Monday, July 25, 2005

Preaching Peace and Love

This Reuters article gives some insight into the tangled twisted thinking of at least one of London's Islamic clerics:

LONDON (Reuters) - Militant Islamists will continue to attack Britain until the government pulls its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the country's most outspoken Islamic clerics said on Friday. Speaking 15 days after bombers killed over 50 people in London and a day after a series of failed attacks on the city's transport network, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed said the British capital should expect more violence.

"What happened yesterday confirmed that as long as the cause and the root problem is still there ... we will see the same effect we saw on July 7," Bakri said. "If the cause is still there the effect will happen again and again," he said, adding he had no information about future attacks or contacts with people planning to carry out attacks.

The cause of the problem, of course, is people like Bakri preaching violence and hatred in the mosque every Friday.

Bakri, a Syrian-born cleric who has been vilified in Britain since 2001 when he praised the September 11 hijackers, said he did not believe the bombings and attempted attacks on London were carried out by British Muslims.

He condemned the killing of all innocent civilians but described attacks on British and U.S. troops in Muslim countries as "pro-life" and justified. In an interview with Reuters, Bakri described Osama bin Laden, leader of the radical Islamist network al Qaeda, as "a sincere man who fights against evil forces."

What does Bakri say about Muslims strapping bombs to mentally retarded Muslim boys and using them as suicide bombers? What does he say about Muslims kidnapping another Muslim's children and threatening to behead them unless the father serves as a suicide bomber? What does he say about Muslims who deliberately blow up Muslim children with nail bombs or shoot them in their schools? Nothing much, I'll bet.

Bakri said he would like Britain to become an Islamic state but feared he would be deported before his dream was realized. "I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world," he said.

That, I submit, is a chilling vision of hell that not even Dante could have foreseen.

A hate figure for the British tabloid press, the bearded and bespectacled Bakri said Islam contained "a message of peace for those who want to live with the Muslims in peace."

That is, Muslims are willing to live in peace with those who submit to dhimmitude, a kind of second class status with no real rights.

"But Islam is a message of war for those who declare war against Muslims," he said.

In other words, Muslims will kill anyone who resists their wish to convert the world to Islam.

"I condemn any killing and any bombing against any innocent people in Britain or abroad, but I expect the British people to condemn the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan."

When Bakri gets around to condemning the mass murders of Muslims in Iraq by Islamic suicide bombers then his claim to reproach the deaths of innocent people in Britain will have a teensy bit of credibility. Even at that, he sneaks into his "condemnation" the qualification that it is the bombing of "innocent" people he denounces. In Islamist thinking, however, there are no innocent Western infidels. They are all guilty so Bakri's pious denunciation is meaningless.

However, asked about Islamist attacks on British and U.S. troops and on Israelis, he said: "If violence is pro-life I don't condemn it." Bakri, a 46-year-old father of six, was born in Syria and lived in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. When the Saudi government expelled him in 1985 he came to London. Nicknamed "The Tottenham Ayatollah" after the area of north London in which he lives, he has infuriated many Britons with his firebrand speeches and refusal to condemn suicide bombings.

He founded the British branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which describes itself as a non-violent political party dedicated to creating an Islamic caliphate centered on the Middle East. But he split from the group in 1996 and set up al Muhajiroun, which won notoriety in 2001 for celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Doubtless he was condemning the deaths of innocents in the World Trade Towers while he was dancing in the streets.

Bakri has Syrian and Lebanese citizenship and says he thinks the British government might deport him to one of those two countries in the wake of this month's bombings.

They shouldn't deport him. They should ceaselessly ridicule both him and his moronic political and religious views until he realizes that to spare himself further humiliation and ignominy, to salvage whatever credibility he might have left after a campaign of public derision, he had best slink off on his own.

"But I think that would be political suicide for the British government if they started to deport and imprison all extremists and radicals," he said. "Because if, God forbid, something happened again, they would have nobody left to blame."

Quite so. If they started to deport all Muslims who are radical extremists, or at least sympathetic to the radicals, there'd be hardly any Muslims left in England to plant the flag at No. 10 Downing Street. God forbid.

PC Make-Believe

It is stunning that the NYPD has decided that they will inspect bags of commuters on the NY subway system. The stunning part is that the searches will be random. Random? As if no one knows who the perpetrators of a bombing would be. As if we are just oblivious to the fact that 99% of terrorist acts are performed by young, middle-eastern, males. No matter, the searches will be random. Ten year old redheads will have their backpacks searched. Just in case. Seventy year old guys wearing lime-green slacks, golf shirts, and white shoes will have their bowling bags checked. You can never tell what might be in them.

We've become so afraid to face and tell the truth in any matter involving race or ethnicity that we're reduced to truly bizarre play-acting. There's not a soul who rides the trains or checks the bags who thinks random searches are anything more than feel-good liberalism. The liberal thinks that the important thing is that whatever we do, no one be offended by it. Whether it's effective or not is only secondary. Like the citizens who turned out to admire the emperor's new clothes, oohing and ahhing at their splendor while watching a manifestly naked emperor riding through the street, everyone seems duty-bound to pretend that young, middle-eastern males shouldn't be any more suspect than anyone else. If liberals could control our thoughts as well as our actions they'd have us all experience astonishment every time a terrorist bombing turned out to be perpetrated by Arab Muslims.

So we all agree to make-believe that you just can't predict who would be a terrorist based on looks because that's the politically correct thing to do. We all nod knowingly when someone avers that, after all, Timothy McVeigh wasn't a Saudi Muslim, but if you're sitting in an airport waiting to board your flight and you see a couple of swarthy Pakistani males with a dead look in their eyes waiting to board the same plane, all your PC liberalism goes into the dumpster and the needle on your anxiety meter nudges the red. If you deny this then you're either not being honest with us or yourself. Or, like Rip van Winkle, you've just awakened from a thirty year snooze.

Unbelievable Rudeness

We hope there's more to this story than what meets the eye. If not, Catherine Baker Knoll, Pennsylvania's Lt. Governor, has shown extraordinarily poor judgment and an utter lack of sensitivity.

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.

[Knoll came into the church and] sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, "Who are you?" Then she handed the family member one of her business cards...

"Knoll felt this was an appropriate time to campaign and impose her will on us," Goodrich said. "I am amazed and disgusted Knoll finds a Marine funeral a prime place to campaign."

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war.' "

This requires almost inconceivably bad manners. How does someone so devoid of good sense rise so high in state politics? Never mind. Dumb question.

Michelle Malkin has more here.