BBC Pulls Punches; Radical Islam Doesn't

Item (PM Tony Blair):

Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on last Thursday's terrorist attacks in London. The number of confirmed dead currently stands at 52; the number still in hospital 56, some severely injured.

The whole House, I know, will want to state our feelings strongly. We express our revulsion at this murderous carnage of the innocent. We send our deep and abiding sympathy and prayers to the victims and their families. We are united in our determination that our country will not be defeated by such terror but will defeat it and emerge from this horror with our values, our way of life, our tolerance and respect for others, undiminished.

Item (Quran 7:4):

How many a township have We destroyed! As a raid by night, or while they slept at noon, Our terror came unto them.

Item (The Telegraph (UK)):

The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday.

Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers".

The BBC's guidelines state that its credibility is undermined by the "careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments".

Item (Nick Cohen, in The Guardian/Sunday Observer (UK)):

On Thursday, before the police had made one arrest, before one terrorist group had claimed responsibility, before one body had been carried from the wreckage, let alone been identified and allowed to rest in peace, cocksure voices filled with righteousness were proclaiming that the real murderers weren't the real murderers but the Prime Minister. I'm not thinking of George Galloway and the other saluters of Saddam, but of upright men and women who sat down to write letters to respectable newspapers within minutes of hearing the news.

'Hang your head in shame, Mr Blair. Better still, resign - and whoever takes over immediately withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,' wrote the Rev Mike Ketley, who is a vicar, for God's sake, but has no qualms about leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban and al-Qaeda or Iraq to the Baath party and al-Qaeda. 'Let's stop this murder and put on trial those criminals who are within our jurisdiction,' began Patrick Daly of south London in an apparently promising letter to the Independent. But, inevitably, he didn't mean the bombers. 'Let's start with the British government.'

And so it went on. At no point did they grasp that Islamism was a reactionary movement as great as fascism, which had claimed millions of mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan and is claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute dunderheadedness to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence.

Item (Quran 8:12):

Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them."

Item (Joseph Braude in The New Republic):

Yesterday's attack on the British people gave Muslims everywhere a chance to distance themselves from the radical Islamists who claim to have perpetrated it. While Muslim governments have taken the opportunity to speak out against the killing of innocents, Muslim Brotherhood offshoot groups failed to rise to the challenge. What they offered instead were statements full of equivocation.

Item (Alain Jean-Mairet, The Lessons of London):

Once a vast community of Moslems is installed in a country, it becomes extremely delicate to intervene there against extremists among them. Any effective attack is characterized as a modern crusade and is used to incite further terrorist attacks. It becomes impossible to apply the law.

Item: (NRO's John Derbyshire):

[I]n all probability, Britain will yield to “these people.” This can be said with fair certainty because Britain did yield to the previous concerted series of terrorist attacks on her soil, the one carried out by the so-called Irish Republican Army (not to be confused with the actual army of the actual Irish Republic, which is a quite different thing), from the early 1970s through to the late 1990s. The terrorists who carried out those attacks were in many cases arrested, convicted, and imprisoned; they have now all been released, even those serving life sentences. Those who evaded the police are not now under investigation. The terrorist leaders who organized and directed the attacks have been given well-paid jobs in the British civil service, with secretaries, chauffeur-driven cars, and handsome pensions. The arm of British law enforcement that bore the brunt of the attacks, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, has been disbanded at the terrorists’ request, and its decades of brave and honorable service to the Crown are being flushed down the memory hole as fast as it can be done. Tiocfaidh ár lá, boasted the IRA men — “Our day will come.” It has.

Yes, Britain will “do a Spain.” I am sure of it.

Item (State of Flux blogger Minh-Duc):

The last explosion aimed at a bus filled with people who because of the discontinued service of the underground. If it was mistimed, it would have exploded before or concurrently to the first three, not an hour after. The bombs were small, less than 10 pounds. They could not be big because that they are not concealable and transportable. To compensate for the small sizes bombs, an enclosed locations (the first three) were pick to maximize the damage, and the last explosion was chosen to create a lingering effect of terror.

Item: (Quran 8:57):

Therefore if you overtake them in fighting, then scatter by (making an example of) them those who are in their rear, that they may be mindful.

Item (Michael Leeden in NRO's The Corner):

The usual suspects, led by the New York Times, blamed it all on Bush and Blair and their perverse willingness to fight back against our murderers. On the other hand, a small cottage industry has grown up around the theory that, bad as it was, the operation is actually good news because, just as the terrorists killed fewer people in Madrid than in New York and Washington, they killed fewer still in London. This was said to "mean" that al Qaeda’s capacity for violence was ebbing. The argument is simple: If al Qaeda could have done worse, they’d have done it. Since they didn’t, they probably couldn’t.

That may be right. But we really don’t know, and I don’t see the value in guessing about something so important. . . Maybe they were unlucky in London. Or maybe, as Sunday reports suggest, there are further bombers waiting to act. Thursday’s event is too small a "sample" to permit us to generalize on the terror universe. And I’m afraid that those who are doing it are looking too hard at a single event, and not hard enough at the overall situation. Policemen are being beheaded in Thailand, Christian missionaries are kidnapped in the Philippines, some of our finest fighting men are being killed in Afghanistan, and bombs are going off again in Turkey.

Indeed, it would be most surprising if the terror masters were cutting back on their jihad, at a time when rising oil prices are pumping vast sums of money into their war chests. The mullahs and the Assads are rotten with cash, and a lot of it is going into the war against us.

Item (Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror (UK)):

We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way. . .

It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on "our" values or "our" way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.

A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from that "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes.

Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?

The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.

They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.

Item (WaPo):

Today, al Qaeda and its offshoots retain broader connections to London than to any other city in Europe, according to evidence from terrorist prosecutions. Evidence shows at least a supporting connection to London groups or individuals in many of the al Qaeda-related attacks of the past seven years.

Item (Jed Babbin, The American Spectator):

It matters not whether the terrorists are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or American Indian snake dancers. It is sufficient that they are an identifiable group dedicated to the destruction of our freedom. Religion is a factor in this war only to the extent that it helps us identify and defeat the enemy.

It's proper to be concerned about oppression of minorities, but this concern has so governed British self-defense over the past decade or more that London is now the hottest of terrorist hotbeds in Europe. Tolerance is one hallmark of democracy. But when it is given importance beyond its proper measure, it becomes a recipe for national suicide.

Item (James Brandon, The Christian Science Monitor):

Thursday's coordinated terrorist attacks that killed at least 49 people have underscored competing forces within Britain's Muslim community: a minority that advocates violence against Western targets, and those who want to coexist peacefully with Britain's multifaith, multiethnic society.

Item: (United States Supreme Court, Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447 (1969)):

[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

Item: (Ishaq: 326):

If you come upon them, deal so forcibly as to terrify those who would follow, that they may be warned. Make a severe example of them by terrorizing Allah’s enemies.

More:

It's not just the news department at the BBC; EU Referendum says it's nanny state (-owned) network!:

I understand that Radio 4 (something I have not listened to for some time) has decided not to broadcast part 2 of Greenmantle, as it would be “insensitive” after Thursday’s bombings (oh what the heck, let the PC brigade arrest me: terrorist bombings).

Insensitive to whom, precisely? As I recall the novel, it is all about a dastardly German plot to use Islamic fundamentalism in a fight against the allies in the First World War. . .

How is this venerable but excellent thriller insensitive? Who is about to get upset by it? Is the BBC not going to dramatize or broadcast any work of literature in which there is any kind of a conflict between members of different nationalities, religions, races or ethnic groups?

Are they going to eschew any novel in which there is a villain of some particular national, religious, ethnic or racial group? If so, their choice of books will be limited.

As limited as BBC reporters' objectivity.