Terrorism

Fifth Column
infiltrators or collaborators with the enemy.

This term for a group of insurgents, traitors, or spies is a calque from Spanish. It dates to 1936 and the Spanish Civil War. That year, Nationalist general Emilio Mola had surrounded Madrid with four military columns and declared that he had a "fifth column" ("quinta columna") within the besieged city. The quotation was widely reported in British and American newspapers and the term quickly caught on and generalized.

Ernest Hemingway
wrote the play, "The Fifth Column," (audio of Hemingway) which helped popularize the phrase (1937).

George Orwell
PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf..

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

Arnaud de Borchgrave
Islamist Fifth Columns
April 8, 2004

The general commanding four loyalist columns moving on Madrid during Spain's civil war (1936-39) referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his "fifth column."
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union maintained fifth columns in the United States. These were groups of secret sympathizers, sleeper cells, or supporters of an enemy that engage in espionage or sabotage, or simply disinform about the attacker's intentions.

But as soon anyone suggests the presence of an Islamist equivalent in Western democracies, watch out. Militant Muslim "moderates" go into their well-rehearsed tonitruant mode. Islamophobia and McCarthyism are among the milder epithets.

Following the Madrid train bombings March 11 and the arrest of eight young British-born Pakistanis before they could put half a ton of ammonium nitrate to work against Heathrow Airport or the London Underground, Prime Minister Tony Blair decided "the enemy within" had to be sharply circumscribed. He ordered an end to any further debate on a national ID card and made it mandatory.

The new Fifth Column syndrome indicates the enemy inside the gates has plenty of bedlamites rooting for him in other countries. In Pakistan, some 66 percent believe Osama bin Laden is a good guy. As for the world's biggest proliferators of nukes to America's enemies, he has close to a 100 percent approval rating.

Recent opinion surveys among Britain's almost 2 million Muslims, mostly from South Asia, rang alarm bells in Whitehall and in the media. Eighty percent were against the invasion of Iraq, 13 percent said another September 11-style attack on America would be justified, and 50 percent said they would consider becoming a suicide bomber if forced to live like Palestinians. Some 200,000 openly sympathized with Osama bin Laden.

Muslim sentiments are not much different in Continental Europe. Increasingly, Europeans are older and affluent and find themselves surrounded by immigrants who have little respect for local traditions. In the Netherlands, Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the country's four largest cities. Rotterdam, a port city where half the people are of foreign origin, will soon unveil Europe's largest mosque. In Brussels, the capital of the European Union, Muhammad has been the name most frequently given for newborn baby boys. Osama is a close second.

While authorities claim it is well-nigh impossible to fool immigration officers with forged passports, a British reporter flew to Poland with no introductions, asked a few questions, was told where to go and in two days picked up a new Polish passport on the black market -- it cost his paper $1,500 -- and returned through British immigration unchallenged. The reporter said all kinds of forged documents were on offer. Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan in Pakistan, is also known for its expertise in forgeries and counterfeit currency.

Spain formally accused 12 Moroccans of involvement in the March 11 train bombing that killed almost 200 and injured 1,800. Of the 20 arrested, 16 are still in custody, including six charged with mass murder. Five blew themselves up as security forces closed on their suburban hideout near Madrid. They have ties to Islamist cells all over Europe. In France, raids on eight locations yielded and arrested 13 Moroccan militants. Their common base was across the narrow Strait of Gibraltar in once elegant Tangier where unemployment is 30 percent.

Several of them came from a middle-class background and had been enticed into a secret life of violence against Christians and Jews and even Muslims who worked with them, not by al Qaeda, but by a still more extreme movement called Salafia Jihadia. Most of its cadres had been trained in Afghanistan in al Qaeda's camps but operated autonomously.

Muhammad Al-Fizazi, a fiery spellbinder, now serving a 30-year sentence in Morocco for inciting violence, inspired their fanaticism. He urged his disciples to "assassinate the impious" and "to love death as much as the impious love life."

A paper found in the rented apartment of one Moroccan terrorist said, "We must develop immigration into Western countries as the path to the glory of Islam and the destruction of the Godless pagans."

The Fifth Column is alive and well in the U.S. Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American citizen who was the prime mover behind the American Muslim Council (AMC) and a number of other U.S.-based Islamist-sympathizing organizations, is the man who certified 75 Muslim chaplains for service in the U.S. Armed Forces. He is a self-described supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah and was arrested at Heathrow last summer as he flew in from Libya on his way back to Washington. He had a little contretemps at the airport, unable to give British customs a plausible explanation for the $340,000 he was carrying in cash.

Mr. Alamoudi, now in jail in Virginia awaiting trial for allegedly lying to immigration authorities, was the most prominent leader of the Muslim World League in America, a Wahhabi Saudi front, made up of some 40 groups run by a small circle of trusted and wealthy individuals.
Mr. Alamoudi was directly involved in 16 Islamist front organizations. The network is controlled through four different layers of front organizations connected to Muslim charities and businesses in Northern Virginia. The FBI has gathered enough evidence to put away several prominent figures. But diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia -- and Saudi influence on the price of oil -- have limited expulsions to 16 Arab clerics with Saudi diplomatic passports who were proselytizing impressionable young minds with inflammatory cliches about Jews and Christians.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stubbornly refuses to concede that there are several thousand American Muslims -- out of 6 million -- who applaud the events of September 11, 2001, and firmly believe the U.S. is the fount of all global evil. Some 400 are currently being monitored 24/7 by the FBI. Either they have been fingered by Islamist prisoners -- interrogated in Guantanamo, Bagram air base near Kabul, a U.S. Navy brig, and prisons in European countries -- or phone taps or e-mail intercepts have shown their verbal propensity for violence against the hated American enemy.

CAIR tells us the latest findings on "Islam in America" show the vast majority of Muslim Americans hold "moderate" views on issues of policy, politics and religion. No one ever doubted that. It's not the problem. What does CAIR have to say about a New Jersey firm that offered investments to wealthy Muslims, including housing developments in suburban Maryland, raised millions of dollars for what law enforcement authorities describe as a "who's who" of international terrorists and Islamist extremists?

CAIR is in deep denial about the violent face of Islam. It's time to care, CAIR. Also time for a Muslim to take the global lead against Islamist terrorism. Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King or Martin Luther who will become the uncontested voice of Islam?

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Enemy Within
Arab News

Editorial: The Enemy Within
14 May 2003

Words are inadequate to express the shock, the revulsion, the outrage at the suicide bombings in Riyadh. Are expatriates working here an army of occupation, to be slaughtered and terrorized into leaving?

This was an undertaking of sheer evil. Life — be it the life of Muslims, of Saudis, of Westerners, of anyone — is sacred, a gift from God. It was targeted as much against Saudi Arabia as against Westerners — not just because Saudis and Westerners alike have been killed and maimed but because the prime aim of those responsible for this despicable crime is to create panic and terror. Those responsible are the new fascists. Merciless, cold and full of hate, with a demented vision of Islam, they declared war on humanity for the thoroughly un-Islamic goal of separating and insulating the Muslim world from the rest of humanity, as part of which they hope to terrorize Westerners into leaving the Kingdom. They have no qualms about killing anyone who gets in their way; they spread hatred and resentment, not peace; yet they have the blasphemous effrontery to claim that they do God’s work. They make a mockery of Islam, an open, inclusive faith.

We have to face up to the fact that we have a terrorist problem here. Last week’s Interior Ministry announcement that 19 Al-Qaeda members, 17 of them Saudis, had planned terrorist attacks in the country and were being hunted was a wake-up call — particularly to those who steadfastly refuse to accept that individual Saudis or Muslims could ever do anything evil, who still cling to the fantasy that Sept. 11 and all the other attacks laid at the doors of terrorists who happen to be Arab or Muslim were in fact the work of the Israelis or the CIA. For too long we have ignored the truth. We did not want to admit that Saudis were involved in Sept. 11. We can no longer ignore that we have a nest of vipers here, hoping that by doing so they will go away. They will not. They are our problem and we all their targets now.

It goes without saying that those responsible, those who poisoned the minds of the bombers, those who are planning to become bombers, must be tracked down and crushed — remorselessly and utterly. But crushing them will not be enough. The environment that produced such terrorism has to change. The suicide bombers have been encouraged by the venom of anti-Westernism that has seeped through the Middle East’s veins, and the Kingdom is no less affected. Those who gloat over Sept. 11, those who happily support suicide bombings in Israel and Russia, those who consider non-Muslims less human than Muslims and therefore somehow disposable, all bear part of the responsibility for the Riyadh bombs.

We cannot say that suicide bombings in Israel and Russia are acceptable but not in Saudi Arabia. The cult of suicide bombings has to stop. So too has the chattering, malicious, vindictive hate propaganda. It has provided a fertile ground for ignorance and hatred to grow.

There is much in US policy to condemn; there are many aspects of Western society that offend — and where necessary, Arab governments condemn. But anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism for their own sake are crude, ignorant and destructive. They create hate. They must end. Otherwise there will be more barbarities.

Peter Arnett
http://andrewsullivan.com

A long, long time ago, I voiced an offhand fear that some parts of the left (and far right) in this country were so disenchanted with America, so contemptuous of president Bush, so full of misplaced attraction to the thugs and despots of the developing world, that they could mount what amounts to a fifth column in the event of serious conflict. For the new class especially, the journalists and academics and chatterers, some of whose loyalties extend only to their latest publicist, the notion of simple loyalty to country is and was, as Orwell, noted a contemptible emotion....

...some...leftwing academics...want the United States to lose this war, and if that means that Saddam wins, so be it.

...There is no question in my mind that that is...a simmering sentiment among several important media institutions, like the BBC and, to a lesser extent, the New York Times. (Reading the Sunday New York Times yesterday was to read a paper whose editors have already assumed - or can barely conceal the conjecture - that the war is lost.) And now we have Peter Arnett, mouthing Ba'ath Party propaganda, lying about declining support for the war in the U.S., sucking up to the Stalinists who control the Iraqi police state, and generally making a huge ass of himself. This interview is disgusting. It is propaganda. It could demoralize Iraqi resistance to Saddam; it could therefore increase the likelihood of a longer war and cost American lives. This after barely two weeks of warfare. Two weeks.

 

"Our Islamic Fifth Column"
Farrukh Dhondy http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_our_islamic.html

My first name gives rise to confusion. It's a common Muslim name, so people I meet, or who read my byline, assume that I am of the faith.

Most recently, in response to a column I write for an Indian paper, in which I confessed to having met a few terrorists in my time and attempted to analyze their limited grasp of the world, I received a lot of hate mail. Some of the e-mailers clearly thought I was a Muslim apostate and reminded me that the penalty for that sin was death. One, who signed himself Zahir Pathan, was more strident. He graphically said I was a Muslim sin cojones, as Hemingway would have put it, because I failed to face up to what had to be done. He went on to say, presumably as part of what needed doing, that preparations were under way for the bombing and destruction of Bombay. His tone was swaggering, his e-mail rage directed against one who had, he thought, reneged on Islam.

I haven't. I was born a Zoroastrian, in India, a descendant of refugees from the Muslim conquest of Iran by Arab armies in the seventh century. The India of my childhood was full of superstition, of faith in myriad manifestations of the unseen, but even then one knew that Islam and its followers were distinctive. From the Shia mosque in Poona, where I grew up, there emerged every Moharrum night, the end of Ramzaan, a procession of chanting Muslims in black shirts, cutting themselves with chains and little daggers strung together, in frenzied and bloody penance through the night—a demonstration of a belief beyond the threshold of pain. They believed that theirs was the only creed, that their book was dictated by God, that Hindus were idolators and the worshipers of trees and monkeys, that Zoroastrians were fire-worshiping infidels, and that Christians were an ancient military enemy. Their faith seemed to me even at the time to exclude what it had not invented.

In the searching years of adolescence, when we all tried to come to terms with the great ideas of democracy, liberalism, the possibilities of life embodied in literature, only the pious Muslims among us seemed impervious to taking part in the passionate arguments. They seemed to have an inbuilt view of the world and of history, formed and sanctioned by the Quran. Even then I wondered: if they would not assimilate the world, how would the world assimilate them?

I arrived in Britain at 20, just when the Muslim migration there, principally from India and Pakistan, was under way. The immigrants were leaving circumstances of grinding poverty and little hope to better themselves materially. They took it for granted that they would be afforded the right to work and live within the cultural and religious freedom that Britain's liberal civilization guaranteed.

During my years in England, I acquainted myself with various groups from the subcontinent who were part of this migration. Most were from peasant backgrounds. The Bangladeshis came to London's East End and found work in the garment industry. The Mirpuris, who came from the part of Kashmir that Pakistan occupied, went to work in the old cotton and woolen mills of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the Midlands. They cohered around the mosque, the central symbol of discipline in their lives, and around the small shops that sold the spices, the lentils, the halal meat that made these towns feel like home. The first generation that arrived imagined making some money quickly and, some time in the future, returning home. That future never arrived. Their children and grandchildren have now grown up as Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen—Muslim Lancastrians and Yorkshiremen.

These antiquated mills went out of business in the 1980s. The population—white, brown, and black—had no jobs. The general depression of the mill-and-mosque towns reflected itself in run-down, restless schools, without ambition or excellence. The activists and ambulance chasers of the Left demanded more multiculturalism in these schools—which gave cover to the ex-peasant community's demands for the Islamization of the schools' ethos and curriculum. They demanded—successfully, in some cases—that girls and boys be taught separately, that girl pupils cover their heads and limbs, that the schools serve halal meat, that Arabic and the Quran be taught, that British history classes depict Britain primarily as an exploitative, demonic nation. Principals who resisted these demands were branded racists.

In 1989 came the most significant divide in the multicultural history of
Britain: the Rushdie affair, which uncovered a multicultural fifth column, whose literary criticism entailed book burning and death threats. The British Muslim community echoed the call of the Ayatollah Khomeini to hunt down and kill the writer. There were denunciations of Rushdie in every mosque by mullahs and crowds who had only handled a copy of the book to burn it. Not one mullah—not one—raised a voice in support of the principle of freedom of creativity; no mullah ventured the opinion that the fatwa was wrong or against Islamic teaching. Though the supposedly liberal Muslim commentators whom the British press retains were not in favor of the death sentence, none would extend himself to a defense of the book. In Bradford, an ugly book-burning rally was led by one Kalim Siddiqui, who was forced to admit to an investigating press that he and his operation were financed by the government of Iran. He subsequently set up a "Muslim Parliament of Britain," which professed to dispense laws and promulgate rules for the Muslims of Britain.

In the first week of the fatwa against Rushdie and his book, I appeared on a television panel. Among the Muslim panelists, all of whom favored condemning the book, were two zealots: the same Kalim Siddiqui; and Yusuf Islam, the Muslim convert pop singer of Greek Cypriot origin formerly known as Cat Stevens. The moderator asked if, in my role as a commissioning editor of Channel 4 UK, I would contemplate turning The Satanic Verses into a film. I said that I would judge the cinematic merits of the script, and that no other consideration would rule it out. Kalim Siddiqui and Yusuf Islam snarled, warning that the sentence of death on Rushdie would extend to all those who forwarded his book in any way.

We had all come from London to Manchester to record the "discussion." The producer had a word with me when it was over: would I feel more comfortable if he changed my hotel, away from the threateners and their entourage?

Before the fatwa and the Muslim solidarity it generated, the race industry that arrogates to itself the leadership of immigrant opinion had assumed that, with a few concessions, and with some exotic and welcome additions to British cuisine, the new immigrant communities would be assimilated into British life with hiccups but not convulsions. The fatwa affair—when the entire Islamic community united behind the condemnation—should have put an end to the idea. This was one bridge that Muslim immigrants were not willing to cross.

In fact, after the Rushdie affair, Muslim spokesmen and their supporters demanded that the law of blasphemy, which still existed in Britain, be extended to apply to Islam. The Muslim clerics would then determine what was blasphemous. Thankfully, nothing came of it. The book burners and novelist killers, recognizing only one book as the fount of truth, cannot countenance a literary tradition, established through centuries of struggle against censorship and obscurantism, that allows the sacred to be prodded critically, even to be profaned. The liberal, democratic freedom to think and speak that the West enjoys has been won in part through this prodding and provocation. That freedom allows people to vilify a writer, to demonstrate their antagonism to his fiction, even to burn a few books. But it does not bestow the freedom to call for the execution of anyone.

The affair of the Verses demonstrated that successive generations of Muslim immigrants to Britain, despite their broad Midland accents and their (admittedly rather curtailed) education in the Western intellectual tradition, identified themselves primarily as Muslims. They declared their allegiance not to the traditions that allowed them to settle, to worship, to have the Prince of Wales visit their mosques and proclaim himself their protector, but rather to a religious philosophy that emanates from a different place and different age.

It was in the early eighties that this identity with a freshly militant universal Islam emerged as a politically distinct force in Britain. While the earlier generation of Muslim immigrants had gone their way without bothering to adopt Western dress, their children grew up wearing Air Jordan sneakers, baggy trousers, and Hilfiger tops, in imitation of American blacks. The great cliché of their generation, enshrined in endless articles and now in facile novels, is that they were caught between two cultures. Some of these second- and third-generation Muslim Britons resolved this tension by adopting the politics, philosophy, and culture of fundamentalist Islam. On college campuses, some students began to dress in what they imagined was a fashion decreed by an Islamic identity. They reformed their lives, their speech, their friendships. They assumed a mission and characterized the evolution of civil liberties—the gains of feminism for instance—as immorality. Their puritan disgust for the West's popular culture and sexual license, their support for laws that decree the stoning to death of adulteresses and the beheading of apostates, became the profession of an allegiance alienated from the Britain that allows them the freedom to assume and argue these positions.

All these new zealots were brought up in a traditional Muslim way by parents whose religious views were generally orthodox but not extremist. But in the 1980s, a new Muslim leadership of mullahs inspired and paid for by various Islamic powers around the world was entering the country and setting up bases in Britain, thanks to an immigration-law loophole that allows religious personnel open-ended permission to stay. Iranian money, Saudi money from worldwide foundations for the promotion of Islam, was establishing mosques and setting up madrasas, schools that purvey primitive religious instruction and teach the Quran by rote. Adolescents attracted to this new radical preaching, young people whose childhood religious observances had already set them apart from their British contemporaries, came under the domination of a stricter observance with the allure of an ideology. The new mullahs were offering a single-minded, luminously simple explanation of the cosmos and promising membership in an organization that would dominate the world. "We carry Islam as a political belief, a complete system," says Omar Bakri Muhammad, a poisonous cleric who runs a London Muslim organization. "We don't carry Islam as a religion. It's an ideology."

If you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful and unfathomable being five times a day, if you are constantly told that you live in the world of Satan, if those around you are ignorant of and impervious to literature, art, historical debate, and all that nurtures the values of Western civilization, your mind becomes susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots.

Worse, it can become the instrument of others who send you out on suicidal missions. Three years ago, the Yemeni police caught eight young men with plans and equipment to bomb British targets in that country: the offices, homes, and churches of the British diplomatic and expatriate community. Six of these young Muslims, all of Pakistani origin, held British passports. Three were from the Midlands, two from the North, and one from London, the stepson of a Muslim preacher in the Finsbury Park mosque. The Yemeni courts tried and convicted them of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

Their cover stories were pathetic. They said they had gone to Yemen to learn Arabic: that's like going to Pakistan to learn English. The Foreign Office in London instructed the British diplomats in Yemen to extend their support to these citizens. One can imagine the
conversation: "I say, old chap, you didn't really come here to blow me and my children up, did you? Ah well—we'd better see you safely back to old Blighty, hadn't we?"

I set out to write about these adventurers at the time. Their wives or partners—young white women wearing headscarves and ankle-length skirts, like the Albanian peasants who beg on the London Underground—appealed on TV for the British government to secure their release. The men in Yemen denied that their aim was terrorism and begged for their freedom, alleging that the Yemeni police had tortured and sexually assaulted them. They, their lawyers, and their families claimed the protection of the British state; and Britain, accepting an obligation to them as British subjects, made representations on their behalf to the Yemeni government. Where did these young men, British by birth and schooling, develop the hatred that would take them to Islamic guerrilla training camps in Yemen and then on a mission to kill British diplomats and their families?

Journalists traced the roots of their mission back to Finsbury Park in north London, to the mosque situated in a largely Turkish Cypriot area of the city and to a preacher called Abu Hamza, a one-eyed mullah with a claw, like Captain Hook's, for a right hand. I asked him where he had lost his hand. His reply was: "I didn't lose my hand; I gained it."

I persisted, and he claimed that he had been a mujahid in Afghanistan and lost his hand in the fighting, though it seemed to me that its amputation was consistent with the premature explosion of a bomb. He boasted to me that he had sent young men to training camps. He would not say what they trained for or where, but his general contention was that, as Muslims, they must fight for the conversion of the world to Islam. The young men in Yemen were part of the worldwide jihad. He would not say which one of the professed worldwide campaigns he was part of. He seemed proud that his own stepson was involved in the murdering foray into Yemen and said that, if they had gone to destabilize the Yemeni government, he would not condemn their enterprise. I pointed out that Yemen was a Muslim country and that these British men and their Algerian co-conspirators were being tried under Islamic law. His contention was that any court that did not support the attack on Western interests in the Middle East was insufficiently Islamic.

The Yemeni incident should have alerted Britain and its government to the rise of a phenomenon that couldn't be explained by any theories of race relations. It didn't. Liberal opinion, while not admitting that the Yemeni six were out to kill Britons, called again for an examination of the British racism that had alienated them.

Then, in the summer of 2001, riots broke out in several of the mill-and-mosque towns. A few hundred masked "Asian" (which in Britain means Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi) youths took to the streets after dark and began torching shops, pubs, cars, and buses. They fought the riot police with staves and stones. Oldham, Bradford, and Burnley exploded in riots. The pundits and the Home Office officials in charge of race relations were bewildered. Their explanations were classic—clichéd and mistaken. They attributed these "Asian" riots to the "failure of years of race relations," to resentment of poverty and unemployment, and to rumors that neo-fascist anti-immigrant organizations like the British National Party were invading these towns.

The BNP had undoubtedly established a small presence among the white citizens of the mill-and-mosque towns, capitalizing on fears of the unemployed and unemployable "Asian" youths hanging around the streets. As for race relations, Britain has long been acting like Florence
Nightingale: selfless, dedicated, bandaging every wound, but ignorant about the genesis and gestation of gangrene. What the newspapers failed to mention was that these weren't "Asian" youths—not Gujeratis, not Hindu Punjabis, not Sikhs. They were Muslims whose parents or grandparents came from Mirpur or Bangladesh. The difficulties Muslim culture places in the way of assimilation has produced a generation of disaffected youth, highly susceptible to the incitements of Islamic militants.

The pundits didn't seem to notice that the stone-throwing impulse and the hanky masks were in imitation of TV pictures of Arab youths in their street battles with Israeli police. They failed to engage with the fact that among these rioting Muslims were members of semi-clandestine Islamic fundamentalist quasi-organizations, gathering under the aegis of a mosque or a college society. And though none surfaced publicly in the wake of these riots to claim responsibility, behind them there were preachers like Abu Hamza of Afghanistan and Finsbury Park.

I had a foreshadowing of this connection in conversations I had with some of these young Muslims in Oldham before the riots. They wore the fundamentalist uniform—the cap, the beard, the white tunic and trousers. They said that Western civilization deserved to be destroyed.

"So where are you going to start? In your own hometown?" I asked.

Their spokesman smiled. "Everywhere," he said.

The riots had no targets, symbolic or strategic. They didn't seem to protest against unemployment. The riots were swagger and mayhem, and the rioters in successive towns vied to outdo one another. The race-relations lobby's claim that this was an "Asian" protest against maltreatment and racism—and the lobby needs racism to keep it in business—is worse than unhelpful, for it obscures the real problem and the real danger: the antagonism among some British Muslims that condemns all of Western civilization as rotten and immoral.

After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Hamza was wheeled out again, together with the poisonous Omar Bakri Muhammad, who had been expelled from his native Syria and is funded by missionary money originating in Saudi Arabia. They both said that they supported the jihad, that the laws and sensibilities of men did not matter, and that only the law of the book and the will of God, as interpreted by them, of course, could govern the thinking of the Muslim. After all, "Muslim" means the one who submits.

Established Muslim organizations of Britain, the sort that talk to the Home Office and get invitations to Downing Street, expressed their regret at the atrocity. The Prince of Wales went to prayers at the East End mosque to demonstrate his solidarity with Britain's Muslims. Tony Blair, staunch supporter of President Bush's anti-terrorist initiatives, appeared on TV, flanked by leaders of Muslim organizations. As a group, they condemned the attack and denounced Hamza and Bakri as "clowns."

Despite these denunciations, outside the mosques of Britain, young men of the jihadi persuasion mount soapboxes with hateful slogans supporting the atrocity, exhorting the arriving or departing worshipers to "join the war" against the wickedness of America and demanding nothing less than its total destruction.

Outside the Regent Street mosque, the largest in London and the one regarded as the central place of worship for all Muslim denominations, groups of these youth, who would not say when challenged whether they were followers of Hamza or of Bakri, distributed leaflets. The leaflets called for the worshipers to defend Islam against the imminent American war and called on the British government to dissociate itself from the American-led aggression against Islam. Uniformed London policemen stood by to ensure their freedom of speech.

And now, even as I write, a young Muslim from Burnley, Lancashire, has been taken prisoner by the Northern Alliance Afghans. He had come to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. The deputy prime minister of Britain, John Prescott, rallied to his defense, perhaps, like so many Labour politicians with Muslim constituents, looking for votes. Instead, he should send MI5 and MI6 to investigate where and how this young man was recruited and whether there are other terrorist cuckoos in this same nest.

The governments of Algeria, Egypt, and Yemen may not be able to root out the fundamentalists in their midst who resort to terror, but Western countries have no option. One can't shelter in one's home those who would kill you. Britain has given extended permission to stay to the likes of Hamza and Bakri. The very liberalism against which they preach has nursed this fifth column. It must be rooted out.

Muslim states, including Libya, have mouthed their support of the U.S. and its people in their hour of bereavement with an ironic brazenness. Some of them, apostles of Islamist terror themselves, do it to avert the judgment and vengeance of an aroused America; others because they have their own local terrorist problem, with which they would welcome assistance. From within the U.S., several voices of the Muslim community have expressed their sorrow, dismay, and outrage.

And yet even when liberal Muslims declare that what was done to the victims of New York, of the Pentagon, and of the four airliners was an atrocity contrary to the tenets and teachings of the Quran, that it was indeed a sinful transgression of Islam that will not lead to paradise but to hell, the majority of Muslims around the world don't believe them, because they have been convinced by the interpretation of the fundamentalist, whom liberal Muslims allowed to remain unchallenged for so long.

Ironically, this terrible act is destined to mark a day of judgment for world Islam. In its 1,400 years, Islam has inspired and incorporated the great mystical movement of the Sufis. It has also suppressed it. It has spawned in its time liberal jurisprudence, great art, scientific endeavor, and the simple idea that what is not forbidden by the Quran is allowed. And yet Islam has, in the twentieth century, funded by oil and inspired by the work of Mohammed Wahab, an eighteenth-century fundamentalist, led its followers back to the book.

Apart from the Muslims of Arabia, all Muslims are converts to Islam. As V. S. Naipaul eloquently argues in his books and essays of travel and discovery (see "Our Universal Civilization," Summer 1991), they date their history from the birth of the prophet. They adopt the history of Islam, the movements and conquests of the desert tribes, as their history, despite being themselves the descendants of the world's most ancient civilizations. Five years ago, Iranian fanatics, the descendants of Muslim converts from Zoroastrianism, set out to destroy the ruins of the ancient Zoroastrian city of Persepolis. This year, the Taliban of Afghanistan destroyed the world's inheritance of the Bumiyan Buddhas that happened to be on the land that they have usurped. Persepolis ultimately escaped demolition only because members of the Islamic regime saw a commercial opportunity in opening the site to tourism, making some money while preserving their contempt for the site's historical and cultural significance.

The creed that leads these vandals to disown and destroy anything that is deemed "un-Islamic" leads them to a mission to challenge and convert the world, through terror if necessary. They don't for a moment consider that the world doesn't want a religion that suppresses women, adopts a medieval creed of crime and punishment, forces people to prayer at the behest of the police, forbids the writing of novels, the making of films, and the playing of music, and destroys the minds of its young and leads them to fanatical acts of suicidal terror in which they murder upward of 6,000 innocents.

This barbaric interpretation of Islam has inevitably come into moral and now mortal conflict with the West and its dominant state power. As the cowboy movies say, this earth ain't big enough for the both of them. And this fight to the obliterative finish ultimately cannot be a matter of killing people and toppling regimes. It has to involve a revolution within Islamic thinking itself.

What Islam needs is a reformation, and if this very concept is forbidden in the unchangeable word of the Quran, there is enough Islamic history to support a reforming and radical interpretation of the law of living with others. There have been movements in Islamic history that are by no means inimical to peace, tolerance, and even to democratic and liberal principles.

But where is the will today to affirm such a history, to promulgate such a theology, and to found an authoritative reformation of the modern Islamic mission?

The U.S. has in the last three decades countenanced the immigration of millions of Muslims from the Indian subcontinent, from the Middle East, and North Africa. Some of them died in the World Trade Center, where they had a mosque on the seventh floor. The Muslims of America now live in what, with all its imperfections, is a free, advanced, democratic society. Many of them are professionals—doctors, dentists, engineers, software and hardware experts, scientists, pilots, even members of the armed forces. Their right to the pursuit of happiness will ensure their right to embrace Islam. They must now see that an interpretation of the Quran that belittles all preceding human history and that refuses to be modified by the discoveries of the Enlightenment, of scientific advance and social liberty, cannot coexist with the rest of the modern world.

The vast number of Muslims in Britain and the U.S. who are educated in Western disciplines and culture, who live by the demands of Western ways of work, are riven by a conflict between the prescriptions of Islam and the freedom to think, speak, and associate, and to be protected by democracy and Western jurisprudence. These Western Muslims will have to resolve their dilemma by seeding the reformation in Islam.

Western Muslims must now discover in their own history and theology that nothing forbids the rise of a single or collective Martin Luther who will defy the medievalist mullahs (a self-appointed rather than an anointed clergy) and will pin new theses, renouncing world conquest, on the doors of every mosque.

The development of Islam, though constantly hijacked by fundamentalist sects like the Wahabis, has always had a strong, non-proselytizing, mystical Sufi current, to which 80 percent of the world's Muslims have some connection. And Islam has always had in its theological armory the sanctioned concept and tradition of ijtihad, which means coming to conclusions about prescription, behavior, and morality through argument and the application of reason rather than through dogma. It is in a sense parallel to the reliance of the Christian Reformation on the supremacy of conscience. True, passages in the Quran urge believers to "kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them" and to wage war on neighboring infidels. But a hundred suras of the Quran also enjoin the faithful to tolerance: one specifically says that killing one innocent person is akin to the murder of the whole world. An Islamic Reformation would delegitimate literal interpretations of Quranic passages stoking intolerance and emphasize those that resemble the Golden Rule.

As for the officials of America and Britain, they need to redirect the effort and money that they have poured into race relations and multiculturalism into a clear, reasoned, energetic defense of the values of freedom and democracy. Their future depends on it.

The Far Left
htttp://andrewsullivan.com

A Million Mogadishus
The Far Left's Wish?

The coming weeks are going to be critical for the left in this country for a very simple reason. Legitimate, important, valid or even extreme and hyperbolic arguments before a war are one thing. But they have a different salience when they are made during a war - especially one that has barely even begun. There are already polling suggestions that the anti-war movement is at this point bolstering public support for the war. But if the anti-war rhetoric among the extreme left continues in the same vein as it has this first week, the marginalization of the left in this country, already profound, might become irreversible.

Let me take two comments this past week. In the Boston Globe, James Carroll explicitly denied any moral difference between the regime in Baghdad and the administration in Washington. He described the "shock and awe" air campaign as if it were the direct equivalent of 9/11:

And what, exactly, would justify such destruction? What would make it an act of virtue? And is it possible to imagine that such violence could be wreaked in a spirit of cold detachment, by controllers sitting at screens dozens, hundreds, even thousands of miles distant? And in what way would such "decapitation" spark in the American people anything but a horror to make memories of 9/11 seem a pleasant dream? If our nation, in other words, were on its receiving end, illusions would lift and we would see "shock and awe" for exactly what it is - terrorism pure and simple.

This lazy form of moral equivalence is not rare among the radical left in this country. But it is based on a profound moral abdication: the refusal to see that a Stalinist dictatorship, that murders its own civilians, that sends its troops into battle with a gun pointed at their heads, that executes POWs, that stores and harbors chemical weapons, that defies twelve years of U.N. disarmament demands, that has twice declared war against its neighbors, and that provides a safe haven for terrorists of all stripes, is not the moral equivalent of the United States under president George W. Bush. There is, in fact, no comparison whatever. That is not jingoism or blind patriotism or propaganda. It is the simple undeniable truth. And once the left starts equating legitimate acts of war to defang and depose a deadly dictator with unprovoked terrorist attacks on civilians, it has lost its mind, not to speak of its soul.

9/11 and our current campaign against Saddam are, if anything, polar opposites. With overwhelming firepower and complete air command, the allies in Iraq could reduce Baghdad to rubble if they wanted to. Instead they are achieving what might be an historically unprecedented attempt to win a war while avoiding civilian casualties. Even if you take Iraqi numbers of dead at face value, even if you believe that every explosion in Baghdad has been the result of allied airpower, the number of civilian casualties is still minuscule, compared the force being used. On 9/11, in contrast, the entire aim of the exercise was to kill as many civilians as possible. For James Carroll to equate the two is a moral obscenity.

How big a leap is it from decrying allied warfare as terrorism to actually actively supporting the Baghdad regime against U.S. troops? In the past two years, we have indeed seen some misguided Americans fighting for the Taliban; we have seen human shields attempting to support Saddam's war crimes; we have seen an American soldier try to kill his own fellow service members; we have seen extremist Muslim Americans murder people in sniper fire and at airport counters. These people are very few in number, and should not be conflated with the "anti-war" movement as a whole. But observing "peace" rallies where Bush is decried far, far more passionately than Saddam -- where, in fact, Saddam is barely mentioned at all -- suggests that something not altogether different lurks beneath the surface among many others. Nick Kristof this week bemoaned the fact that "in some e-mail from fellow doves I detect hints of satisfaction that the U.S. is running into trouble in Iraq -- as if hawks should be taught a lesson about the real world with the blood of young Americans." (When you read Eric Alterman's blog, and see him almost high-five every allied setback, you can see what Kristof is worrying about.)

Then last week, someone actually came out and said it. Columbia University professor, Nicholas De Genova, hoped at an "anti-war teach-in," hosted by left-wing writer and historian Eric Foner, that there would be "a million Mogadishus" in this war. To translate: this guy wants to see a million young American troops subjected to war crimes, shot and mutilated, and paraded through the streets. No one in the crowd objected. "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military," he elaborated. And to loud cheers from an Ivy League college audience, he thundered, "If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine."

Notice how de Genova parroted Saddam's propaganda that the dictator and the "Iraqi people" are indistinguishable. But notice something far more obvious. If de Genova's comments aren't an expression of a fifth columnist, someone actively supporting the victory of a vicious dictator over the troops of his own countrymen, then what, please tell me, is? And please, don't give me the old McCarthyite "J'accuse." De Genova has every right in the world to say what he believes; and I would defend his right to say it anywhere, free from any governmental interference. By the same token, I am allowed to say that his views are morally repugnant.

But then again, he has a point, doesn't he? The rhetoric of the "anti-war" movement has consistently argued that this is indeed a criminal war: that it is being conducted by an illegal president for nefarious ends - oil contracts, the Jews, world domination, etc etc. When you have used rhetoric of that sort, when you have described your own country as indistinguishable in legitimacy from a Stalinist dictatorship, when you have described the president as the equivalent of the Nazi SS, when you have carried posters with the words Bush = Terrorist and "We Support Our Troops When they Shoot Their Officers," then why shouldn't you support the enemy?

Before the war, such hyperbole could perhaps be dismissed as rhetorical excess. During a war, when American and allied soldiers are risking their lives, it is something far worse. Before the war, it was inexcusable but not that damning for the mainstream left merely to ignore the rabid, immoral anti-American rhetoric of some of their allies. But during a war, ignoring it is no longer an option. In fact, the mainstream left has a current obligation to declare its renunciation of what amounts to a grotesque moral inversion, to disavow the sentiments that were cheered at Columbia University.

You can see why they might be reluctant. De Genova's rhetoric - and that of the rest of the far left - describes president Bush as an unelected, maniacal tyrant, a caricature that is useful to Bush's political enemies. But indeed, if the president is what de Genova says he is, if he is, as the posters have it, the same as Hitler, then why indeed isn't Saddam indistinguishable? Why should we back one unelected dictator against another? Those are questions the rest of the anti-war left never answered categorically before the war, because they didn't have to. Now they do.