Honest Aryan
2006-08-29 21:01:11 UTC
"Pan-Islamism challenges idea of nation state
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn13.html
Mark Steyn
August 13, 2006
Here's how an early report by Reuters covered the massive terrorism
bust in
the United Kingdom. They started out conventionally enough just
chugging
along with airport closures, arrest details and quotes from bystanders,
but
then got to the big picture:
" 'I'm an ex-flight attendant, I'm used to delays, but this is a
different
kind of delay,' said Gita Saintangelo, 54, an American returning to
Miami.
'We heard about it on the TV this morning. We left a little early and
said a
prayer,' she said at Heathrow.
"Britain has been criticised by Islamist militants for its military
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prime Minister Tony Blair has also
come
under fire at home and abroad for following the U.S. lead and refusing
to
call for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and
Lebanese
Hizbollah guerrillas."
Is there a software program at Western news agencies that automatically
inserts random segues in terrorism stories? The plot to commit mass
murder
by seizing up to 10 U.K.-U.S. airliners was well advanced long before
the
first Israeli strike against Hezbollah. Yet it's apparently axiomatic
at
Reuters, the BBC and many other British media outlets that Tony Blair
is the
root cause of jihad. He doesn't even have to invade anywhere anymore.
He
just has to "refuse to call for an immediate cease-fire" when some
other
fellows invade some other fellows over on the other side of the world.
Grant for the sake of argument that these reports are true -- that when
the
bloodthirsty Zionist warmongers attack all those marvelous Hezbollah
social
outreach programs it drives British subjects born and bred to plot mass
murder against their fellow Britons. What does that mean?
Here's a clue, from a recent Pew poll that asked: What do you consider
yourself first? A citizen of your country or a Muslim?
In the United Kingdom, 7 percent of Muslims consider themselves British
first, 81 percent consider themselves Muslim first.
And that's where the really valid Lebanese comparison lies. Lebanon is
a
sovereign state. It has an executive and a military. But its military
has
less sophisticated weaponry than Hezbollah and its executive wields
less
authority over its jurisdiction than Hezbollah. In the old days, the
Lebanese government would have fallen and Hezbollah would have formally
supplanted the state. But non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and
al-Qaida
have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to
fry.
If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N.
seat
and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of
use to
such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and
Lebanon
is. They act locally but they think globally.
And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's
Christians
may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite
constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce
differences
between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to
note the
numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent
weeks
who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his
(Shiite)
Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew
used
to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe
a
few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire
populations
are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any
means,
but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which
they're
nominally citizens.
Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their
primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By
comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39
percent of
Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent
consider
themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been
writing
about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the
Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of
2002:
Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely
Islamic
than their parents and grandparents.
That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to
conventional
ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the
average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern
multicultural man
disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on
being un
citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it's
mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World
basket-case
and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set
have
no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It's a
quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but
they
don't act on it.
The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The
World,"
they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only
take
over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and
Lebanon. The
Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern
multicultural democracy -- legalisms, victimology -- to their own
advantage.
The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at
a
certain level Her Majesty's government shares the same problem as their
opposite numbers in Beirut: They don't quite dare to move against the
pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable
them
to do so.
So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by
MI-5
and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the
one
after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the
meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen.
If
you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years
all
hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he'd have thought
you
were a kook. If you'd told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be
banned
except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the
adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a
security
guard, she'd have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a
ludicrous imposition. But now it's here. What other changes will the
Islamists have wrought in another five years?
Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness
the
unraveling of the world."
--
Visit the Cybermuseum of BBC War Crimes at:
http://users.bluecarrots.com/rbisto/BBC/BBC.html
Admission *FREE* - even for libruls!
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn13.html
Mark Steyn
August 13, 2006
Here's how an early report by Reuters covered the massive terrorism
bust in
the United Kingdom. They started out conventionally enough just
chugging
along with airport closures, arrest details and quotes from bystanders,
but
then got to the big picture:
" 'I'm an ex-flight attendant, I'm used to delays, but this is a
different
kind of delay,' said Gita Saintangelo, 54, an American returning to
Miami.
'We heard about it on the TV this morning. We left a little early and
said a
prayer,' she said at Heathrow.
"Britain has been criticised by Islamist militants for its military
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prime Minister Tony Blair has also
come
under fire at home and abroad for following the U.S. lead and refusing
to
call for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Israel and
Lebanese
Hizbollah guerrillas."
Is there a software program at Western news agencies that automatically
inserts random segues in terrorism stories? The plot to commit mass
murder
by seizing up to 10 U.K.-U.S. airliners was well advanced long before
the
first Israeli strike against Hezbollah. Yet it's apparently axiomatic
at
Reuters, the BBC and many other British media outlets that Tony Blair
is the
root cause of jihad. He doesn't even have to invade anywhere anymore.
He
just has to "refuse to call for an immediate cease-fire" when some
other
fellows invade some other fellows over on the other side of the world.
Grant for the sake of argument that these reports are true -- that when
the
bloodthirsty Zionist warmongers attack all those marvelous Hezbollah
social
outreach programs it drives British subjects born and bred to plot mass
murder against their fellow Britons. What does that mean?
Here's a clue, from a recent Pew poll that asked: What do you consider
yourself first? A citizen of your country or a Muslim?
In the United Kingdom, 7 percent of Muslims consider themselves British
first, 81 percent consider themselves Muslim first.
And that's where the really valid Lebanese comparison lies. Lebanon is
a
sovereign state. It has an executive and a military. But its military
has
less sophisticated weaponry than Hezbollah and its executive wields
less
authority over its jurisdiction than Hezbollah. In the old days, the
Lebanese government would have fallen and Hezbollah would have formally
supplanted the state. But non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and
al-Qaida
have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to
fry.
If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N.
seat
and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of
use to
such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and
Lebanon
is. They act locally but they think globally.
And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's
Christians
may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite
constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce
differences
between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to
note the
numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent
weeks
who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his
(Shiite)
Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew
used
to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe
a
few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire
populations
are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any
means,
but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which
they're
nominally citizens.
Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their
primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By
comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39
percent of
Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent
consider
themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been
writing
about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the
Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of
2002:
Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely
Islamic
than their parents and grandparents.
That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to
conventional
ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the
average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern
multicultural man
disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on
being un
citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for Western do-gooders, it's
mostly a pose: They may occasionally swing by some Third World
basket-case
and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set
have
no wish to live anywhere but an advanced Western democracy. It's a
quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but
they
don't act on it.
The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The
World,"
they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only
take
over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and
Lebanon. The
Islamists are very good at using the principal features of the modern
multicultural democracy -- legalisms, victimology -- to their own
advantage.
The United Kingdom is, relatively speaking, a non-failed state, but at
a
certain level Her Majesty's government shares the same problem as their
opposite numbers in Beirut: They don't quite dare to move against the
pan-Islamists and they have no idea what possible strategy would enable
them
to do so.
So instead they tackle the symptoms. Excellent investigative work by
MI-5
and Scotland Yard foiled this plot, and may foil the next one, and the
one
after that, and the 10 after that, and the 100 after those. And in the
meantime, a thousand incremental inconveniences fall upon the citizen.
If
you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years
all
hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he'd have thought
you
were a kook. If you'd told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be
banned
except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the
adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a
security
guard, she'd have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a
ludicrous imposition. But now it's here. What other changes will the
Islamists have wrought in another five years?
Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we're about to witness
the
unraveling of the world."
--
Visit the Cybermuseum of BBC War Crimes at:
http://users.bluecarrots.com/rbisto/BBC/BBC.html
Admission *FREE* - even for libruls!