The terror that dare not speak its name

Whenever there’s a round-up of terror suspects, whether in England or Canada, we always hear a lot about how they represent a “broad strata” of society. And in a sense, I suppose that’s true, if the society in question is that of Baluchistan. There are British-born Muslims, Canadian-born Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, pregnant Muslims, 34-year old Muslim biochemists, 17-year old Muslim students, black converts to Islam, white converts to Islam, Hindu converts to Islam, Muslims born in Virgo with Venus ascendant, and Muslims born on Venus with Virgo ascendant. In short, a pretty broad strata of Muslim society.

First, it was box cutters. Then it was shoes. Now it’s liquid explosives smuggled in sports drinks, to be detonated with a camera battery. It seems to me the overall strategy here is to get as many items banned from in-flight travel as possible, until eventually we’ll all be boarding in loincloths. The deadly conflagration over the ocean thing may not have worked out so well, but on the bright side, it’s imposed the unthinkable inconvenience of passing a whole trans-Atlantic flight without lipstick or an iPod.

I can’t help but feel that al-Qaeda is in danger of becoming a one trick pony. I mean to say, airplanes. YAWN. That’s so, like, five years ago. We waited this long, and all we got was this lame resuscitation of a failed 11-year old plot conceived, incidentally, in the supposed heyday of Clinton internationalism. Come on. Even the whole sorry shoe-bomber episode was better than this. It’s time to get over this unhealthy obsession with flight travel and move on.

Granted, al-Qaeda has a well-developed flair for the dramatic, but their problem is a marked distaste for mediocrity. They’re like an opera diva who can belt it out no sweat at the Royal Albert Hall, but freezes singing the national anthem at the local high-school football match. All this emphasis on glamorous, high-value targets is costly and self-defeating, especially while the apostate Shi’a are battling the Zionists so successfully. Makes you look a little bumbling, doesn’t it, Osama? You scored a big hit with the 9/11 stunt, but you’re all washed up now, trying to relive your past glory like a cheap starlet. You used to be a luxury brand, but now you look more like a cheap knock-off. The Hezbollah, meanwhile, is building the brand one Zionist at a time.

Robert Fisk recently ridiculed suggestions that the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict is anything so tawdry as a religious war, instead describing Hezbollah’s attacks as proceeding from purely rational motives – to wit, a territorial dispute over the Sheba’a Farms, which surely has as many claimants as it has spellings. Of course, the Sheba’a Farms has been recognized as disputed Syrian-Israeli territory, and has at no time in its history belonged to Lebanon – which is precisely why the United Nations certified Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 to international borders. One wonders how he would explain the recent plot to blow up airliners departing Heathrow, a dispute over sovereignty of the concession stand in Terminal B?

Here’s a clue. The ink on the arrest warrants was barely dry before Muslim groups began issuing the usual qualified condemnations, predictably linking the planned terror attacks to British foreign policy. As it stands, the plotters were simply giving violent expression to a widespread opposition to British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's leave aside for a moment the inconvenient fact that when it comes to killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, other Muslims win hands-down over the hapless British. In fact, it's hard to see what stands between the wholesale slaughter of Muslims at the hands of other Muslims except the presence of coalition forces. But withdraw British forces, the thinking goes, and all those British-born jihadis will lose the will to fight and volunteer instead to groom kittens at the local SPCA.

Some time ago, a Montreal-area imam explained to the local paper why Islamic religious law encourages its women to veil. Unveiled women, he explained, might incite uncontrollable lust in Muslim men. Rather than control the impulse, so much simpler to just wrap women in a burqa and call it a day. And since independent British policy might incite uncontrollable rage in radicalized British Muslims, well, if we can’t accustom the radicalized Muslims to the policy, then accommodate the policy to the radicalized Muslims.

That might work when we’re talking about abandoning some Jews in Israel to the tender mercies of their Islamist neighbors, but what happens when the demand is the imposition of shari’a law – something polls suggest is the ardent wish of 30% of British Muslims? A similar poll last year reported that a commensurate 30% of British Muslims believe Western society is hopelessly decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to end it. Are these groups seriously suggesting that we allow our best interests to be dictated by those who most wish for our destruction? British foreign policy is a convenient pretext used by those whose real goal is the Islamicization of British society.

No amount of broad euphemism for Islamist terror is going to change the reality. Police can boast all they like of consulting with “cultural communities” prior to arrests, journalists can skirt the obvious and identify the suspects as “Asians” like they were Japanese tourists on holiday, and airline security can pretend that an 83-year old grandmother from Wichita is as great a risk to public safety as a bearded 20-year old with a well-thumbed copy of the Koran in his backpack and a lot of racked up airmiles to Pakistan. We can trot out the well-known aphorism that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but there’s no denying its converse, that the vast majority of terrorists are Muslims. And no amount of sensitivity training will make this one jot less true.