Brits' "Newspeak" Rationalizes Failure to Understand Islamism; Stage-Set for Reversion
The ironic confluence of 4 items make this newsworthy:
1) Britain's Home Office issuing an Orwellian-Newspeak dictionary requiring police and other civil officials to self-censor all public references to Islam or Muslims when discussing political Islamist terror or the Iraq/Afghan War on Terror. Melanie Phillips remarks:
Talking about ‘shared values’ amounts to no more than meaningless platitudes if it is forbidden to talk about the ideology which seeks to supplant them. That ideology can only be defeated if its characteristics are talked about frankly, and that cannot be done if the entire subject is prohibited. Fanaticism cannot be fought if people refuse even to name what they are fighting.
This ‘new sophistication’ is simply all about giving in to terror and intimidation. It principal effect is to give Islamism in Britain a free pass and to systematically conceal from the British people what is happening to their country. For what it also does is to define the problem as ‘violent extremism’; but the threat is not from violence alone but from the religious extremism that seeks to Islamise Britain, and whose strategy is to use cultural creep as well as terrorism to achieve its ends.
2) This follows yesterday's Times of London's report that Scotland Yard apprehended a suspected al-Qaeda cell who arrived at London's Gatwick Airport with intent to detonate suicide attacks on the London Underground.
According to El Pais, the Spanish newspaper, a member of the Barcelona cell told3) A Palestinian homicide bombing in Israel's city of Dimona by the Abbas-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade & the PFLP (which infiltrated Israel from Gaza), which killed 3 and wounded 11 innocent civilians (and was celebrated by Palestinians by distributing candies and met with little public censure). This evidences the error in the West's $7 Billion plan to strengthen Palestinian leader, Abbas, because of his inability to fulfill the Palestinians' Road Map to Peace obligations to stop terror - a precondition for Israel granting them security/autonomy concessions.
the Spanish civil police that it was planning attacks not just on Barcelona’s underground system but also against public transport in Britain and other
European countries.
The informant is said to have told police that pairs of suicide bombers planned to strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up on the rail and bus networks in Britain, France, Germany and Portugal.
Referring to the arrests of the Pakistanis at Gatwick, a senior British official said: “The intelligence from Spain was that there was to be another wave of attacks on the way to us after the attempted attacks in Barcelona. When it was followed up it led to this lot.”
Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP who last year helped to prepare a report on terror threats to crowded places, said: “This intelligence shows the breadth and span of international terrorism and anybody who thinks that the threat has either gone or is in abeyance is in cloud-cuckoo-land.”
4) All this on the eve of the US Presidential Primaries' Super Tuesday, which calls attention to the (lack of) progress that the West has made in:
(a) educating the public about the ideological motivations of political Islamists;
(b) our ability to distinguish the political Islamist movement from spiritual Islam; and
(c) the ability of the public and the Presidential candidates to confront and defeat this imperialist movement.
"In War against Islamism, We Must Listen to the Words of Our Enemies," American-Muslim physician M. Zuhdi Jasser examines the public's and the Candidates' understanding of political Islamism, and provides a checklist of questions to qualify the best candidate for defeating the imperialist ideology, including these questions:
"* International Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are now conveniently condemning terrorism in order to mainstream themselves and fit into the Western construct of anti-terrorism. Is anti-terrorism enough? Shouldn’t anti-Islamism be a more defining litmus test for the organizations and networks we positively engage?
*Should we remain dangerously silent under the false guise of political correctness? Why would you not critically engage countries which enforce medieval laws against their populations in the name of Islam? Sudan tried to enforce medieval blasphemy laws against a British teacher. A Saudi court turned a rape victim into a criminal and an Afghani court tried a citizen for apostasy laws after he left Islam. At what point is it incumbent upon the President of the United States to set the stage for the contest of ideas between the west and our United Nations Declaration of Human rights and the Islamist world?
Never compromise the principle of freedom in the name of political expediency and fear of our enemies.
How can we speak about bringing liberty and freedom to the Muslim world when the Islamist mindset remains effectively unchallenged by mainstream media and politicians in our public arena? How can we liberate ideas we never engaged?
The core ideological conflict between Americanism and the militant Islamists remains inferred, rather than in front. It is time to bring it to the fore. It is time to expose Islamists – domestically and on foreign soil – who exploit our protections of religious freedom in exchange for the toxic advocacy of their own theocratic political agenda.
If the President will not lead and address these ideological chasms, one would have thought that the Presidential candidates vying for change would have been challenged to gain more clarity on them. Much to the contrary, they are even more evasive and dismissive of Islamism. "
Jihadists, Islamists, and "Extremists" - what's in a name? By Jeffrey Imm in CounterTerrorism Blog
ReplyDeleteAnother U.S. threat assessment has been issued that refuses to identify the enemy threatening us, and instead defines the enemy only as "extremists". Today's annual threat assessment from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) fails to use the terms "Jihad", "Jihadist", "Islamism", or "Islamist" in identifying the enemy. The question must be asked how the U.S. can meaningfully assess threats, if it can't even identify the enemy. The term "radical Islamic" (used twice) and "militant Islamic" (used once) is the only term close to "Islamist", and such terms as "radical" and "militant" have very different meanings to different people. Predominantly, when describing the enemy, the DNI annual assessment today uses the term "extremist(s)" (used 18 times) or "extremism" (used twice). In effect, the DNI views that America is fighting a war against "extremism".
This follows last week's State of the Union message where the term "extremist" was the primary definition of the enemy, with the term extremism, extremist(s) used nine times in defining the enemy (see recent columns on this by Counterterrorism Blog's Andrew Cochran and by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy). Our national leadership continues to ignore political "Islamism" as defined in the 9/11 Commission report, and refuses to make the distinction, as per Dr. Jasser, between "personal spiritual Islam from political Islam", but instead addresses threats from ambiguously defined "extremists" as its primary concern.
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/02/terms_matter.php
Questions for the Pentagon: Who Is Hesham Islam?
ReplyDeletehttp://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NTQ1ZjE0MWZlYWI2ODVjYzU3MjcyZjBkMzcxNzBjNTQ=