Daily Ramblings:
I Wish I Was On Some Australian Mountain Range ...07/21/2005 10:32:16 pm
Australia's estimable Prime Minister John Howard, was, of-course, right today when he said the following - and it is rightly being picked up by many people, though not nearly enough:
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq; and could I remind you that the 11 September occurred before the operation in Iraq; can I also remind you that the very first occasion that Bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor.
He also said something that I'm not so sure about, though there is truth in it:
Could I just add that one of the difficulties that all societies face here is that essentially the laws dealing with the behaviour of terrorists were framed at a time when terrorists didn't have available to them the technology, access for how to make a bomb from the internet, mobile phones, text messages. To I hope not over-simplify it, we have 19th century legal responses to potentially 21st century technological terrorist capacity.
There's no question that the threat posed by today's Islamic terrorism is of a completely different nature than previous terrorist threats, and on a completely different level of seriousness. Technology - i.e. our Western infidel technology which they enjoy and use against us - is a factor in that, without a doubt. However, there has long existed the technology to kill lots of people, particularly defenseless civilians. It's not hard.
The simple truth is that the 20th century terrorism with which Europeans are familiar (and which they never tire of reminding us naïve Americans about) was never aimed at causing mass death. The terrorists' objectives - as immoral as their actions may have been - were slightly more nuanced than merely the killing of hundreds, or thousands, of people. Their actions were tied to specific political objectives - albeit generally warped ones. In plotting their attacks, they calibrated the damage, the potential loss of life, and the targets themselves, with an eye not towards causing universal fury - which would damage their cause - but rather with an eye towards drawing media and political attention to their grievances and exercising leverage - often in an economic sense.
A good example of this is the oft-mentioned-in-this-context IRA. "Red" Ken Livingstone today said:
"Those people whose memories stretch back to the terrorist campaigns in the '70s and '80s and early '90s will remember the very often horrifying bombings in London, often only weeks apart. And we got through that, and we will get through this."
The IRA's objective was (is?) driving the British out of Northern Ireland - among other things. From around 1969 through 1998 they waged a campaign of terrorist attacks. Though they were responsible for the deaths of civilians - notably a 1974 Birmingham pub bombing which killed 19 - the great majority of their attacks were directed at British and Northern Irish security forces, and political leaders (Lord Mountbatten; the 1984 Conservative Party conference; MP Ian Gow in 1990; many British soldiers and Northern Irish police officers).
Many of their attacks on the British mainland were literally "phoned-in." They would plant devices in a public place, e.g. a department store, and then call in a warning to the British police, who would have minutes to clear the area or risk civilian deaths. Callous and incredibly reckless, to be sure. But it suited their objectives to simply make the point that they could do such things. Killing hundreds of people would undoubtedly have initiated a crack down of epic proportions and complete loss of sympathy with their cause. As it was, they carried on for 3 decades; they had (and still have) a political "wing" called Sinn Fein who operate openly without fear of arrest, and they still have not been defeated in any military sense, though they have danced the strange dance of the Northern Ireland peace process for the last several years.
Those people who, like Ken Livingstone, compare the current Islamofascist onslaught to the IRA: I wonder if they can imagine a situation where these terrorists would telephone in a warning? The very concept is enough to spark bitter laughter. How would such a call go?
Hello! Infidel British police! You have 3 seconds to clear Harrods! Not enough time for you? Well, too bad for all the crusader zionists and the Jew descendants of pigs and monkeys that are dying right now! Allah Akbar!
Here's a point of comparison that illustrates the difference between the IRA and the Islamic Jihadists: On the 15th of August, 1998, in an incident that is widely considered the worst in the history of the Northern Irish troubles, 29 people were killed by a bomb in Omagh, County Tyrone. A warning had in fact been phoned-in, but it was botched with inaccurate information on the target, whether accidentally or intentionally. The horror that this bombing caused across all spectrums of the Northern Irish community made it effectively impossible for the IRA to continue their "military" campaign even if they wanted to (though the bombing was actually the work of a splinter group calling themselves the "Real IRA, " who themselves announced a cessation of activities shortly afterwards). The IRA's own assumed base of support - the Catholic Nationalist community in Northern Ireland - was filled with revulsion at the deaths of so many civilians, including 9 children. It demonstrated that the IRA and their fellow travelers could only function by keeping their violence restrained at a certain level. Mass death - even on the scale of 29 people - was simply not something that their own supposed supporters could stomach.
Contrast that, if you will, with the reaction of Al-Qaeda's natural base of supporters to the lurid and horrifying murder of nearly 3000 people in New York's World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Lest we forget, it prompted literal dancing in the streets in the West Bank, and expressions of joy and pride from Cairo to Islamabad and beyond. No, not from the political leaders, but from many real people across the world who provide Al-Qaeda and their ilk with a crucial foundation of moral if not logistical support.
In other words, Al-Qaeda did not hurt themselves with their own supporters by carrying out mass murder live on television. And they did not hurt themselves with their own supporters by killing 56 in London two weeks ago. And it is all but certain that they would not hurt themselves with their own supporters were they to succeed in murdering thousands more crusader zionists, and pigs and monkeys.
This is the crucial difference between 20th century European terrorism and 21st century Islamic terrorism. The goal of the Jihadist is to kill a whole lot of people - as many as possible. Precisely because they regard non-believers as not deserving to live, and precisely because they believe that if they die while killing such vermin they themselves can earn eternal happiness and non-stop sex with dozens of virgins - so the killing of non-believers is in fact an end in itself.
This is far from anything that Ken Livingstone has had to deal with before - and his failure to recognize it would make me nervous if I were a Londoner. It is one thing to bravely ride the Tube each day and face down this unprecedented evil. It is another to have one's political leaders dismiss it as something that's old hat - been there, done that, no big deal. Livingstone and others who believe that and propagate it are gravely in error. It is to be hoped that their blindness will not have a cost too great to bear.
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