April 30th, 2013 in General

Pow­er­ful col­umn in the UK In­de­pen­dent by Yas­min Al­ib­hai-Brown:

First, read this un­con­di­tional ac­cep­tance of facts that can­not be de­nied nor ex­cused. Is­lam­i­cist ter­ror­ism has in­flicted atroc­i­ties and dif­fused panic and amor­phous, long-term anx­i­ety from east to west, south to north. Cit­i­zens of Nairobi and Bagh­dad, Madrid and Lon­don, Ba­mako and Dar es Salaam, New York and Bali, Mum­bai and Dam­as­cus, Moscow and Karachi and now Boston, other places too, have had their lives and sense of safety blown apart. Those un­af­fected per­son­ally are haunted by the im­ages and sto­ries. Trep­i­da­tion has en­tered their bones, our bones. Al­most as chill­ing as real at­tacks are those thwarted by in­tel­li­gence and se­cu­rity ser­vices. How many plots are still being planned? What if? Why? What do they want?

Mil­lions of ir­re­proach­able Mus­lims are be­wil­dered and en­raged by this global vendetta which seems de­ter­mined to an­ni­hi­late mod­ernism, oc­ci­den­tal val­ues, and also to desta­bilise some of the poor­est and most hap­less of na­tion states for rea­sons not made clear at all. Why are they try­ing to de­stroy Mali’s old cul­ture for ex­am­ple? Some of us feel ashamed that Islam has be­come a by­word for sin­is­ter, guer­rilla war­fare and is now re­garded as a mon­strous, rogue faith, eas­ily turned into a killing call, most ef­fec­tively for young men for whom life lacks mean­ing and di­rec­tion. Women are now join­ing in too. The “spir­i­tual lead­ers” be­hind the may­hem are wicked and psy­cho­log­i­cally ma­nip­u­la­tive men in­ter­ested only in high body-counts and lurid pub­lic­ity.

OK, now let’s turn to the most dom­i­nant coun­tries in the world – and their fi­nessed, wide­spread, ex­treme tac­tics used against peo­ple, some ev­i­dently fa­natic and dan­ger­ous, oth­ers to­tally in­no­cent. This is state-spon­sored, state-ac­ti­vated, state-en­gi­neered ter­ror­ism which we are just meant to ac­cept as a pro­por­tion­ate re­sponse to the evil above. More peo­ple are vic­timised by the un­ac­count­able, se­cre­tive ac­tions of the west­ern na­tions – the US and UK most no­tably – than all those vic­timised by Is­lam­i­cists. Most brain­washed and gen­uinely fright­ened west­ern­ers just ac­cept what their gov­ern­ments do in fight­ing a neb­u­lous “war on ter­ror”. Hun­dreds of thou­sands are killed, phys­i­cally and psy­cho­log­i­cally maimed and shocked and awed by west­ern weaponry. It is fair enough and sen­si­ble to use in­tel­li­gence and pre­vent plots home and abroad, but what is hap­pen­ing and has been since 9/11 is not de­fen­si­ble, moral, right, just or sane.