percent in 2004. ...
Anti-Jewish sentiment was overwhelming in the Muslim countries. In Lebanon, 100 percent of Muslims and 99 percent of Christians said they had a very unfavorable view of Jews, while 99 percent of Jordanians also viewed Jews very unfavorably." (See also the report: "Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western Publics" (Pew Research Center, 2005/07/14))

"Dutch terror dilemma" (Jeremy Hurewitz, UPI/World Peace Herald, 2005/07/14)
A report from Amsterdam: "'Everyone has a right to say what they want,' said Brigitte Hammouti, a few feet away from where van Gogh (a descendent of the famous painter Vincent van Gogh's brother) was brutally murdered by another young man of Moroccan descent. But she quickly added, "a lot of people were relieved because they felt he was insulting Islam" and that in the resulting uproar "Dutch people showed their real faces." ...
The child of a Dutch mother and a Surinamese father and a convert to Islam at twenty, Hammouti's bright, friendly demeanor couldn't mask the bitterness that many non-white Dutch feel towards native Dutch these days. ...
At his parliamentary office in The Hague Wilders paints a bleak picture of the failure of Dutch society to grapple with the unsuccessful integration of Muslim minorities and is unsurprised that The Netherlands has become the focal point for the Muslim-Western struggle.
"It's not a coincidence that the unfortunate slaughter of Mr. van Gogh happened in the streets of Amsterdam and not anywhere else," he said. "For too long we've been tolerant of the intolerant. We've had a policy for years that everything should be tolerated, that anything is possible. For instance, when the Kurdish PKK party was outlawed everywhere they came to The Netherlands to hold a congress.
'We should have seen it coming. Only three years ago journalists on public television recorded Imans in The Netherlands saying things on the record about how women could be beaten, homosexuals should be killed and the friends of democracy are the sons of Satan. Our secret service has already known for two years that the recruitment for jihad in mosques and prisons were no longer incidents but a structural phenomenon.'" (Hat tip: Austin Bay.)

"Britain's fanatics" (Robert Wistrich, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/07/14)
7/7 XI: "Perhaps most worrisome, stridently anti-Israel sentiments have long ceased to be limited to Muslims. Earlier this year, the city's mayor, Ken Livingstone published a piece in The Guardian claiming that Ariel Sharon "is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office," adding that "Israel's own expansion has included ethnic cleansing."
Since the election late this spring, things have only gotten worse. On May 21, a massive rally held in Trafalgar Square featured a crowd waving anti-Israel banners. In addition to Palestinian representatives and local Muslim leaders, several prominent non-Muslim public figures also spoke. Tony Benn, for instance, a former Labor MP and veteran Leftist, called George Bush and Sharon the "two most dangerous men in the world," while Andrew Birgin of the Stop the War coalition demanded the dismantling of the Jewish state. ...
The demonization of Israel has had a profoundly debilitating effect on British public opinion. It has helped to blind Britain to the true nature of the Holy War currently being waged against Western civilization. In reality, the motivations of the bombers have little to do with Palestine, with poverty or despair - the usual suspects evoked after every murderous terrorist assault in Europe or elsewhere. It has everything to do with religious fanaticism.
Slowly yet surely, the jihadist challenge is effecting a profound erosion of Britain's proud history of tolerance, moderation and multiculturalism. Unfortunately, until Britain acknowledges this growing cancer of terrorism, jihad and anti-Semitism in its midst - and acts to stamp it out - we can expect that Thursday's tragedy will not be the last London sees." (See also: "Calls for Israel's destruction in London" (Yaakov Lappin, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/05/22))

"They tried to make me a suicide bomber" (Matt Roper, The Daily Mirror, 2005/07/14)
7/7 X: "THREE years ago Muhammed Yusuf was approached by two strangers who tried to recruit him as a suicide bomber.
The 18-year-old has already informed anti-terrorist police about his encounter with the hardliners at a North London mosque. Here he tells MATT ROPER what happened:
THEIR words, spoken with calm and conviction, were powerful and persuasive. But as I realised they wanted me to become a martyr for the cause of Islam I felt sick to the stomach.
"You'll go instantly to heaven," they repeated. "All the problems and pain in your life will go away. You'll be rewarded for all eternity."
For two weeks two men had befriended and groomed me. I was just 14, naive yet idealistic, and I had no idea why they were so interested in me. But after days of observing me, the moment had arrived to finally come clean.
They wanted me to avenge the deaths of my Muslim brothers and sisters around the world.
And they cynically exploited a time of turmoil and confusion in my life to convince me to end it - not shamefully but gloriously - by blowing myself to bits in a terrorist attack. ...
They promised that if I died that way I would get 70 virgins in heaven and even talked about how I would be given a place to have sex, covered in diamonds and pearls, where even angels couldn't see me. ...
I was a teenager, with all the fears and insecurities of my age, with the added anguish of having just lost my dad. I was vulnerable and easily manipulated.
They said: 'If you commit suicide for your own reasons you'll bring shame on your family and go straight to hell, Jahanam. But if you end your life fighting for the cause of Islam, you'll be rewarded for all eternity. And you'll see your dad again really soon.'" (Hat tip: Daniel Pipes.)

"Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise..." (Nasra Hassan, The Times, 2005/07/14)
"What motivates a suicide bomber? Our correspondent talks to a young Muslim who survived his intended 'martyrdom' a