RUTHFULLY YOURS

The GCCEI needs to examine, among other things, the way in which its patron, Saudi Arabia, has participated in, if not spearheaded, the very extremism that it is claiming now to combat: the connection between Wahhabism and terrorism; the hostility of its regime to democracy; the abuse of human rights; and the suppression of moderate interpretations of Islam.

When Trump stated that fighting extremism and terrorism “transcends every other consideration,” he was, in effect, giving them unwritten permission to continue repressing their citizens and whatever else they wished.

The GCCEI will be managed by a board of 12 directors appointed every five years, and the number of directors from each member state will be based on that country’s financial contribution to the center. In other words, the center will be ruled by — and further the interests of — wealthy absolute monarchies.

During his trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe in May, U.S. President Donald Trump inaugurated the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology (GCCEI) in Riyadh — an endeavor that its appointed secretary-general, Nasir Al-Biqami of Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, described as the “fruit of collaboration between Muslim countries that believe in the importance of combating terrorism.”

However admirable a goal from the point of view of the West, this initiative has little chance of success, given the repressive regimes involved and the extremist worldview of the individuals who will be funded to promote it.As Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and top adviser to former U.S. President George W. Bush, wrote:

“Partnerships with repressive regimes may in some cases exacerbate rather than solve the problem for us. Gradual reform is exactly the right approach, but will we see President Trump pushing President Sisi of Egypt (with whom he is friendly), or Erdogan of Turkey, or the Bahrainis, for gradual reform?”

Pointing to the weakness of Trump’s praise of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia for “working to undermine… radicalism,” Abrams stated:

“This is quite wrong. The Sunni royal family’s oppression of the country’s Shia majority is in fact creating a breeding ground for radicalism and opening a door for Iranian subversion. … Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam is at least a gateway drug for extremism. All around the world, Saudi money is being used to suppress indigenous forms of Islam. Saudi preachers, mosques, and schools teach that local and moderate versions of Islam are impure and must be replaced by the only true version: the Saudi Wahhabi version. But that version of Islam treats unbelievers with contempt and often hatred, oppresses women, and opposes democracy.”

Jihadism loves a weak horse, as no less an authority than Osama Bin Laden reminded us, if we care to listen. What we owe the memory of violent Islam’s many recent victims is to acknowledge the very real war that made them its casualties and respond accordingly.

Those with heads still below the clouds and feet firmly on the ground – or simply with heads not in the sand — should be readily able to accept several fundamental truths about Islam and the West.

First, we are at war. The enemy is a soldier, not a criminal.

Second, the enemy and his motives and methods are in plain sight, not remotely a mystery. What inspires them might be incomprehensible to any sane observer, but the bitter fruits of that inspiration are clear as day.

Third, there are ways to respond other than through vapid hand-wringing, hand holding, candle-lit vigils and impotent head-shaking.

Fourth, it is not too late to act, despite decades of poor decisions in the West.

These truths are clear to me, though plainly not to everyone. There is a broad lack of will to recognise this escalaing war and, more culpable than even that, a refusal to identify an enemy, other than dressing him in palliative euphemism. Why this is so, take your pick. Academics have sought to instill an unshakable deference before “the other”, also infusing with reflexive horror the very thought of standing up for, or even recognising, the existence and virtues of Western values, especially Judeo-Christian ones. There is also queasiness at the thought of being called to fight a war in an age of comfort, endless distractions and, let’s be blunt, spinelessness. Top off that list with a simple lack of understanding of how to fight back and then, to complete the recipe, add the mandatory dash of “tolerance”, which apparently means we must tolerate the intolerant and intolerable.

The sneering green Left likes to brand all who dispute global warming as “climate deniers”, which is funny when you think about it because temperatures have flat-lined for almost 20 years, the IPCC admits its models have been hopelessly out of whack, and every Flanneryesque prediction of doom by roasting or melting inevitably falls on its face. There is nothing there to deny, in other words, except rent-seekers’ press releases.

But Islam’s propensity to inspire murderous assaults, well that is very much “there”. Blood on the streets of Manchester, London and, as of last night, the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, attests to that. Yet here, where the evidence of a palpable threat is beyond dispute, a virulent denialism flourishes. Often it is encouraged and abetted by those most loud in their climate alarmism. The infamous episode of Q&A, in which junketeering warmist Lawrence Krauss cast aspersions on whitegoods by way of dismissing Islamic butchery, provides a priceless example:

TONY JONES: Lawrence, we see that Trump is stepping back from some of his positions. Will he step back on…? He’s obviously got within his administration people who are serious climate science deniers.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Yes, he certainly does.

So let us start, first of all, with the Kraussian doctrine of dismissal by diminution. “More chance of being hit by a falling fridge than by terrorism,” the great mind pronounced. Tell that to a Coptic Eqyptian, buddy. True or not — and it most certainly isn’t – you are still left with the fact that such logic is irrelevant and, ultimately, entirely meaningless.

Then there are those who simply cannot see any evil whatsoever in Islam. This is the Religion of Peace™ brigade, the ones who insist the threat starts and ends with those “lone wolves”. They swear there is nothing to see here, shrink from appending the label “terrorist”. That would be simplistic stereotyping, don’t you know. More than that, describing someone as a terrorist poses the obvious question: to what end are little girls being blown up and Saturday night revellers knifed? The answer is so obvious denialists cannot utter it, nor will they sit silent and let others do so. The person who speaks the self-evident truth must be torn down, blitzed with a Twitter storm, made the object of ridicule and shunning.

While it seems hardly believable anyone would think this way, many political “leaders” find it convenient to pay lip service. The protagonists of this line cast the enemy as a “criminal” and support only law-enforcement responses. How long might World War Two have lasted if every Luftwaffe pilot downed over Britain were to have been put on trial, with attendant costs and delays. Fortunately, in those days, the ability to recognise a war and discern its foot soldiers had yet to be eroded by cant and cowardice.

Whether belief in the caliphate or a tendency to jihadism is the core business of any or all forms of Islam or merely the whacky obsession of the very few doesn’t matter in practical terms. There are people with certain beliefs who are eager to kill us, that is what matters and, just at the moment, the only thing that matters. Seemingly, many of their co-religionists either agree with the killers, support them actively or passively, give them cover in the Muslim enclaves in Paris, London, Brussels, Manchester or wherever.

Photo ops, soft words and Iftar dinners at Kirribilli did nothing to curtail the murderous impulses of the man who, last night in Melbourne, staged a lethal ambush in the name of Allah. That creature is dead, as is an innocent desk clerk, and three officers wounded. If our leaders won’t lead, we need better ones.

Terrible attacks in both Manchester and London further underline the fundamentally flawed official response to Islamic terrorism. The official refusal to name the enemy leads to a muddled law-and-order response, focussed on the criminal plans and actions of errant individuals. Yes, the powers-that-be talk incessantly about the so-called ‘war on terror’. But this is a cop out, as they must know in their hearts even as their mouths spill those Religion of Peace™ platitudes.

To wage a real war, you highlight the goals of the enemy, not simply his methods. Just imagine if, instead of assailing the philosophy of Nazism and its plans for domination, Churchill had talked only about the need to wage war only on Stukas, U-boats and the Bismark. Get the point? Terror is the weapon. Militant Islam, implemented in accord with quite specific Koranic instructions, is the hand that wields it.

It seems to me that the ordinary punter “gets it”, whilst “educated” officialdom remains in a fog of stupidity and political correctness.

I suspect that large numbers of ordinary people are sick of efforts by the likes of Malcolm Turnbull and Therese May to describe Islamic terrorists as somehow “un-Islamic”, supposedly guilty of perverting Islam, despite numerous quotations from the sacred texts lending full justification to the jihadis’ mayhem. Of course, neither Turnbull nor May is in any position to propound a corpus of doctrine which would constitute “authentic” peaceful Islam.

Unfortunately and inconveniently, a large percentage of Muslims in the West countries regard Sharia supremacism and violent jihad as authentically Islamic and other Muslims who opt for peaceful integration as un-Islamic. Whether we like it or not, a large number of Muslims in our midst, whether by thought or deed, feel themselves at war with the rest of us.

By trying to pretend that we are not at war, we have sacrificed innocent lives. We should long ago recognised that this is not simply a matter for the police and the criminal justice system. Nor is it any longer a matter of our intelligence services being able to catch terrorists just before they commit mass murder. So far, with the notable exception of the Lindt Cafe siege, Australian intelligence has largely succeeded in foiling large-scale potential terrorist acts. But even the best intelligence service cannot hope this run of luck will continue. Someday, somehow, an Islamic terrorist group will slip through the net. (stop press: last night in Melbourne a Somali-trained disciple of the Prophet killed one person, wounded three police officers and, his one good deed, saved the courts the trouble of dealing with him by succumbing to hail of bullets).

The great tragedy in both Manchester and London is that at least some of the perpetrators were “known” to authorities, as was the perpetrator of Melbourne’s ambush. We have now further learnt that up to 23,000 are, err, “known” to Intelligence authorities in Britain. The problem is that only approximately 3,000 can be monitored at any one time. The rest, including the perpetrators of the latest horrors, were off the intensive watch list for the time being.

Clearly, the reactive police approach favoured in peacetime has failed, and will continue to fail, with more tragic loss of innocent lives.

By contrast, waging war against a named enemy must be necessarily proactive. The following are the essential elements of waging war:

(1) Name our enemy. To the extent that Islam is a spiritual exercise, it can be tolerated. However, to the extent that it is a political ideology, which does not recognise any distinction between the sacred and the secular, it must be fought and defeated. We may choose to identify the enemy as “Sharia Supremacism”. This is the goal for which the terrorists are fighting.

(2) Institute preventive detention. The onus would be on those interned to prove that they pose no threat to life and limb. Those who declare war on our civil society through incitement, association and actions should not expect protection from institutions whose legitimacy they reject.

(3) Those who have chosen to fight for the Islamic State are our enemies. Where possible they should be stripped of Australian citizenship and prevented from returning. Whether they become stateless is their problem not ours. After all, they have chosen to place themselves outside of Australian civil society.

(4) All funding from abroad for mosques, Islamic institutions and associations should be blocked. Saudi funding of Wahhabism in this country and worldwide is an especially pernicious facilitator of global jihad.

(5) All mosques which promote Sharia supremacism to be closed down. Likewise, Islamic associations, such as Hizb Ut-Tahrir should not only be banned but, in addition, its members interned.

(6) Proactive counter-terrorism must inevitably be the responsibility of the specialist military. The police forces have to remain primarily focused on civil law enforcement.

Today we hear that the perpetrator of the latest incident in Melbourne was yet another of those “well known” to police — a fact that underscores the point that the sooner we move away from the stupid delusion that a peacetime criminal justice system can deal with the threat, the safer we will all be.

LONDON—One of three knife-wielding assailants who killed seven people in a weekend terror attack here was known to security services, authorities said Monday. Neighbors said his zeal for Islamic extremism was broadcast to the nation in a television documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.”

But police said they had no intelligence suggesting the man, Khuram Shazad Butt, a 27-year-old Pakistan-born British citizen, was plotting violence ahead of Saturday’s rampage.

Several neighbors said Butt had appeared in the documentary, which followed radical preachers calling for Islamic law in Britain and was aired early last year. One neighbor said Butt was reported to the police as a potential danger two years ago. Police declined to comment.

On Monday, police also identified a second attacker as Rachid Redouane, 30, who they said had claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan. They said they were working to determine the identity of the third attacker.

Saturday night’s attack in a crowded area of pubs and restaurants was the third by Islamist terrorists this year in the U.K.—and the third involving someone who had come to the attention of security officials but wasn’t deemed threatening enough to be closely monitored or detained before they struck.

“We cannot go on as we are,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday, pledging to take tough new steps against Islamist extremism. She vowed to crack down on online radicalism and said she would consider expanding the powers of the police.

London’s police chief, Cressida Dick, named one thing she didn’t think should be considered: arming regular officers. “I don’t think the public in this country want to live in a place where we are all armed to the teeth,” she told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Monday. CONTINUE AT SITE

The only man I ever met whose ambition was to be a suicide bomber was an inmate at the British prison where I worked as a doctor in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a career criminal of very nasty propensities whose father was Arab and mother English. He had reached his 30s, the age at which criminals usually turn away from crime in favor of something better—in his case the killing of as many infidels as possible, along with himself.

Coming to religion is one reason, or pretext, for abandoning crime. In the prison there was much more Islamic evangelism than Christian. I would find Qurans and Islamic pamphlets in drawers, insinuated there by I knew not whom, but never Bibles or Christian pamphlets.

I interpreted religion as the means prisoners used to rationalize giving up common crime while at the same time not feeling defeated by, or having surrendered to, the society around them—for they knew conversion to Islam gave that society the shudders.

The problem for the security services, however, is that there is no invariable profile, social or psychological, of the Muslim terrorist. Nor is there a kind of economic lever that can be pulled so that, with better material prospects, young Muslims will be less attracted to terrorism. There have, it is true, been no-hopers among the terrorists, but there have also been medical students and doctors. There was nothing (except himself) impeding the recent Manchester bomber from having a normal or even a highly successful career. As Prime Minister Theresa May rightly said after the most recent atrocities in London, what the terrorists have in common is an ideology. She rightly called it evil, but it is also stupid: It makes the Baader-Meinhof Gang look like Aristotle.

An ideology, however stupid, is not easy to destroy; believing six impossible things before breakfast is almost par for the human course. One obvious thing to do would be to strangle the foreign funding of so much Islamist activity in Britain. That is no doubt complicated in many ways, but no British government, solicitous of trade relations, has dared even try. The British economy is precarious, and it is difficult to be strong when your economy is weak.

Instead, we have gone in for what a Dutch friend of mine calls “creative appeasement.” Authorities make concessions even before, one suspects, there have been any demands for them. Thus, a public library in Birmingham, one of the largest known to me, has installed women-only tables, a euphemism for Muslim women only. Whether there was ever a request or demand for sex-segregated seating from Muslims is probably undiscoverable; truth seldom emerges from a public authority. But the justification would almost certainly be that without such tables, Muslim women would not be able to use the library at all. CONTINUE AT SITE