Author: Mick Hartley

es to the hypocrisy of so many of their co-religionists who take advantage of that tolerance to sneer at it as a weakness and then plot against it. Just one….not a whole movement away from Islam, I’m not expecting miracles….but just one.

It’s unlikely, though. You’d need someone with the courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Violent retribution is a real threat for any Muslim apostate. It’s easy enough to find scriptural justifications for this, both in the Koran and in the Hadith (the canonical tradition of Islam). Is it then official Islamic doctrine? Well, who’s to say? No doubt the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t accept that killing apostates is justified, but there are, quite clearly, enough nutters around in this country to make public apostasy a very risky business indeed.

At which point you have to ask the question, well, how much respect should one have for a religion which loudly demands tolerance for itself, but refuses to grant it to others? And, as Charles Moore argues, we’re developing a hypocrisy of our own, where Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick – who clearly came top of the class at his police anti-racism awareness course – says that Islam and terrorism don’t go together, but, I would suggest, knows perfectly well that at the present time that, unfortunately, is nonsense.

t Bouyeri explained he would do exactly the same thing if he was ever paroled, and addressed Van Gogh’s mother directly:

He argued that he did not kill her son, “but I have chopped off his head according to the law that orders me to do so to everyone who offends Allah. I do not feel your pain as I do not know what it is to suffer the loss of a child”

In an earlier post:

One of the absolute benefits of the Van Gogh trial is the fact that in Mohammed Bouyeri we have pure, unrefined jihadist material at our disposal like we have never had it before. The 9/11 hijackers perished together with their innocent victims, many hardcore al-Qaeda and Taliban members have been killed in Afghanistan, the al-Zarqawi division in Iraq is decimated regularly, a number of the Madrid bombers equally perished to the afterlife, and there’s no sign of the London attackers as of yet. What we have been able to incarcerate so far in my opinion is second-tier material, a number of the residents of Gitmo have started talking and some of them have even been released. Not so with Bouyeri, who is likely to remain behind bars forever, silently. And although he won’t say anything and refuses to co-operate, just by observing him we can paint a pretty scary picture, one that reminds us again of what we’re actually fighting.

Possessing a video collection “with horrific scenes of mutilations, amputations, and liquidations”, and a terrifying religious zeal, it is indeed a scary picture. When asked why he became so radicalised, he answered, “the only thing I can answer to that is that I pray to my Lord everyday. That he keeps me from thinking in any other way than I do now”

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No arrests have been made but a senior source at Scotland Yard told Sky News that the raids were ‘significant’ and arrests were likely to be made later today.

From the same article (in the Times):

It is understood that the examination of the No 30 bus at Tavistock Square has yielded vital fragments that have sharpened the focus of the police inquiry. Forensic pathologists have been paying particular attention to the remains of two bodies found in the mangled wreckage of the double-decker.

A senior police source said: “There are two bodies which have to be examined in great detail because they appear to have been holding the bomb or sitting on top of it. One of those might turn out to be the bomber.” A decapitated head was found at the bus scene which has been, in Israeli experience, the sign of a suicide bomber.

I have difficulties imagining what a decapitated head might look like.

ng. Blocking the Democracy Times at the Chinese border is kid stuff. The Chinese state accomplishes much more by filtering not just Web content, but the tools that allow the Internet to function: search engines, chat rooms, blogs, and even e-mail. The idea is to make filtering a basic fact of the Web. And filtering a tool like a search engine has the benefit of subtlety, because to most people searches will feel free even when they’re not. How many of us can tell when something goes missing in a Google result? […]

Techno-optimists like Kristof nonetheless take it as an article of faith that all of China’s controls are destined to fail. They echo the hacker’s creed—if a system can be beaten it will, so control of information is impossible. They point out that when chat rooms are closely monitored, people start talking about “cabbages” when they mean “democracy.” As one blogger wrote recently, “No democratic movement in the history of mankind has ever stalled just because the word ‘democracy’ could not be uttered.” But these arguments ignore a fundamental principle in legal theory: A law does not need to be perfect to be effective. If you’re talking about carrots and cabbages instead of multiparty elections, the Communist Party has already won. Ordinary Chinese won’t have any idea of what you’re talking about. Competing discussion threads that rant against the Japanese, on the other hand, will continue to enjoy mass appeal.

China’s long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. With every passing day the Chinese Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we’re only beginning to understand—one in which powerful countries refashion the global network to suit themselves.

harles Clarke, the Home Secretary, had previously refused medical treatment for him, ignoring pleas from MPs of all parties. Despite being too weak to stand, Timba Mqhubeli, 28, a teacher, was kept in handcuffs at Homerton University Hospital until the Labour MP Kate Hoey intervened.

Mr Mqhubeli claims that he is an opposition activist and that he and his family were detained and beaten in Zimbabwe. A second hunger striker, Harris Nyatsanza, is also understood to have been transferred to hospital.

Lileks on the London bombings:

Some believe that England was already America, inasmuch as both were ruled by fiendish quazi-nazis who tossed their nations into a war for grins and giggles. Some believe that the bombings in London, like the ones in Madrid, can be blamed on Bush and Blair for the Iraq campaign. It’s always interesting to see how people who pride themselves on sophisticated analyses and exquisitely tuned cultural sensibilities cannot see the plain home truths. The foe sneers: you are infidels; you die now. The moderns pull a face, steeple their fingers, and wonder what they really mean. Surely this is a result of invading Iraq and forcing them to have elections. Surely one of the bombers was an ordinary Iraqi who lived a peaceable life – well, aside from the time that Qusay’s men came by, took his daughter, returned her the next day as a broken heap who died from a vaginal hemorrage, and aside from the time when his brother was thrown off a roof because someone said he had turned his portrait of Saddam to the wall – surely it was the invasion that made this ordinary man take the understandable step of moving to London to kill commuters. […]

They did not bomb London because there is insufficient transparency in Congress about the Gitmo detainees; they bombed London because it is part of the Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy run by the sons of monkeys and pigs, who must submit or die.

Any questions?

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This is a craven statement. The “culture” of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honor and shame. Thanks to that code’s ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law must do what it can.

Harry’s already linked. I’ll just quote this bit from Nick Cohen:

In these bleak days, it’s worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that ‘we had it coming’. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.

All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we’ve got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair’s fault but there wouldn’t be indiscriminate murder because ‘the threat’ was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him. […]

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.

ring, the pain? Oh yes….that was the whole point. The casualties weren’t an unfortunate side-effect; they were the target. These weren’t attacks on the tube, or on the bus: they were attacks on the people in the tube, on the passengers on the bus. Not even because they were of the wrong race or the wrong nationality, or the wrong class. Not even because they were of the wrong religion. Just because the maximum amount of human suffering in this city at this time serves their purpose.

And they derive their justification from a religion. Really, what can you say? More to the point, what can Muslims say if people sharing their religion have come to this.

So much for the terrorists: according to a Telegraph YouGov poll, people are now more satisfied with Tony Blair as PM than they were back in January:

The response of Tony Blair and his ministers to the attacks has clearly boosted the standing of both. Early this year, twice as many people said they were dissatisfied with Mr Blair as Prime Minister as said the opposite. In the aftermath of Thursday’s bombings, Mr Blair’s approval rating has flipped from negative to positive for the first time in five years.

Moreover, the bombings have failed – despite Mr George Galloway’s best efforts – to undermine support for the British presence in Iraq. The proportion wanting British troops brought home quickly has fallen and the proportion who now want Britain to retain its close ties with the US has risen. The section of the chart headed “Assessing performance” tells a story of which Britons can be proud.

A massive 95 per cent of YouGov’s respondents believe that on Thursday London’s emergency services responded either magnificently (71 per cent) or very well (24 per cent). More than two thirds, 71 per cent, give comparably high marks to the Prime Minister and his Government.

Only Britain’s intelligence services – for obvious reasons – fare less well. A third of YouGov’s respondents, 33 per cent, accord their performance an equally high rating.

As figures in the chart show, virtually the whole nation, 90 per cent, applauds Londoners’ courage and calm under fire and Tony Blair’s satisfaction rating has shot up from a mediocre 32 per cent at the beginning of this year to a creditable 49 per cent now.