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October 14, 2007 | Simon Jenkins' editorial today in The Times Online is spot on. The entire article includes a lengthy preamble on Christianity versus Islam, but the salient points toward the end are words that every person living in a free democracy should understand and reflect upon. As is the case in America now, where leaders are increasingly being questioned, Jenkins lays the blame with leaders who seek to curtail western freedoms for a few misfit jihadists whose prominence these leaders have created. Naomi Klein has recently published her reasoning as to why our leaders see profit in the perpetuation of conflict [The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism see video], yet it is for the mass of the electorates to bring about the correction peacefully.
Jenkins is at his best when he concludes: To portray Islam as a whole as a concerted threat to western security, and to imply that the West's democratic institutions and freedoms are not proof against that threat, is absurd and close to treason. Then to demand that western freedoms be dismantled and stored away for the duration of a "war on terror" is to wave the flag of surrender. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called "the slow unravelling of the people's liberties". It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim. This poison has not been generated by the teaching of Sayyid Qutb and his Al-Qaeda fanatics, but in the overreaction to them. After sowing their mayhem they, and not Afghanistan and Iraq, should have been targeted and eliminated. The belligerence and ineptitude of western policy over the past decade has turned nobodies into heroes of the Muslim world. The most incompetent period of western diplomacy since the 1930s has left the West hated and cities everywhere at the mercy of any Muslim misfit with a sack of explosive. When Thomas Paine told America that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again", he meant by example, not military conquest. His utopianism was a brave, confident and open-hearted one. That of his successors is sinking into the opposite, a fearful, besieged, security-obsessed wimpishness, in which Muslims rightly feel threatened by the arbitrary violence of the American right. The Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not With Islam, Simon Jenkins, Times Online, October 14, 2007. ___________________________________ 10.14.2007 |