Date: 12/12/2001
What every terrified HINDU cabinet minister and demolished Member of Lok Sabha (Member of Parliament) in New Delhi, who has been shrunk in size by the ISLAMIC BLOW OF PARTITION, must know about Islam.
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This is a war that dare not speak its name
The Times,London, November 17, 2001, page 24.
The West is in denial over Islam's bloody past and dangerous ambitions.
To American and British politicians, the week's events in Afghanistan have been triumphs. To the Northern Alliance warlords and the Pakistanis, they have been another chapter in the history of their region's inter-tribal, and inter-Muslim, conflicts that is being written. But the impoverished statements of our leaders since September 11 reveal that historical knowledge plays no significant role in their thinking, despite the perilous venture upon which they are engaged.
In consequence, we are being led to battle by those who give every sign of not being sufficiently aware of what they are doing, and who are not, therefore, fit to be our guides.
Tomahawks in hand, they have promised us that "terrorism" will have "nowhere to hide". But we are not engaged in a war agaisnt terror. It is a war provoked by Islamism, directed against it, yet which dare not tell its name, and in which there cannot be the "victory" the politicians promise. The Northern Alliance carries the Koran in its knapsacks, too.
The outrages against the US were seen as bolts from the blue, but are different only in degree from earlier Islamist attacks. Yet there had already been millions of lives lost in the Islamic world's past decades of war. At least since 1947, the year in which Arnold Toynbee warned of the "sleeouing giant", or since 1952 when the Egyptian revolution brought Nasser to power, Islam, waking from three centuries of torpor, has been astir with internecine struggle and assertion against the West. Since then its internal and external conflicts have raged, drawing in Islamic and non-Islamic nations alike.
Iran and Iraq have fought an eight-year war; Syria has occupied much of Lebanon; Iraq has sought to ravage Kuwait. Sudanese, Egyptian, Nigeian, Pakistani and other Islamists have been killing Christians; Egyptians and Algerians have each battled to protect themselves against fellow Muslims; the Chinese, Indians, Russians, and now Americans have faced local Islamic attack. Today, the cry of jihad against the 'kuffar', or infidel, is on the lips or in the heats of young Muslims the world over, while Western relativists consider how "pluralism" can be reconciled with the aims of those who would see our very societies fall.
Postwar and post-colonial Islamism, revived and still to revive much further, has expressed itself in different ways. It has taken political form in Arab nationalism, as in the seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956; economic form as in the use of the oil weapon against the West in 1973; religious form as in the Iranian-inspired arousal of worldwide Islamic fervour. In such context a bin Laden, important as he is, is not of greater historical significance than a Nasser or an Ayatollah Khomeini.
All of them, including the suicide bomber, are apostles of the Islamic resurgence, as historians of Islam's modes of warfare (and conquests) know. In these past decades, a cat's cradle of links has been woven across the Islamic world. Ahmed Shah Massood, the Taleban's then leading opponent, was assassinated in September by Algerians with Belgian passports and with visas to enter Pakistan issued in London.
Armouries have been amassed by the more dangerous Islamic states with the help of the historically unseeing West. Such filiations and weapons are the instruments of no abstract "terror" or "unreason" but of an insurgency of faith, cruelty, pride and anger that in intention would master the globe. Even if bin Laden were killed tomorrow, or Israel disappear from the face of the earth, this insurgency would continue.
It has occured at a time when the West's knowledge of Islam, and even of its own history, has never been less. The only truly historical question asked in America since September 11 has been the vacuous, "Why are we so hated?" It is a question which the Americans have been unable to answer. Muslims with a long memory have no such problem.
In the light of its battles with medieval Christianity and with varieties of modern imposition, Islam's "anti Americanism" and "anti Westernism" and "anti Zionism" are as we ought to have expected. In the First World War, the Ottoman Empire readily joined the Axis powers; in the Second, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was Hitler's de facto gauleiter in the region. No one in their (historical) senses should be surprised that today's Palestinian Islamists would uproot Israel, a nation conceived with the West's support as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. Turn back the pages of the record and the century-old voices of premonition, including those of Jews, about Israel's uncertain fate as an "island in an Arab sea" can already be heard. "Most Jews are no longer Oriental," the early Zionist Theodor Herzl confided to his diary; a "tranplantation" to Palestine would be "difficult to carry out".
Israelis have always had a fight on their hands. Yet knowing so is to be better armed than are Americans- for all their firepower-as they try to square up to foes whom they cannot name, and of whose faith and past they know too little. Clio, the goddess of history, is not likely for this reason to be on the side of the West, which is more blind than it can afford to be or than its peoples deserve, while Muslims now walk with a spring in their strides. They have good reason to do so, even as the Taleban falls. For the sharp end of a resurgent Islam is a more powerful and long-term adversary of the Western democracies than was Nazism.
When I was in the US in September, I offered the New York Times Magazine an account of the post-1945 decades of Islam's upheavals. One of its editors told me it was "interesting, but we don't do history". But if the Americans (and British) "don't do history", history will do for us.
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David Selbourne is the author of 'The Spirit of the Age' and 'The Principle of Duty'.
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PARTITIONED INDIA had to occupy herself day and night with one theme only, the HIGH TREASON of the "indigenous" Mohammedans, and the sudden and unprovoked naked AGGRESSION of Islam in 1947.
But instead, what do we see? The Hindus and Sikhs have closed their eyes just like the pigeons on seeing the cat approach.
NRI's, lucky to have ESCAPED such a decomposing gutless, soul-less "secular" India, in order to live in the free West do notice the media and the politicians pre-occupied with World War 2 and with all those wars in Korea, Vietnam, Falkland Islands and Iraq/Kuwait. Yet they are unable to pass on such brave patriotic impulses back home. None can expect Gopal Gandhi, the new Indian high commissioner to London, a dirty "political" appointment based on NEPOTISM, to notice this.
The result? The death of BOFORS CHOR (Rajiv Khan) is commemorated more solemnly by the President and the whole cabinet of ministers in India, but NOT THE LOSS OF FIVE PROVICNES IN 1947.
Obviously India is still a slave colony where, as per Government directives from the top, nobody mentions PARTITION on August 15.
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