2007 promises, or rather threatens, a dramatic escalation in mutual hostilities between the two contending forces in the current war between western liberal democracy and Islamism whose effects are likely to be most fully felt in the main current theatre of hostilities -- the Middle East.
This is because, rather than heed the Iraq Study Group which proposed capitulation to the forces of jihad, President Bush seems about to make one final push to quell the insurgency in Iraq and quite possibly also to endeavour, through or in concert with Israel, to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability before it acquires or worse still exercise it.
While Anatole Kaletsky and Matthew Parris in the op-ed page of today’s Times pour scorn on Bush's likely new strategy to end the war against terror by confronting its sponsors, quite wrongly in my view, buried in the News in Brief columns elsewhere in today’s Times is another indication of the gathering storm that lies ahead of us this year and which promises or threatens to be felt much nearer to home.
It reports the speech of a Mr Sohail Nawaz, Muslim community leader from the Lancashire town of Preston made at a pop festival there held on Boxing Day for local Muslim youths designed to promote peace and moderation. In that speech, Mr Nawaz is reported to have warned his audience of the need of fellow local Muslims to face up to and confront the reality of the growing menace of hatred of non-Muslims on the part of local Muslim youth. For reasons best known to himself, Mr Nawaz deployed the fiction of referring to this form of hatred as ‘racism’, a fiction the Times preserves in its brief report of it.
If one clicks on the link to a clip of his speech which the Lancashire Evening Post provides in its fuller report of it, one can be left with no other impression than that, first, it was Muslim kuffr-phobia to which he was in reality referring, and, second, that he seems to have a very genuine knowledge of its presence in his local community and knows his audience does too. It is well worth looking at that video clip of his speech.
He also says in his speech, to quote the Lancashire Evening Post’s summary account of it, that a study of Preston’s young Muslims had shown ‘some of them thought it would be “cool” if terrorists were in possession of nuclear weapons’.
As we all know, the wish is father to the deed. So, we can construe Mr Nawaz’s warning as one straw in the wind that something far more lethal than just straw could be liable to blow our way in 2007.
A second straw to similar effect is the widely reported news last month that ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, have recently ordered their forces to purchase 100,000 special hoods for their front-line officers designed to protect them from the chemical, biological or radiological fallout of a dirty bomb.
Those inclined to think Britain would be currently facing a much reduced risk of attack, were it only to disengage its troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, should bear in mind that jihadis are taking up their cudgels to reverse the defeat and overthrow of the caliphate which, according to their book, took place upon the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following its defeat and that of its wartime ally, Germany, in 1918!!!
The ideology behind jihad which purportedly licenses the detonation of dirty-bombs against kuffrs is a version of Islam that would legitimise their use here regardless of Britain's current stand on the war against terror, save that of wholesale capitulation and surrender to those who practise this brand of Islam.
When are the likes of Kaletsky and Parris going to awake from their innocent dream and finally… smell the coffee to use a well-worn phrase?!
Comments (1)
Yes, David, I too have been wondering when the likes of Matthew Parris are going to awake from their slumber.
I live in Bradford and the sense of bristling aggression amongst the young Pakistanis here is palpable.
I hope that 2007 will see a further escalation in our confrontation with these elements, not because I revel in social disorder but because our best chance of destroying them is to be had now rather than in a few years time.
Posted by Malta_1565 | January 6, 2007 1:37 PM
Posted on January 6, 2007 13:37