“Kill them in Allah’s name…”

In memory of the Mumbai massacre, Freethought Nation

The handler is heard saying:

“They’re saying that there are many many killed and injured…. People are dying all over the place. With God’s blessing, you’ve done a brilliant job! All praise to God… You’re very close to heaven, brother. Today’s the day you’ll be remembered for, brother.”

After one of the terrorists is killed, the handler says:

“May God accept his martyrdom.”

He later tells one terrorist:

“For your mission to end successfully, you must be killed. God is waiting for you in heaven.”

The terrorists and their master keep saying:

“Inshallah – God willing.”

As he’s telling one terrorist to murder his hostages in cold blood, the handler says:

“Do it, in God’s name. Do it, in God’s name.”

More memory of the Mumbai massacre

Chicago Misunderstander of Islam charged with aiding Mumbai jihad attack

The irony is perhaps thicker than ever. As jihad attacks and attempted attacks in the U.S. increase, and jihad activity continues around the world, Islamic spokesmen ever more shrilly attempt to blame “Islamophobes” for linking jihad terrorism with Islam, apparently hoping that no one will notice how jihad terrorists themselves invoke the Koran and Sunnah to justify their actions.

“Chicagoan charged with aiding deadly Mumbai terror attack,” from the Chicago Breaking News Center, December 7 via JW

Al-Qaeda and a decade of terror

Should read: Islam and 1400 years of terror

What has been the impact of al-Qaeda and its affiliates on Britain and the world? And have government responses to Islamic threats made the situation worse, asks Michael Burleigh in the Telegraph

Around the world, the decade of terror has generated different anniversaries, the latest being the 12 months separating Indians from the Mumbai gun and grenade atrocities. The announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 atrocity, and four accomplices are to be tried in New York, also makes this an apt moment to assess the deeper impact of terrorism.

Al-Qaeda’s leadership has been either captured or killed, whether during the B-52 strikes on Tora Bora, or by the CIA’s Predator drone assassinations along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Although it is claimed that a voice on audio cassettes is that of Osama bin Laden, it is strange that a movement so reliant on the charismatic Saudi has not released any filmic evidence that he is still among the living. Nor, despite Bali, Atocha station, and the July 7 London bombings, has there been another al-Qaeda “spectacular”, the mass casualty attacks which commenced in Africa in 1998, and which any terrorist movement needs to sustain its brand for reasons of recruitment.

Intelligence experts reckon there are probably 120 core al-Qaeda operatives, their overriding concern being to get through each night still in one piece by day break. Most al-Qaeda members come from north Africa or the Gulf states, with a few Indonesians and Uzbeks tacked on. Since their chief animus is against the rulers of those states, by their own lights they have failed, for not a single authoritarian republic or reactionary monarchy has fallen as a result of terrorist activity. The one thing the Bouteflikas, Gaddafis, Mubaraks and Sauds are very, very good at, is remaining in power. Further east, the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore seems to have crushed jihadism – notably by the killing of Noordin Top, al-Qaeda’s chief operative in the tri-state region. According to MI5, the real danger comes from such  al-Qaeda affiliates as Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organisation responsible for the Mumbai murders.

Some things have been irrevocably changed by international terrorism. The use of commercial aircraft as flying bombs, and conspiracies to down them with passenger-assembled explosives, has made international travel a trial. Mumbai was an example of a mass casualty gun attack, of the sort hitherto used to murder unwitting tourists, as happened in 1997 at Luxor in Egypt. Although attempts to gun down soldiers have been foiled at barracks in Australia and Fort Dix in the US, one succeeded at Fort Hood last month.

Many government buildings are now ringed with security barriers, and most senior politicians have got used to having bodyguards or armed policemen outside their homes. The threat of terrorism has also justified the proliferation of CCTV cameras and the storage of credit card transactions, mobile phone records and email, all of which have been produced in court whenever there is a major terrorist trial.

Of course there have been changes of a more complex kind: September 11 enabled international Islamism to impose itself on our collective consciousness, which was surely one of its major objectives. While only policemen and intelligence officers rushed to purchase the Koran and the more radical texts of such ideologues as the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, most of us have become depressing familiar with a range of alien terms, such as jihad, mujahadeen, and sharia. Our knowledge has expanded to encompass remote provinces in Afghanistan, not to mention Xinjiang in China, where there is a problem with Muslim Uighurs.

Since Islamism is an ugly form of supremacism, we have also become accustomed to its more extreme local exponents condemning our institutions and way of life; while claiming every benefit and asserting each right which our system affords them. “I know my rights,” said one of the failed July 21 suicide bombers. Although the indulgence Anglican clerics and senior judges were prepared to show sharia proved a step too far for the British people, we have quietly allowed sharia banking to become normative, so as not to lose this potentially lucrative business.

At first after September 11, we imagined that the terrorist threat would be external; although in Londonistan we had smugly allowed every species of violent radical to wage war on the governments of their homelands, dragging us into these conflicts regardless of whether these radicals professed a local ”pact of security” with their hosts. Last month, the Excel Centre witnessed a ”Martyrs Commemoration Day” organised for Tamil extremists, even though in 2000 our government proscribed the Tigers as terrorists. From Israel to Sri Lanka via Egypt, governments warned us that this tacit tolerance might blow back, or have deleterious effects on our national interests. Under New Labour, one has the feeling that human rights lawyers and NGOs dictate our foreign policy. All terrorists need easy access to arms and sophisticated financial systems. We certainly provided plenty of the latter, something the Labour Government has only partially rectified after 12 years in office. As a BBC radio programme revealed, the levels of transaction that trigger warning bells are pitched too high at £7,000 to detect terrorist plots that cost peanuts. So-called students come and go, often enrolled in colleges consisting of a pretentious name plate below a corner shop; in major universities, Islamist student societies with links to Hizb-ut-Tahrir are still allowed to poison minds, by irresponsible academic authorities. Greedy universities lap up money for Islamic or Middle Eastern studies centres, without regard to their wider cultural impact.

The mass murders of July 7 in London revealed that we had a hydra in the form of boys who said “bruv” and “nuffink”, but who were in a rage about Western foreign policy. My abiding memory of this past decade will be some indignant and ignorant youth wagging his finger at the camera recording his suicide video, and warning “don’t mess with the Muslims”.

Typically, the British elite tried to manage the problem by co-opting the self-appointed tribal chiefs, and paying them off with honours. Unfortunately, some of the so-called moderates also had outrageous views about adulterers, homosexuals or Jews, and worse, were disconnected from the radicalised youths who wished to dictate our foreign policy with bombs on buses and the Underground. In turn, under its Prevent policy, the Government perceives a difference between ”extremists” (who merely say they want to kill Jews or homosexuals), and ”violent extremists” who want to blow us all up.

During the last decade, New Labour’s brave new multicultural world has turned to dust. It has recently been revealed as a deeply cynical attempt to marginalise the Conservatives as ”racists” while forming the electorate into neatly manageable platoons, each with its self-appointed “spokespersons” and mono-identity: ”Asians”, ”blacks”, ”gays” and so forth. Apart from the fact that a Chinese or Japanese Asian is not the same as a Pakistani, there is the insulting presumption that people are merely a tribe rather than complex individual entities. This is an ideological project, enforced by Labour’s client army in local government. It has nothing to do with the welcome manifestations of cosmopolitanism, which for centuries have enriched all our lives, and which is the antithesis of the dull monocultural suburbia that blankets swathes of North America.

Many British people have become deeply and rightly suspicious of every government statistic on immigration. I was surprised to learn there are a quarter of a million Somalis in the UK and not the 90,000 I had imagined. Many people like the Third World; they never imagined that it would come to live next door, because this suits businessmen seeking cheap labour, and oblivious to the wider cultural impact of something that does not personally affect them. Nor that our EU dictated human rights laws would positively invite these not so humble masses to claim every entitlement, without apparently feeling the need for reciprocal responsibilities. Instead, the quasi-legal neologism ”Islamophobia” is deployed to protect the most outrageous claims of Islamist radicals, even though virtually all of the aggression has come from the Islamist side.

One of the biggest failures of government policy has been not to hold up the exemplary virtues of the Chinese community to those who imagine that Britain will become a glorified souk beneath loudspeakers sonorously proclaimingAllahu Akbar. It is all very well to inculcate British values through a Home Office manual and citizenship test, but are we so relativist that we can’t say: “Look at these Chinese people, this is how we expect you to behave, if you want the privilege of living in the UK”? One could do the same with Hindus or Sikhs.

If, at least in the public mind, the Islamist terrorist threat has focused these questions of identity, rights and responsibilities, it has also raised other questions about Britain’s world role. All prime ministers seem to go crazy when they first experience a US presidential motorcade, a glimpse of serious power. The limpet-like determination to attach ourselves to the US, described at the Chilcot inquiry by Sir Christopher Meyer, led to Blair’s questionable ventures – or ”my wars” as he vaingloriously had it – in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not so carefully crafted lies led to the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is driven by the dubious assumption that terrorism thrives in failed states, although this does not account for jihadists from Bolton or Luton, nor that truly failed states lack the sophisticated infrastructure required for terrorism, like credit cards to defraud. Why else are so few terrorists from sub-Saharan Africa?

Terrorism is only one facet of the current world scene. Relations with the US are important, but so are relations with India and China, and also for reasons of energy, with Russia. Despite the images of September 11 and their inevitable impact on the US psyche, there are deeper tectonic shifts in world power which we need to pay equal attention to. No signs of our solipsistic littérateurs doing that either, as they vainly grope around in the mind of a Mohammed Atta for the meaning of this last decade.

KRuddworld & Kruddwatch

TONY Abbott has attacked Kevin Rudd, saying he needs to learn that he was elected to represent Australia, and not the world.

Tagged as: a decade of terror, Mumbai attacks, Taj hotel