RCP:

Witness Tony Blair’s recent speech to the World Affairs Council on August 1, in Los Angeles. He defined the enemy as: “A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works.” The enemy’s reasoning was: “A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. They realised they had to create a completely different battle in Muslim minds: Muslim versus Western.”

The attacks were a way to galvanize the Muslim masses; to create conditions of war in which they must choose between their own and the other, and in which every Muslim “tribal” instinct (in the broadest sense, distinguishing “own” from “other”) would be viscerally engaged. It has inevitably the same effect not only through the Muslim-dominated world, but in the Muslim “diaspora” within the West, where the clash between the demands of Islam and the demands of Western life is most poignant. Hence the proliferation of so-called “home-grown” terror cells in Britain and elsewhere.

That speech of Mr Blair’s is among the few truly worth reading from our political masters, and for the point I have quoted. But what follows from it is not quite what Mr Blair prescribes. For his mind is still mostly in 2001. Since then, the enemy’s strategy has succeeded. It is getting less and less useful to claim that we are defending a “moderate Islam” that can accommodate the West, against a “fanatical Islam” that can’t. The enemy has succeeded in making the issue, Islam versus West.

The plot develops with the progressive takeover of the world Islamist movement, by the ayatollahs of Iran; and has been further thickened by the huge propaganda victory that Iran’s client, Hezbollah, has just won over Israel. This has had and will continue to have the same effect on Muslim mass psychology as the Al Qaeda terror attacks. It shows the most virulent and aggressive forms of Islam to be triumphing — to be, in effect, the wave of the future, the standard around which all Muslims may rally. It leaves all those who reject this standard not in the position of “moderate Muslims”, but rather in that of isolated and irrelevant or treasonous holdovers from some “Western imperialist” past.

Numbers have nothing to do with this; for the question is, who has the guns and will use them.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 12:19 pm and is filed under General, New Media, Religion, War, art, culture, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.