Skrýtin heimur - Vaxandi árásir á gyðinga - Samsærið á bakvið 11. september

Einu sinni sem oftar ætla ég að vekja hér athygli á dálki sem birtist í breska Tímanum (The TimesOnLine).  Þar skrifar Gerard Baker, og veltir fyrir sér hlutum s.s. "profiling", "pólítískri rétthugsun", hvort réttlætanlegt sé að skerða mannréttindi og þá hversu mikið, til að berjast gegn hryðjuverkum?  Er réttlætanlegt að skerða réttindi eins hóps meira en annara?

Það er ekki til neitt eitt rétt svar við þessum spurningum, en þarft eigi að síður að velta þeim fyrir sér, grípum hér kafla út greininni:

"IF ALL THE BIG terrorist attacks of the past 35 years — from the Munich massacre to the July 7 London bombings last year — had been carried out by groups of white, English, middle-aged newspaper columnists, I suspect my life might have become quite intolerable in recent years.

I would have had to get used to looks of fearful suspicion every time I got on a train or a bus. Whenever I checked in for a flight or sought entrance to a government building I would doubtless have been taken away for questioning. "

"Racial profiling is an ugly business. Carried to extremes it can produce outrageously discriminatory outcomes, based on the false logic that all terrorists are Muslims, therefore all Muslims are potential terrorists. A reasonable person can only sympathise with those poor chaps who were thrown off a plane from Manchester last month.

We should be careful to ensure that “flying while Muslim” does not become a new offence in the criminal code. As critics have said, not only is it wrong, it is almost guaranteed to increase sympathy for the real terrorists. But those singled out for increased scrutiny must also accept that profiling is going to save us lives. In a world of limited resources and clearly identifiable threats it is entirely legitimate, indeed necessary, to subject certain individuals to greater attention than others."

"This condition places the blame for every ill in their lives, in their communities, in the West and in the countries of the Middle East, on the imperialist oppression of the white man, the American and, of course, the Jew, never once stopping to consider even the possibility that their plight might be, in part at least, their own making.

Though the West is surely not blameless, either through history or today, in its treatment of Muslims, the idea that responsibility for the woes of the Islamic world these past few hundred years can be laid at somebody else’s door is escapist fantasy.

The nasty regimes of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt conveniently emphasise this victim status to divert attention from their own repression and inequality and to blame Israel. The failure of Palestinians to create an orderly and successful society is blamed on “the occupation”. 

The failure of many Muslims in Europe, especially in Britain, to integrate effectively is laid at the feet of a white racist society that excludes them. The real injustices suffered by these communities become a convenient smokescreen to hide their own flaws. "

"Pierre Rehov, an Algerian-born French filmmaker, who produced a documentary, Suicide Killers, was asked in a TV interview this year how the world could end the madness of suicide bombings and terrorism. “Stop being politically correct and stop believing that this culture is a victim of ours,” he said.

Of course, this celebration of victimhood plays to the West’s deep sense of guilt, producing a fearful complementarity that makes today’s crisis so potent — a civilisation all too willing to accept the blame for the woes of a people all too willing to blame them.

We can stop enabling the victim mentality by overcoming our guilt complex. But then it is up to Muslims themselves to defeat it. Polls repeatedly show vast majorities of Muslims in the West, and smaller majorities in the Middle East, believe that terrorism is a perversion of Islam. But those same polls also show many Muslims agreeing with the proposition that the root cause of that terrorism is “oppression”."

"No less a figure than Ghazi Hamad, the spokesman for the terrorist-supporting Hamas Government in the Palestinian Authority, wrote in an Arabic newspaper about the real causes of the mayhem in Gaza since the Israeli occupation ended last year.

“We’re always afraid to talk about our mistakes,” he said. “We’re used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganised traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories, one that has limited our capability to think.” "

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Svo mörg voru þau orð, auðvitað þarf að taka öllum skoðunum með fyrirvara, enginn er hlutlaus, Rehov, kvikmyndagerðarmaðurinn sem vitnað er í, er gyðingur fæddur í Alsír.  Hans skoðanir eru þó fyllilega verðar að þeim sé gefinn gaumur, rétt eins og margra annara.  Ég hef ekki séð myndir hans, en ímynda mér að þær séu ekki hlutlausar, ekki frekar en nokkuð annað sem kemur fram, ekki einu sinni fréttir eru hlutlausar.

Í "Tímanum" mátti einnig lesa í dag frétt um aukið ofbeldi gegn gyðingum í Bretlandi.  Hér eru nokkrar klausur úr fréttinni:

"BRITISH Jews are facing a wave of anti-Semitic attacks prompted by Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Synagogues have been daubed with graffiti, Jewish leaders have had hate-mail and ordinary people have been subjected to insults and vandalism.

On Thursday an all-party parliamentary inquiry will state that anti-Semitic violence has become endemic in Britain, both on the streets and university campuses. The report will call for urgent action from the Government, the police and educational establishments. "

"The July incidents “were more dispersed than usual”, Mr Gardner said. “It is usually a small number responsible for a large number of attacks, but these were very widespread across the country and included graffiti attacks on synagogues in Edinburgh and Glasgow.”

The attackers, when visible, are from across society, he said. “When it’s verbal abuse, it’s just ordinary people in the street, from middle-class women to working-class men. All colours and backgrounds. We hardly ever see incidents involving the classic neo-Nazi skinhead. Muslims are over-represented.” "

"In Hampstead Garden Suburb, swastikas and the words “Kill all Jews” and “Allah” were daubed on the house and car of Justin Stebbing. Dr Stebbing, who works at a hospital, said: “I felt violated. It’s horrible.”

Jon Benjamin, of the Board of Deputies, said: “The problem is the spin that Israel is an irredeemably evil regime, and we are concerned that it may become common currency to connect British Jews with this.”"

Fréttina má finna hér.

Það er vaxandi spenna víða, ekki bara í miðausturlöndum.  Það hriktir í "fjölmenningarsamfélaginu" og umburðarlyndi virðist fara minnkandi.

Síðasta greinin sem ég tek vil minnast á hér er einnig úr the Times.  Þar fjallar Martin Amis um bók eftir Lawrence Wright, "The Looming Tower".

Það ber auðvitað að varast að taka þessu sem "hinum stóra sannleik", rétt eins og öllu öðru, en magir fróðlegir molar koma þarna fram og bókin virðist athygliverð.

"The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s tough-minded and cussedly persistent narrative opens with portraits of the triumvirate of developed Islamism: Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al- Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. Almost at once, the question arises: should we be solaced or additionally galled by the poverty of the human material now so ferociously ranged against us? In these pages we meet some formidable schemers and killers, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the author of “the planes operation” (since captured). As for the other players, there are nuances, there are shades of black; but the consistent profile is marked by intellectual vacuity, by a fanaticism that simply thirsts for the longest possible penal code, and, most basically, by a chaotically adolescent — or even juvenile — indifference to reality. These men are fabulists crazed with blood and death; reality for them is just something you have to manoeuvre around in order to destroy it. "

"The verdict stands. Bin Laden’s contribution is his image, and nothing more: omnicidal nullity under a smiling halo of beatitude. His personal deformation remains mysterious. Zawahiri was jailed and tortured. Qutb was jailed, tortured and executed. Nobody traumatised bin Laden; unlike his mentors, he was not internally rewired by whips and electric cables. Alone among a shifting crew of one-eyed mullahs, tin-legged zealots, blind shiekhs and paralysed clerics, bin Laden was always intact.

Physically, that is. At the time of his Declaration of War against America (1996), bin Laden was mouldering in a cave in Tora Bora — stateless, penniless, and half-starved. His achievements were a matter of myth, of fabulation; he was a funk-ridden and incompetent ex-jihadi (a mere pepperer of the Red Army); and he was a serial business flop.

In short, he was a terrorist financier who had run out of cash, and was now entirely at the mercy of the local Islamist power, the village-idiot vigilantes known as the Taleban.

Very soon, Zawahiri would be in a Russian jail, and bin Laden subsisting on stale bread and contaminated water. At this stage al-Qaeda’s survival looked unlikely and its chances of mounting an operation the size of September 11 were infinitesimal. The “declaration” was little more than a deathbed whimper.

How then did the cornered troglodyte of 1996 become the radiant Mahdi of 2001? Bin Laden’s notoriety was lucrative; in 1998 the Taleban leader Mullah Omar started taking bribes from Riyadh as a down payment for his extradition and delivery to the Americans. But Omar and Osama were soulmates — and business partners. That same summer, the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania took place. In Nairobi, al-Qaeda killed 206 Africans and wounded 4,500 (150 were blinded by flying glass), plus a total of 12 Americans; the half-bungled attack in Dar es Salaam killed no Americans at all. Although Islamic reaction worldwide was unanimous disgust, it was, definingly, the American reaction that empowered bin Laden.

Of the 66 US cruise missiles fired at camps around Khost in Afghanistan, a number failed to detonate. According to Wright (his source is Russian Intelligence), “bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for $10 million”. "

"All was set fair for yet another of al Qaeda’s ridiculous failures, on a par with the plan to assassinate the Pope in 1994 (abandoned soon after the purchase of the killers’ cassocks). The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity.

Negative coincidences also characterised the American end of the story. It is painful to follow the inter-agency malfunctions, resentments and pedantries that opened the door to disaster. The man who came closest to averting it, John O’Neill, quit the FBI in August 2001. He took up his new job on the 23rd: head of security at the World Trade Centre. He had 19 days to live.

Expert opinion in the West is now largely persuaded that al-Qaeda is more or less finished. The “base” — justly so called in the adjectival sense — has become, we hear, “a state of mind”. And what is that state of mind? One convinced that it is possible simultaneously to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim.

A death-brimmed bog of paranoia and credulity, it is the state of mind of the armed fabulist. The conspiracy detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline: the year was 1683 and the day was September 11. "

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

 

Athugasemdir

[Haukur Jóhannsson, 6.9.2006 kl. 22:59]

Getur verið að hnotskurnin sé sú að allir hafi rétt fyrir

sér ?

Sem sagt fólk tekur fyrir hugmyndir sem það telur réttar og

fylgir þeim eftir.

Niðurstaðan af því hefur verið hingað til og núna sú að fólk

gefst ekki upp nema í rauðan dauðan.

Ég er orðin viss á því að lausnin felst í því að fólk horfi

meira innávið, t.d. hvað er í næsta 50 metra radius.

Og bæti síðan við 50 metrum á hverjum degi.

kv Haukur