After 9/11 there was much talk of people who got it, and people who didn’t, “it” being that this wasn’t just another, albeit larger, terrorist attack in the same old IRA, ETA style, but signalled that the Islamic fundamentalists of organisations like Al Qaeda really meant what they said: they wanted to destroy us. This was a war of ideologies just as much as the anti-fascist Second World War, though a very different type of struggle.
The latest bombings in London serve to emphasise that same point, but it’s depressing to see how many of those who didn’t get 9/11, and thought that in some ways the US had it coming, or that the terrorists supposed demands – US troops out of Saudi Arabia, for instance – were not unreasonable even if their methods were, well, a little de trop, still cling to the fantasy that these are political protests, about the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Palestine.
As Anthony Browne points out in his article on Britain’s useful idiots, the Islamists echo the Nazis in the way they cultivate support by nurturing grievances. It’s all about the perceived injustices suffered by Muslims. Impossible to imagine Muslim radicals wasting an ounce of their indignation against, say, Robert Mugabe: equally impossible to imagine them condemning the murderous activities of the Janjaweed in Darfur, against fellow Muslims. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s only interest in Sudanese affairs was to denounce as un-Islamic the recent accord with the Christian rebels in the South.
Sadly this mind-set is reinforced here in Britain by sections of the Left, who are, similarly, only aroused to anger by the actions of the West, specifically the US. Yes, they’re concerned about Mugabe, or about Darfur, but – as anyone will know who’s ever been involved in arguments with them, or indeed read the comments and letters pages of the Guardian or the Independent, only the crimes of Bush and Blair get the juices flowing. What it all boils down to one way or the other: it’s our fault. Whether it’s for helping depose one of the most vile dictators the world has yet seen, or for our racism and Islamophobia, or for being too tolerant and decadent, somehow it’s got to be down to us. Why else would these people hate us so much? Why else would they blow themselves and others to smithereens?
What can you say? They still don’t get it.
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