WarSclerotic

Just a Bit More Beheading than We Are Used To, Gatestone Institute, Douglas Murray, August 24, 2014

There has been a debate in the UK press suggesting we should hope that some of these ISIS killers come back to Britain, realize that jihad was all a phase and then head off to university for the start of the new term.

The beheading of James Foley was terrible, she stressed, “because we don’t know what [his] views were.”

Is there a time when even “combatants” — or anyone else — should be treated in this way? And who is to say who is a combatant and who not?

[A]s I recall saying after the last decapitation performed by a British man, the unspoken British deal on multiculturalism appears to come to light at such moments. The deal — the acceptance and accommodation — appears to be that mass, uncontrolled immigration has brought us all sorts of benefits, including a greater variety of food and cheap labour. The downside is that we have to put up with, among other things, a bit more beheading than we have been used to. But much of the political class appears to be content with this bargain. I beg to differ. As horrors like those of this week mount, a great many more people might feel that way too.

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Who is surprised? That is one question I have most wanted to know since the video was released of the murder of American journalist James Foley. The politicians keep expressing it. And interviewers have kept asking people whether they feel it. But who can honestly say that he was surprised to learn that the murderer of the American journalist turned out to be a “British” man?

American journalist James Foley (left) is shown kneeling beside the British jihadist who murdered him moments later (Image source: Islamic State video)

Did anyone really still think that a British Islamist would not be capable of doing this? Why wouldn’t he do it in Iraq or Syria if his allies had already done it in London? After all, it was only last year that two other Islamists beheaded one of our own soldiers – Drummer Lee Rigby – in broad daylight in London. And it is only twelve years since another Londoner – Omar Sheikh – arranged the abduction and decapitation of another American journalist, Daniel Pearl.

What is shocking is that expressions of “shock” seem to be regarded as an adequate response. Prime Minister David Cameron has pronounced himself “appalled” by the act, and made clear that he “utterly condemns” it. As though anyone should ever have expected him to think otherwise. But this is to a great extent what government policy is reduced to in Britain, as in the United States. Politicians briefly break off their holidays in order not to do anything much, but to be seen to be doing “something.” And they then make sure to stand in front of the cameras and say how opposed they are to “something.” It is the denigration of people in positions where they actually could do something, to the level of the commentariat.

The question, as written here before, is not how sorry any one political leader feels about such savagery, but what they are going to do about it. And here in Britain, we are in something of a bind. We can deal with fringe details. But we are incapable of having the real debate or taking any real action that is needed. In lieu of such action, the political classes are left floundering, desperate to cling to any point, however unimportant, in order to look as they are acting.

So in the wake of the release of the Foley murder video by ISIS, the British Labour party’s Shadow Home Secretary attempted to take political advantage of this affair.[1] The truth is that the Labour party seized on this debate because it was the debate they knew best, and the one they are most comfortable going round and round on. Even the remarks of the former Conservative party Security Minister — Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones — who was reduced, on the BBC’s Today program, to suggesting that the solution to tackling ISIS is to engage more in social media campaigns against the group. Neville-Jones is regarded as somewhat hawkish. But that even people of such stature are reduced to this, reveals something important.

Atrocity after atrocity is perpetrated by Muslims radicalized in the UK, and the debate over what to do about it remains bizarrely circumscribed and ineffectual. Surely somewhere in the conversation and response should be the expression of a desire for a strategy against ISIS which has at its base the utter eradication of the group — wholesale battlefield victory against them, killing their members and leadership in their entirety. Would that not be a desirable objective? I have yet to hear a mainstream politician suggest this or even talk in these terms. Indeed, there has been debate in the UK press suggesting we should hope that some of these ISIS killers come back to Britain, realize that jihad was all a phase and then head off to university for the start of a new term.

And then there are the longer-term objectives. Since writing about it in this place, a number of other media have finally picked up one of the most concerning statistics to show the failure of integration at which we are staring in Britain: that more British Muslims are fighting together with ISIS than with the UK Armed Forces. This is just a tip of the problem. On a BBC show after news of the murder of James Foley, I found myself discussing these matters with young British Muslims. All condemned the act. One – the Ahmadiyya Muslim in the group – was superb in his utter abhorrence of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam and his repeated and sincere expressions of pride in Britain and British achievements in the world. But among the others? Well one of them — a nice and nicely presented young man said that this was totally abhorrent because “a non-combatant should not be treated like this.” “Well sure,” I was forced to say. “But why only non-combatants? Is there a time when even ‘combatants’ — or anyone else — should be treated in this way? And who is to say who is a combatant and who not?”

Even more concerning was a young woman from Nottingham who spent as much time as possible talking about the “alienation” and “rejection” which a lot of young Muslims feel. It was repeatedly pointed out to her that there isn’t a young person of any religion or background who does not feel alienation at some point. The vital question then, is not just whether such a sense of grievance is justified, but whether there are people seeking to manipulate and then play into such grievances and what extremes some individuals might urge vulnerable minds to as a result. A snapshot of my fellow guest’s own thinking was available in her own condemnation of the murder. The beheading of James Foley was terrible, she stressed, because among other things “we don’t know what [his] views were.”

Here again a little peep-hole into a mainstream and radical world view becomes possible. What if James Foley had not been — as he appears to have been — a man with a deep desire to bring out the terrible stories and sufferings of the region, but someone who was ambivalent to them? What if he had been the most pro-intervention bomb-them-all-to-hell right-winger? Or a member of the Republican Party? What if he had been a Zionist? Or a Jew?

There are poisonous attitudes and lies going around unmolested in this country. And they are one of the causes of the repeated international shame that is coming down upon us. These ideas — hatred and suspicion of the actions of Britain, America, Israel and our other liberal, democratic allies — act as the background music to radicalization. This music plays to exactly the sort of people who are going out to fight with ISIS and exactly the sort of people who think that although they might condemn a beheading in this circumstance, it isn’t always a cut-and-dry issue.

The BBC is reporting about the voice of James Foley’s killer: “Some experts think the accent sounds like the man comes from London, as it is a mixture of multicultural speech patterns often heard on the streets of the city.”

It certainly does sound “like the man comes from London.” And as I recall saying after the last decapitation performed by a British man, the unspoken British deal on multiculturalism appears to come to light at such moments. The deal — the acceptance and accommodation — appears to be that mass, uncontrolled immigration has brought us all sorts of benefits, including a greater variety of food and cheap labour. The downside is that we have to put up with, among other things, a bit more beheading than we have been used to. But much of the political class appears to be content with this bargain. I beg to differ. As horrors like those of this week mount, a great many more people might feel that way too.

[1] The Home Secretary said the problem was the government’s watering-down of Control Orders — which had been brought in by the former Labour government. Control Orders give the state the ability to put someone under 24-hour surveillance or house arrest, necessitated by the then Labour government’s unwise signature of the European Convention on Human Rights. True, the coalition government – under pressure from the Liberal Democrats in the coalition — very slightly watered these Orders down to satisfy critics. But this has nothing to do with this case. So far as anyone knows the murderer of James Foley is not somebody who slipped any surveillance measures in the UK. And rather obviously a TPIM or Control Order being slapped on an individual — however British — is no use if that particular individual is at present beheading American journalists inside the no-go-zone of the Islamic State. That this was the best the Labour opposition could come up with is telling.

The biggest single trigger of jihadism has been our adherence to ‘multiculturalism’ Breitbart, Professor Anthony Glees, August 24, 2014

The sadistic beheading of the American journalist James Foley by an ISIL killer apparently from Britain, just a few days ago, is the first such killing of an American by a jihadist with a British passport.

But it is the second ritual beheading carried out by British Islamists (the head of a British soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, was hacked from his body by two of them in Woolwich, London last year in full public view).

Jihadists from Britain are at the forefront of the most violent extremism seen in modern times and many will properly be puzzled by how such people be citizens of a civilised country like Britain and why we seem powerless to prevent them from behaving like this.

On 8 October last year Andrew Parker, head of MI5, Britain’s security service, said there were ‘several thousand Islamist extremists’ in the UK. He also said that the UK has ‘one of the most developed and effective set of counter-terrorist capabilities and arrangements in the world’. Adding ‘for the future there is good reason to be concerned about Syria. A growing proportion of our casework now has some link to Syria, mostly concerning individuals from the UK who have travelled there to fight or who aspire to do so. Al Nusrah and other extremist Sunni groups there aligned with Al Qaeda to attack western countries’.

If we knew all this last autumn, and if our capabilities and arrangements are so superb, why have we not only failed to eliminate the jihadist danger but actually seen it increase? Today about 500 young Muslims from Britain have travelled to Syria, turning jihad into a gap-year activity.

One answer is that instead of quizzing Parker (and his colleagues from MI6 and GCHQ) as to what should be done about several thousand extremists in Britain, Britain’s intelligence community was stunned by a barrage of criticism from civil liberties groups and the libertarians in the Tory and LibDem parties, a bizarre coalition, which was frequently joined by prominent ‘human rights’ lawyers.

Already under attack from this lobby thanks to the appalling activities of Edward Snowden, and of Julian Assange before him, our intelligence chiefs found themselves having to justify their work on our behalf instead of being able to request more resources and firmer policies to make carrying it out easier for them.

Just a few days ago another jihadist from London, known previously only as a rapper, whose music was broadcast on the BBC, was seen in ‘the Islamic State’ proudly holding the severed head of a soldier under the caption ‘Chillin’ with my homie of what’s left of him’.

Another Brit, Reyaad Khan, 20, from Cardiff boasted online of his ‘martyrdom ops’, ‘planning “fireworks” ’ and ‘executing many prisoners’. Abdul Amin, an engineering student from Aberdeen texted that joining ISIL was one of the ‘happiest moments of his life’. There are many other like these: the list is very long. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond has admitted that ‘significant numbers’ of Britons are involved in the commission of atrocities’.

It is now obvious to everyone that almost ten years after the London bombings, Britain has a serious and growing problem when it comes to young British Muslims becoming radicalised and turning to terror. What now needs to be reflected upon is why this should be the case – and what our policy makers must do about it.

Part of the problem is that many Muslims in Britain come from parts of the world like Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Horn of Africa, where political violence is endemic. Yet the biggest single trigger of jihadism here has been our adherence to ‘multiculturalism’ which has meant that we have for far too long allowed vile Islamist ideologies to be propagated under the cover of ‘free speech’ or ‘religious freedom’.

Islamists in Britain have been able shamefully to exploit our proud tradition of freedom and staying out of religious disputes, seen as questions of personal faith. We have closed our eyes to the reality that to fight for ISIL and to slaughter and maim on its behalf is a political act, not a religious one.

Of course, the so-called preachers like Anjem Choudary repeatedly claim that Islam justifies the butchery and genocide. However because Sunni Muslims have no recognised religious hierarchy anyone can call themselves a ‘preacher’ and go on the campus lecture circuit, to mosques or other places young Muslims congregate. They are even able to gain funding from an Islamic ‘charity’ which arranges their tours and funds their expenses.

What’s more, declaring for ISIL is not like joining a mainstream political party or a college debating society. Those who fight for it explicitly want the overthrow of parliamentary, liberal democracy, the establishment of a world caliphate – the black flag of ISIL to fly over Buckingham Palace as one young jihadist put it a few days ago. For the jihadist, ‘we’ means the jihadists and ‘you’ means us, the Brits. Islamists hate Britain and despise its values. They say so. Their black flag has nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with political power and domination.

Since the Cameron-Clegg coalition came to power in 2010, specific measures (such as control orders) have been abolished and replaced with much milder ones (Mrs May, the home secretary, said this was to ‘restore civil liberties’) and the Communities minister, Eric Pickles, has made it clear he is bored by counter-radicalisation measures regarded as wasteful (which some often were) and which smack of Blairism. Whilst Cameron himself (for example in his 2011 Munich speech) publicly railed against extremism, his government quickly lost its appetite to act against it.

Even so, four years of counter-radicalisation measures, even weak ones, have not helped us win the battle against murderous Islamism. It is plain, therefore, that the time has now come to go much further than ever before in stamping jihadism out of British life.

For one thing we need to scrap the concept of multiculturalism, of letting different cultures co-exist inside Britain as if they were equal to our own free, western values. Sharia courts in the UK should be immediately dismantled. We need to pull ‘faith’ out of education. ‘Faith schools’ (another Blair obsession) have been cynically used by Islamists to peddle their own political views, promote Sharia law, and anti-Semitic and anti-women attitudes (as was seen recently in Birmingham).

This is truly about politics, power and political systems, not religion. One ISIL recruit from East London told the BBC ‘the caliphate is something that is in the heart of every single practising Muslim. There is not a single country in the world, whether it’s Saudi or Pakistan that implements Islam fully. So now we’ve got this caliphate, people are going to flock there and leave the west and live their [sic] peacefully under the Sharia’. Here we have it: this brainwashing (which extends to the belief that living in the Islamic State is ‘peaceful’) didn’t just happen by itself; it was done to this man and thousands like him by odious demagogues.

It should be made clear to everyone that if you live in Britain, you live by British rules. If you don’t like them, you are free to go to a country that has the rules you do like. Instead of preventing radicalism by bringing back ineffective control orders, institutions who allow extremists onto their premises to brainwash young Muslims should be prosecuted and if necessary closed down. Foreign ‘preachers’ should be kept out of the country.

Finally, rather than try to prevent jihadists from Britain going off to Syria by confiscating their passports, we should let them travel and take their passports off them only when they’ve left Britain. They should never be allowed to return. The sadistic murders and mass killings in which they revel show that whatever nation they belong to, it is not Britain.

At least five rockets fired from Syria at northern Golan Heights – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Rocket hits empty house in Western Galilee; 2 people lightly wounded in Be’er Sheva; some 100 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel since midnight.

Ynetnews

Latest Update: 08.24.14, 01:41 / Israel News

At least five rockets were fired from Syria at the northern Golan Heights Saturday overnight, after a rocket fired from Lebanon hit an empty house in the Western Galilee earlier.

Rocket alert sirens blared through the Golan Heights at least three times around 1:30am in short intervals. All of the rockets hit open areas, while three of them hit close to communities in the northern Golan. There were no reports of wounded.

Earlier Saturday night, two people were lightly wounded from rocket shrapnel in Be’er Sheva on Saturday night after two rockets hit a parking lot and a park in the city, police said.

Lebanese reports indicated that two rockets had been fired into Israel from Dheira in southern Lebanon, three kilometers from the border with Israel. According to the reports, security forces from Lebanon began searching for the locations from where the rockets were fired.

A Lebanese source said IAF helicopters were seen flying over the area of ​​the border.

Some 100 rockets were fired at Israel on Saturday, with one of the rockets hitting a communal dining hall in Nahal Oz, the very same kibbutz in which 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman was killed from a mortar hit the day before. Damage was caused to the structure, but fortunately there were no injuries.

At least one rocket was intercepted over Petah Tikvah in a rocket volley at central Israel on Saturday evening, with shrapnel falling the yard of a house. Three rockets were intercepted earlier over Ashkelon and shrapnel from the interceptions caused damage to buildings in the city. Another rocket shot down over Sdot Negev. One rocket hit an open area in Sdot Negev, one in Be’er Tuviya that started a fire, and three in open areas in Eshkol and another hitting a cowshed.

Rocket fire inceased in the late afternoon, with seven rockets hitting open areas in Eshkol and two inside communities, one of which caused light damage to a storage space. Six rockets hit Sdot Negev while four were intercepted by the Iron Dome over Hof Ashkelon.

In the early afternoon, 1 rocket landed inside a community in Eshkol, causing damage to houses while another landed near the border fence inside the regional council’s area. No one was hurt. One rocket landed in an open area in Sdot Negev, while three rockets were intercepted over Ashdod, Ashkelon and Hof Ashkelon.

Around noontime, two rockets hit open areas in Sdot Negev, while another hit inside a community in Eshkol. One woman was treated by paramedics for shock.

Sirens sounded multiple times around noontime in the Sha’ar HaNegev, Sdot Negev and Eshkol Regional Councils. One rocket exploded in a small forest near one of the communities, causing a fire to erupt.

Five other rockets exploded inside communities in Eshkol, causing damage to property, including agricultural machinery, tractors and houses. One woman suffered from an anxiety attack after a rocket hit in the area. Another rocket was intercepted above Ashkelon.

Palestinian rocket attacks continued to pound southern Israel on Saturday morning, with six rockets landing in the Sdot Negev Regional Council area.   Iron Dome shot down one rocket above the council.

Four-year-old Daniel Tregerman became on Friday afternoon the first child casualty in Israel since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge when a mortar fired from Gaza struck his kibbutz in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, and took his life.

On Saturday morning, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that the mortar that killed Tregerman was fired from a Palestinian Authority school that provides shelter for refugees in the Gaza Strip, and is close to an UNRWA facility.

Earlier Saturday, security officials stated that the mortar had been fired from within an UNRWA school in Gaza.

AFP contributed to this report.

I consider this the greatest day of my life. Hitherto I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people — forgetfulness of its being, almost. Today I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world. This is a great age, the age of liberation of the Jewish soul, and it has been accomplished through the Zionist movement, so that no one in the world will be able to destroy it. (Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, World Publishing (1971) pg 393)

I have read your article on Zionism and feel, as a strong devotee of the Zionist idea, that I must answer you… I realized that only a common enterprise dear to the heart of Jews all over the world could restore this people to health…It was the great achievement of Herzl’s to have realized and proclaimed… the establishment of a national home, or more accurately, a center in Palestine…

All this you call nationalism… But a communal purpose, without which we can neither live nor die in this hostile world, can always be called by that ugly name. In any case it is a nationalism whose aim not power but dignity and health.If we didn’t have to live among intolerant, narrow minded and violent people, I would be the first to discard all nationalism in favor of a universal humanity

Letter to Professor Hellpach, published in Mein Weltbild (The World as I See It), 1934