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July 12, 2005
Normal Service has Been Resumed by the BBC asap -- and by the Met Even Sooner
I was clearly guilty of wishful thinking in the blog I wrote last Friday when I applauded the apparent decision by the BBC, in the wake of last Thursday’s London bombings, to cease referring to those who had carried them out, and perpetrators of other such atrocities, by euphemisms such as ‘militants’, as had become its practice, and instead to start calling these despicable vermin by their rightful name of terrorists!
Today’s Times carries a brief news report to the effect that the BBC has decided to refer to last Thursday’s bombers on its news website simply as ‘bombers’, and not ‘terrorists’.
In explanation of this terminological decision, a spokeswoman for the BBC is reported as having said: ‘The word “terrorist” is not banned by the BBC …. [but] we take care great of the language used.’
…. So, it’s back to normal service from the BBC, although their news bulletins have yet to fall into terminological line.
If last Thursday’s bombings in London temporarily brought some parts of the BBC to their collective senses, they showed no such signs of having been able to awake from their complacent stupor the upper echelons of London’s Metropolitan police.
Shortly before the bombings occurred, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, was interviewed on BBC radio’s ‘Today’ programme about security at the supposedly still forthcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in 2012. In the interview, Sir Ian boasted how British anti-terrorist procedures were the envy of the world.
Shortly after the bombings, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met, Brian Paddick, took to task a BBC interviewer who had spoken of ‘Islamic terrorists’ as their possible perpetrators. ‘As far as I am concerned’, Mr Paddick said, ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’
Doubtless, it is because Mr Paddick’s panglossian views about Islam and terror are so widely shared by his senior colleagues that, according to a report in today’s Times, the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers have not seen fit in the light of last Thursday’s bombings to withdraw their financial support for bringing to London later this month the controversial Swiss-based Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan, to address young British Muslims at a ‘Middle Path’ conference to be held at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park being organised by the Muslim charity, Da’qatul Islam.
For the benefit of those who might not before have come across the names of either the speaker whose visit to London the Met are helping to finance or that of the organisers of the conference at which he is due to speak, it might help to know the following.
Professor Ramadan is the maternal grand-son of Hassan-al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamist organisation, created in Egypt in 1928 but banned there in 1954, which has consistently preached world-wide Jihad.
Professor Ramadan is also the brother of Hani, a fellow resident of Geneva to which their father fled in 1954 when the Brotherhood became banned in Egypt. According to Robert Spencer, author of the 2003 book, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, brother Hani was sacked from a teaching post he had held there for having defended in an interview he gave to Le Monde the stoning of adulterers.
In the foreword he wrote for a republished edition of a book written by his grandfather, Professor Ramadan described it as containing ‘the core of the spiritual education of the Muslim Brotherhood’ and his grandfather’s teachings as ‘simple and luminous’.
Among the teachings of Professor Ramadan’s grand-father, so Robert Spencer reports, are such simple and luminous doctrines as that, in Al-Banna’s own words, 'In [Muslim] tradition , there is a clear indication of the obligation to fight the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians], and of the fact that God doubles the reward of those who fight them. Jihad is not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace Islam’.
It is unlikely that Da’watul Islam, the organisers of the forthcoming London conference which the Met are helping to pay for Professor Ramadan to attend so as to be able to addres, will regard his views and associates as departing too far from what they consider the non-extreme ‘Middle Path’ that they favour.
As Stephen Pollard reminded us in a Thunderer piece in yesterday’s Times, this charity saw fit to invite to speak at its Middle Way conference last year, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and someone who, in a sermon delivered in March 2003, is alleged to have called on his followers to ‘destroy the Zionist, the American, and the British aggressors’.
Reassuringly, Mr Pollard informs us, the Sheikh does not consider someone who blows himself up whilst engaged in jihad to have committed suicide and hence as not having contravened the express Muslim prohibition against suicide. In an interview given last year, according to Mr Pollard, the Sheikh claimed that ‘Islam justifies suicide bombings in Iraq against the US military and in Israel against women and children’.
So, to sum up: according to the BBC, those who carried out last week’s London atrocities are bombers, not terrorists; and, according to the Met, Muslims cannot be terrorists or capable of carrying out acts of terror in the name of their religion.
When will we be told by these same authorities, as Winston Smith was finally instructed to believe at the end of George Orwell’s novel 1984, that 2+ 2=5?
Posted by David Conway at July 12, 2005 01:06 PM
Comments
Until our so called leaders accept that the terrorists are a strand of islam and continue to push the "criminal" element we will never address the problem correctly.
I accept that the majority of muslims are like the mass of English catholics historically, they just want to be left to their own faith and exist alongside the rest of us. However they are abused by the militant strain that want our destruction, multiculturism,their own leaders that keep then as a power base, the so called liberal left who need victims. This leaves them with out a sensible voice, they only get platitudes from religious leaders, threats from the terror supporters, which leaves only a few lone voices in the wilderness.
I believe that what Islam needs at the moment is a new generation of leaders who have the ability to speak out and really claim that the bomns are not in their name.
Posted by: steves at July 12, 2005 09:42 PM
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