Militant Moderate: Apologia of an Anti-Terrorist

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Apologia of an Anti-Terrorist

The King of Jordan has said that it is the British occupation of Iraq that was behind the suicide bombings in London. When will he wake up and face the reality of what is happening? Whether you agree or disagree with the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, one thing is for certain - the 'insurgents' don't care about the Iraqi people. They are outsiders who want to impose their Islamofascist theocracy on ordinary Iraqis, because ultimately they want to impose their Islamofascist theocracy on all of us.

As for those people, such as Michael Moore, who said that there was no terrorist threat posed by Al-Qaeda, they have been proved sadly wrong. Especially when people are prepared to blow themselves up, there is little that we can do to stop terrorist atrocities. If someone is set on it, it isn't hard to kill 50 people and to strike fear into the hearts of many others. A case as simple as the Washington snipers proves this - a few people shot dead, and a whole city was terrified of using petrol stations after dark. It is precisely because the mechanism of terror is so abhorrent to our values, yet in many ways so simple, that it is so effective in spreading fear.

Do people really think that the West would be a less "legitimate" target for these walking timebombs if we weren't in Iraq? The Islamofascists have no respect for our way of life, or our freedoms - they see things such as our tolerance of homosexuality as proof of the unalterable corruptibility of Western freedoms. Fundamentalist Islam is a menace, and it must be stamped out. When people are prepared to get up in front of an audience, blame the Economist for spreading dangerous values and ask "who cares if they lost two towers?" - and this was at the Oxford Union - there isn't much hope for negotiations or reasoning.

The bombers who blew up the Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon didn't have Iraq to worry about. Oh, but our policy in the Israeli-Palestine conflict is all wrong, they say. Let's just remember that the PLO was created in 1964, 3 years before the annexation of Palestinian territory. Our record there isn't exactly glowing, but to pretend that the problems are limited to one side is short-sighted, and will ultimately entrench tension and anger, not dissipate it.

Following the blame game is morally corrupt. People who are prepared to blow themselves up, killing as many others as possible, are not worth our time. We cannot continue to appease them by saying "oh, it's Iraq", "oh, it's Palestine", "oh, it's the headscarf law". They are all sideshows compared to the true aim of the terrorists - to subjugate the freedoms we sought so hard to establish. Indeed, to back down as a result of terrorist atrocities is exactly what they want. They want us to go into retreat, to back down - because then they know they can strike fear into our hearts and change our course of action.

We saw how appeasement failed in the 1930s - it failed because we were dealing with a leader set to achieve his goals come what may. In that case, it was sending millions of innocents across Europe to the slaughter. It's not that different now, other than that the balance of power is totally loaded with us. We have to make sure we use our moral superiority most of all, however. We can't try and understand the motivations of the terrorists - we must fundamentally reject their politics and their way of life.