Open Thread On New London Bombings

I don't have much to say. I could link stuff, but Michelle Malkin has it all as usual.

As you may have heard, London's Mayor, "Red Ken" Livingston, recently blamed the 7/7 attacks on, well, Britain, and also decried terrorism, unless the victims of terrorism were Israelis, for such terrorism he made a special exception.

This is going to be bad. Those who are going to be harmed the most are Britain's Muslims. I say this without any happiness. But these lunatics are going to cause all sorts of problems -- from police scrutiny to random attacks by hoodlums -- on their fellow Muslims they claim to love so much.

It has long been the stated ambition of Islamicists to provoke an all out war of all of the West against all of Islam. More Muslims need to speak out -- and act -- more forcefully against this nihilist psychopathy unless they're comfortable being drafted against their will into this war of all against all.

How Many Times...? One idiot just made a possibly libelous statement about Matt Drudge.

If anyone wants to indulge in a bit of libel or hatemongering, please, start your own blog, and rant to your heart's content. Don't pollute my blog with that kind of crap.

Copycat/Agent Provocateur Attack? There's a lot of speculation about this, given the less deadly nature of this attack and the fact that one detonation was a detonation of, well, just a detonator, without explosives.

The speculation then goes: Perhaps this is the IRA, or perhaps this attack was perpetrated by right-wing ultranationalist terrorists hoping to provoke an additional backlash against Muslim immigrants.

Well, maybe. All things are possible, especially before there's much evidence in.

But once again, those Big Brother cameras that some are so worried about will almost certainly have caught one or more or all of the terrorists boarding the buses. We will have a pretty good idea about the perpetrators, and their likely motives, soon enough.

And even if this is some sort of coypcat attack, it seems a bit early to say the copycatters weren't, in fact, jihadis. They may simply have been Al Qaeda wannabees, inspired by the 7/7 attacks but not having the training at Pakistan terror bases that the 7/7 murderers had.

Sorry, but violent thuggish Islamicists remain the most obvious culprits. The most obvious culprit sometimes isn't the culprit at all, but it seems a bit early to too eagerly chase other culprits before we have more information.

Why Do They Hate Us? Update: Rightwingsparkle goes a-traipsing through an Enlgish language jihadi site and gets the chills.

In the interests of intellectual honesty, I will admit that the left is right-- the action in Iraq, and our support of Israel, does in fact contribute to "why they hate us."

Those who say Iraq and Israel have nothing to do with this are being rhetorically excessive, or a little naive, or just telling what they think is a white lie in the service of a bigger truth.

However-- the reality is that "why they hate us" is, as they say, overdetermined. Meaning: there are so many reasons they hate us that it's glib and stupid to attempt to say they bomb us for this or that reason. They have hundreds of reasons.

If not for Iraq, then for Afghanistan.

If not for Afghanistan, then for Palestine.

If not for Palestine, then for our military presence in the Gulf.

If not for our military presence in the Gulf, then the simple fact that we dominate the world miltiarily, technologically, and culturally, which is an affront to radical Islamicists who believe that Muslims must rule the world, and to follow Allah's teachings righteously, they must fight us to claim world dominion as dictated by the Prophet.

Etc.

And changing our behavior won't change any of this. We risked blood and treasure to save Muslims in Serbia; that won us no fans whatsoever. They're still screaming about the Andalusia and thousand-year-old grievances. Those who believe a charm offensive is going to win the hearts and minds of people still nursing grudges from a frickin' thousand years ago are simply delusional.

They just hate us. Perhaps hate isn't a strong enough word. I use "hate" to express my feelings from time to time, but that hate does not imply anything like the desire to murder people.

They view us, as the Nazis did their foes -- Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs -- as subhuman, dehumanized, nonhuman, and not deserving of the normal compassion and empathy one human feels for another.

Those who speak of reaching an "understanding" with these sorts of viciously racist psychopaths have to be a little more honest with themselves. Yes, the military solution is bound to take a long time and take a lot of lives.

But how long will the "understanding" route take? When your enemies don't even view you with the sort of empathy they feel for a dog, how long, precisely, will it take simply to convince them that you are just as entitled to live a life free of random violence and maimings as a dog is?

And how many lives will be lost pursuing this naive and quixotic dream of "educating" moral monsters in the most basic precepts of shared humanity?

If left-liberals want to pursue the "understanding" route with the self-made monsters of Islam, let me ask: Do you similary support the "understanding" route when dealing with gay-bashers/gay-killers, lynchers, and abortion clinic bombers?

Why the difference in approach? Why do you urge coercive action (jailing for life) for some monsters and endless compassion and leniency for others?

posted by Ace at 11:39 AM

| Access Comments