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Islam and terrorism are not linked. That’s official.
Islamism or
militant Islam and terrorism are not linked either. There is absolutely
no connection whatsoever between Islam, in any of its forms, and
terrorism. The only thing that is linked to terrorism are various
‘death cults’ or ‘sects’. This is the truth according to Barack Obama.
This man ordered a revision of America’s National Security Strategy,
around a year ago, so as to erase all possible connections between
Islam and terrorism. Between Islam and anything violent.
This is thought control. It's all about words, not realities or actions.
Specifically,
the phrases ‘Islami radicalism’ has been erased from American
governmental discourse. And if the words no longer exist, then the
realities don’t exist either. At least not according to the post-modern
logic of the American state.
Apparently it was George W. Bush
who got it all wrong. He made the illogical and 'Islamophobic'
conclusion that Islam and terrorism are indeed intertwined. Actually
not quite that. He rightly concluded that ‘militant Islam’ and
terrorism are intertwined. More specifically, a Bush-era document
described the war against terrorists as
“the struggle
against militant Islamic radicalism … the great ideological conflict of
the early years of the 21st century.”
After all, didn’t he too also think pure and good Islam was a pretty
decent thing?
Then
the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) got in on the act. And
when it does so, which is quite often, it usually gets what it wants
from the US Government.
Clearly such a disuniting of Islam and terrorism pleased CAIR very
much. It said that it would
‘welcome this
change in language as another step toward respectful and effective
outreach to Muslims at home and abroad’.
Well
I never! Muslims being jubilant over the effective denial of any
Islam-terrorism connection? You wouldn’t expect anything else. Now
Muslims can carry out their jihadist acts without anyone seeing the
deep connections between Islam and violence. Or at least they won’t be
able to use the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamist terrorism’ if
they work for the US Government. Who knows, perhaps Islamic terrorism
will magically disappear if such a thing is never spoken of, or even
thought about, in those words.
CAIR thinks that phrases like
‘Islamic terrorism’ are ‘loaded’. That is, it is wrong and quite simply
'Islamophobic' to use phrases like ‘Islamist terrorism’. Let’s not mess
about here. It is wrong and Islamophobic to even think that
there is even a slight hint of a connection between Islam and terrorism
or to violence generally.
Yet
Islamic terrorism and violence exists. It exists on a massive and
everyday scale. So what does CAIR, and therefore Barack Obama, want to
do about this very inconvenient and logical connection between Islam
and violence? They want to change the words we use to describe Islamic
terrorism by keeping the ‘terrorism’ part and erasing the ‘Islamist’.
Surely that will change reality too, not just the words we
use and the thoughts we think. Or so CAIR and the US Government think.
Specifically,
they want to keep the ‘Words that Work’ and get rid of the ‘Words that
don’t’. That is how the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre put it.
“'Islamist terrorism’” does ‘not work’. "'Death-cult terrorism”’ or
‘”evil terrorism”’, yes, ‘does work’. Why is that? Well, it can in no
way stop Islamist terrorism. It may make the lives of American Muslims
a whole lot easier. The ‘moderate’ Muslims will not feel the need to
defend their religion any more. The terrorists will find it a whole lot
easier to do what they do if Government infidels are not allowed to
look towards Islam, and the teachers and teachings of Islam, to help
them fight Islamist terrorism.
Not
even al-Qaeda can now be called ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’. It will come as
a surprise to Osama bin Laden that he is not a Muslim and that he does
not control an Islamic terrorist network. Indeed this is a surprise to
me, as it will be to the millions of non-Muslims who do see a
strong connection between Islam and violence.
More
specifically, CAIR and the US Government are claiming that these
naughty and Islamophobic phrases ‘unintentionally legitimise’ terrorist
groups. That is, by seeing these organisations as Islamic, or as
aspects of Islam (even small aspects), is to make them seem more
acceptable and, well, Islamic than they really are.
But what if there is a connection between Islam, or only parts
thereof, and violence? What if Osama bin Laden is a Muslim.
Full stop? What if he is even a good Muslim
who is actually truer to his religion than many other Muslims,
including CAIR and the ‘moderates’. (That’s if CAIR and the Muslim
moderates are genuinely against Islamic terrorism or terrorism in the
name of Islam.)
Alternatively, CAIR’s suggestions may have been offered to
make
life not only easier for moderate Muslims, but for the Islamic
terrorists themselves. If the terrorists and their acts cannot be
spoken of as what they truly are, then they case to exist qua
Islamic terrorists. And if Islamic terrorism ceases to exist qua
Islamic terrorism, then the terrorists will be far harder to
defeat. Islamic terror will thus get worse and increase, not lessen.
All
this is no surprise if one bears in mind Obama’s speech at Cairo
University in Egypt in June 2009. In that speech he told Egyptian
Muslims that 'the US does not fear or hate the Muslim world'. And to
prove this he promised to bend over backwards - as far as is humanly
possible. He promised to rewrite the English language and thus retune
the infidels’ thoughts about Islam and terrorism. Could any Muslim ask
for more?
Let’s take the ‘Guide for Counter-Terrorism Communication’ in more
detail.
This document seeks to ‘avoid labelling everything
“'Muslim'". Thus the US Government can longer label anything
‘Muslim’. Or at least not acts of terrorism and other acts of jihadist
violence. This is because Obama wants to get rid of the mindset which
believes that it is the case today of 'the US vs Islam’.
What if it is largely a case of Islam versus the
US and the rest of the non-Muslim world? What if it is
the case that millions upon millions of Muslims believe in jihad, even
if they don’t carry it out themselves? Not all Muslim believers in
jihad and terrorism are actually active in either jihad or
terrorism. Not every Nazi loaded the cattle trucks with Jews, fought on
the Russian front or joined the Gestapo. Still they supported
these things, either directly or indirectly.
This
is a chicken-or-egg scenario. The aforesaid document says that when we
use the naughty words which connect Islam with terrorism this will
result in ‘a large percentage of the world’s population’ becoming the
victims of policy and hurtful words. This in turn will result in our
‘unintentionally alienating them’. That ‘is not a judicious move’.
What if it is actually the other way around? That is:
i)
National legislation and government actions alienate Muslims because it
is Muslims, and their religion, who and which are largely responsible
for most contemporary acts of terrorism.
Barack has got this the wrong way around. He thinks that
ii)
National legislations and government actions, up until now, have
alienated Muslims and have thus contributed to the rise of terrorism
and Muslim violence generally.
Why would the US
Government have focused upon - and thus alienated - Muslims if it had
not made the obvious connections between Islam/Muslims and terrorism?
Of course there is a Leftist and an Islamist alternative to this. That
the US Government focused upon, and thus alienated, Muslims quite
simply because of its ‘Islamophobia’ and/or its ‘racism’.
But again we can ask:
Where did that ‘Islamophobia’ came from?
It came from Islamist terrorism. It did not create Islamist
terrorism.
Most people don’t fear that which is not dangerous. The
possibility of Islamic terrorism is ever-present. Thus we have the fear
of Muslims and Islam. We have Islamophobia.
The US will never understand Al Qaeda and Islamic violence
if it
really believes it own Muslim-friendly rhetoric. It will be forever
barking up the wrong tree. Barack makes the absurd and dangerous
conclusion, or at least US officials do, that al-Qaeda
‘exploits
religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions’.
This is similar to the mistakes governments made about the
‘ridiculous’ Hitler and his ‘silly Brown Shirts’. It is also parallel
to the grave mistakes UK ministers and officials made about a whole
host of potential terrorists and Islamists. Civil servants and
officials in the UK once saw these people as simple 'buffoons' and
'clowns' and thus concluded that they were no real threat to Britain.
Some civil servants still think this way. Thus the ‘misfits’
and ‘clowns’ were quite simply ignored. As long as they didn’t plant
their bombs in England, all was fine. And then came 9/11. Madrid. Bali.
And then London.
Barack, instead of seeing Al Qaeda as being
made up of clowns or buffoons, sees it as being made of ‘criminals’
instead. How does that work? Is it being suggested that al-Qaeda is
making money from their operations and propaganda? If not, what other
kinds of criminality is being hinted at here? One cannot say ‘the
exportation of heroin’ because the funds gained from this are invested
into the jihad against the West. Thus we are back to where we started –
Islamic jihad and Islamic violence generally.
What about just calling al Qaeda ‘terrorists’. Full stop? But
terrorists must terrorise for reasons, principles or
beliefs. No one is just a terrorist simpliciter.
Thus, as with the 'criminals' earlier, we are back to the starting
point again. Al Qaeda members aren’t terrorists simply because they are
terrorists. They are terrorists in the name of Allah and Islam. Even if
we, and indeed Muslims, think that terror in the name of Allah and
Islam is wrong or a misinterpretation of that religion, it is still
the case that Al Qaeda does not think it is theologically
or Islamically wrong in doing what it does.
Why pretend that they are not Muslims just
because we
think they are theologically in the wrong or that such an acceptance of
their politico-theology would work against moderate Muslims at home? Al
Qaeda is made up of Muslims and commit acts of Islamic
terrorism no matter what we think of their theology. So even if we
accept that there exists a non-violent Islam, this need not mean that
we are given a good reason to claim that al-Qaeda members are 'not
really Muslims’ and that what they do ‘is not really Islamic’.
As
it is, millions of people do believe that there is such a thing as
Islamic violence and that al Qaeda is not really distorting Islam at
all. No word games from Barack Obama and others will change this.