Why should we have to justify ourselves to the people who want to bomb us?
There are calls for self-examination, as if we brought the stash of weedkiller on ourselves Catherine Bennett Thursday May 3, 2007 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2071237,00.html Although we shall never know how the Prophet would have received a plan to blow up "slags" in a London nightclub, there is no avoiding the feeling that for some of today's more respectable non-Muslims, this particular target might appear more . . . how shall we say - understandable? - than others. People who would not countenance the Iraq war as an adequate pretext for domestic jihad seem strikingly open to the idea that a pure-minded revulsion from our filthy western ways might, in some cases, prompt extreme disaffection leading to social exclusion followed by the emergence of individuals such as the thwarted terrorist Jawad Akbar who fantasised thus about slaughter on the Ministry of Sound dance floor: "No one can turn around and say, 'Oh, they were innocent', those slags dancing around. Do you understand what I mean?" Some people do. Ed Husain, author of a revealing and alarming account of his experiences inside radical Islam, said of the "slags" comment: "That was me, man. That's classic Hizb-ut-Tahrir rhetoric." In his new book, The Islamist, Husain identifies a professed horror of western decadence as the next, infinitely promising excuse for Islamist murder. "When the political pretexts of Palestine and Iraq have been dealt with," he writes, "Wahhabi-inspired militants will turn to other social grievances. Drinking alcohol, 'impropriety', gambling, cohabitation, inappropriate dress - these and a host of miscellaneous others will become excuses for jihad, for martyrdom, feeding the tumour of Islamist domination which grows in the Wahhabi and Islamist mind." Since - as Husain suggests - there can never be enough modesty, celibacy and sobriety to placate Islamist critics of our national slaggishness, you might consider their complaints on this score no more worthy of investigation than the precise adjustments that might make our free and easy voting system more acceptable to paternalist fundamentalists, or the amount of tweaking that would bring the British legal system into line with that of, say, Saudi Arabia. But where Islamist complaints about immorality and women's sexual behaviour are concerned, there are calls for self-examination, for all the world as if we brought the stash of weedkiller on ourselves. On the Today programme yesterday, Patrick Mercer, formerly the Tory homeland security spokesman, said: "We have got to understand why we look offensive to those who choose to suborn our society." Why have we got to? It's like an innocent woman asking what she did to incite her rapist. Was it the short skirt? We heard it before, after 7/7. "I feel a growing sympathy for so-called 'radical' Muslims who reject western civilisation," Norman Lebrecht wrote in the London Evening Standard that summer. "It does not take much to see where things have gone wrong. Binge drinking is accepted as a teenage norm, promiscuity as preferable to chastity, and wealth as something to be flaunted in the face of the poor." Around the same time, Bel Mooney, displeased by a bikini advertisement, sought a kind of enlightenment from the acts of sociopathic Islamist fundamentalists (who would certainly have disapproved of her having any views at all). "Surely," she wrote in the Mail on Sunday, "it would be useful if we could use the current crisis to train a searchlight on the way we live now." Leave aside the disgustingness of taking moral instruction from the advocates of mass murder, or those from the Saudi Arabian school of sexual etiquette, and there is still a problem with their qualifications. For some reason their very outrage seems to confer authority. Writers whose suspicions would be instantly aroused by, say, a smarmy TV evangelist who seemed obsessively interested in fornication, or a politician who relied on divine inspiration as a justification for war, seem to have no difficulty listening to the strictures of angry young men whose primary moral interest appears to be in telling women what to wear on their heads. In The Islamist, Ed Husain confirms what you might suspect: his former colleagues included sexual hypocrites, as well as offenders, thugs and homophobes. Many preferred ranting to prayer. The same activists who banned discos and western music at his London college, and who bullied homosexuals and Brick Lane's prostitutes and inadequately covered female students ("Hijab - put up or shut up"), would decide, having thoroughly reviewed the theology, that pornography was acceptable. And concubines. "I prefer blondes from the Balkans, personally," announced one hammer of western decadence. Following a period in modestly dressed, porn-loving Saudi Arabia, Husain concluded that the Islamists' depiction of the west as morally inferior was nothing more than "Islamist propaganda, designed to undermine the west and inject false confidence in Muslim minds". And whether through accident or design, the propaganda is working brilliantly, as it coincides with an epidemic of binge drinking, super casinos and intermittent moral panic. Even if it does not want them to be killed, the Daily Mail is very upset about women who enjoy ending their evenings with their knickers showing, being sick in the gutter. Even if they don't want to wear one themselves, many liberal feminists are happy to make believe that the male-enforced hijab is a modest, feminine response to a materialist, oversexualised society that judges women by their appearance. And of course, like lots of things in this decadent society, that is not very nice. Many of us share the Crawley terrorists' dislike of Bluewater. But that is not to say we have any interest in their plans to improve it. This week: Catherine read Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris: "As everyone's already heard, an incredibly funny, inventive and affecting first novel about work. And how nice to find a writer who doesn't seem to be economising on characters". She watched a top Doctor Who: "The one place the human race always comes across really well." (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of The Copyright Act of 1976. 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