Posted on 11/04/2005 4:28:13 PM PST by saquin
AMSTERDAM’S Linnaeusstraat is a bleak place to die. Lined with budget stores and overshadowed by a railway bridge, it is largely populated by Muslim immigrants. On November 3 last year, the film-maker Theo van Gogh halted his bike in the cycle lane. The anti-clerical van Gogh had made many films criticising Christianity and Judaism, as well as Submission, an indictment of Islam’s treatment of women, based on the experiences of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali MP.
Muhammad Bouyeri, a young Moroccan, came alongside Van Gogh. He shot him in the side, propelling van Gogh to the ground. The victim managed to get up, lurching through the traffic. Bouyeri tracked his victim, shooting him twice more before trying to cut his head off with a butcher’s knife. He then rammed a smaller knife into Van Gogh’s chest, with a letter threatening two Dutch politicians slipped over the blade.
Bouyeri ran into a park, where he was captured. He had a poem in his robes, which included the line: “The knights of death are at your heels.” He belonged to a small Islamist radical cell conspiring to blow up Schiphol airport. He is now serving a life sentence for murder. The Dutch reaction to the murder has been ferocious, up to and including banning wearing of the burka.
Islamist terrorism is not a phantom product of our nightmares and neuroses, but a real and present danger in the world. There have been devastating attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, 9/11, Bali, at Atocha station in Madrid and the July suicide bombings in London, commemorated this week. At present, Australia is on high alert.
Osama bin Laden, the inciting intelligence behind many of these atrocities, certainly believed in a “clash of civilisations”, as he called it. His justification for 9/11 was a bizarre fusion of finance and theology. The twin towers reminded him of the moon idol Hubal, worshipped by pagan Meccans until Muhammad demolished all lesser gods. But bin Laden’s stream of consciousness also included totting up the financial cost of 9/11 to the US, in terms of disrupted financial markets, lost employment and reconstruction, arriving at a net loss of $1 trillion for the modest investment of $500,000 that these attacks are thought to have involved.
But bin Laden has competition in the stakes for the world’s most wanted terrorist. His erstwhile Jordanian protégé, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, established his credentials as a murderer by cutting off the head of the US businessman Nicholas Berg, graduating to bomb attacks in Iraq that claim 60 lives a day. Perhaps al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has expressed “concern” about the killing of Iraqi Muslims, may get to al-Zarqawi before American special forces do. Big egos are at play.
President Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, have been commendably unflinching in their determination to eradicate the pestilence of Islamist terrorism. Other governments are trying a different tack, which smacks of appeasement. Last week in Madrid, I attended a “Dialogue between Cultures and Religion”, organised by a foundation with links to Spain’s ruling socialists. Here, talk of “dialogue” between faiths effortlessly mutated into the separate notion, promoted by Spain and Turkey, of “an alliance of civilisations” spanning the Mediterranean world. Countries can ally; civilisations generally don’t. A banquet in the government quarter elicited the intelligence, from a Moroccan diplomat, that not only was “Europe” morally superior to a US symbolised by Bush’s Texas, but that a distinctive “fusion” culture was emerging in the Mediterranean, “different ” from that of northern Europe. One doubts whether the Italians feel that way.
The conference opened with protestations of goodwill from Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s former president, delivered by an ambassador who was not among those recalled for failing to reflect the crazed views of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Felipe González, the former Spanish premier, chose to overlook Ahmadinejad’s rant, preferring to contest the notion of a “clash of civilisations”, as if this were US policy.
At least Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the Spanish Foreign Minister, managed condemnation of an elliptical sort. He has been a prime mover of the claim that you cannot “fight evil with evil”, a formula begging many questions about moral equivalences. He favours marginalising extremists through a dialogue with Muslim “moderates”. These included Dr Tariq Ramadan, an Egyptian intellectual, who is on an FBI watch list and banned from France, but welcome in Spain.
Discussion of religion and politics took the form of a “dialogue” between aggressive secularists — on this occasion Spanish socialists with memories of “national Catholicism” under Franco — who averred, against all the evidence, that “religion” will “inevitably” fade away, and those who think it is an essential and vital force in the modern world. This was a dialogue of the deaf, because Western liberals have become totally unmusical on the subject of religion, which they nevertheless combat with an evangelical fervour.
I mentioned the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s striking metaphor of Britain needing the ethos of a country house rather than a Holiday Inn to overcome the divisive effects of multiculturalism. An evangelical Christian lady ran with this idea, suggesting — presumably not to the Muslims present — that we all needed to be buying drinks for each other in the hotel bar rather than skulking in isolated rooms.
The fate of a Dutch film director hacked down by a maniac seemed remote from the Madrid junket. After all, that was northern Europe. Actually, the conference was a few minutes’ drive from the station where 200 people were killed by a Moroccan terrorist network. Dialogues between civilisations, Christian, Islamic or other, are fine, but a constant part of this must be the grim reality that visited Van Gogh on a cold northern street, an event depressingly indicative of the ethnic and religious complexity of Europe. We cannot wish away the clash of civilisations.
Michael Burleigh is author of Earthly Powers. Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War
Powerful story. Western civilization will unify against these facist Jihadis or be subjegated and ultimately snuffed out. Laws, borders and morality mean nothing to these killing machines.
Some Muslims - maybe many - are incapable of dealing with the idea that others can hold differing beliefs.
Only one side is civilized.
And its not much of a clash when much of the civilized side isn't willing to clash!
...“The knights of death are at your heels.”...
Sure, A-holes, but the Knights of Nuke will then be over your diaper covered heads.
Fourteen centuries of killing has not gotten through to the Euroweenies/Leftists. Since the Cult of Mohammed began with murder and theft, grew as it became organised violence on a massive scale and flourished as it systemically wiped out the entire Christian Middle East. Only armed force halted the Scourage of Satan and beat it back from Europe now it has insinuated its way back into the heart of Europe and the killing will start to grow again.
Clinton's idiot policy promoting bin Laden's allies in Kosovo increased the danger from these fanatics.
The Times (UK)! I think some people are beginning to wake up. This still doesn't drive the point home as forcefully as I would like, but at least it recognizes the heart of the problem.
We're not going to die. YOU ARE.
-Time to kick the tires & light the fires, folks- terrorism gathers across the World...--
Old bump list- we've covered this for years:
Clash of Civilizatio:
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Now, now.
We can't jump in an condemn the young muslim. We need to understand his motivations, his upbringing, his family life. He was oppressed, and like a puppy with it's foot caught in the door, merely snapped at the nearest thing out of desperation. We need to feel his inner pain.
We should condemn ourselves and our religion for crowding his peaceful religion out of the mainstream.
(/sarc in case it wasn't obvious!)
(Hmmmm. Maybe I should have used all caps and misspelled more words...)
The History channel is airing a piece on the Crusades Sunday evening at 9:00ET I'm hoping it lends some perspective about a war the muslims believe is ongoing today. A "Clash of Civilizations".
Paris in flames has a way of concentrating the mind wonderfully.
No country went out of its way to be more accomodating to the Arab world than France. And this is their thanks.
This Van Gogh doesn't seem to have been the sort of fellow we'd like to have in our civilization anyway ~ a second front to the conflict with the Moslems perhaps?
There could be a lot more to this than a mere war on civilizations. Here's something of interest found from the USENET:
From the Presages of Lynette:
#5
Out of Mirkwood the Necromancer is purged,
But retreat, forseen, had been planned for long.
The stroke was too late, the Shadow has resurged,
Beyond the Sea of Rhun, where they speak in song.
#8
A medieval sage wrote: the world would be smaller around,
That there would be travel by sky, by sea and over ground,
That in a land long inhabited without a fight,
The wars would resume with new vigor and might.
Vanquished between Hammer & Sickle, Stripes & Stars,
Skies filled with planes, seas & roads with ships & cars.
From behind the Crooked Cross, the Shadow passed out of sight.
But under the Crooked Crescent, it returns for a new fight.
#13
A medieval sage wrote:
a great English empire would come to be,
For over 300 years would its power last.
Its armies would cross by land and by sea.
Lusitania would not be pleased when this had passed.
In the land between rivers shall arise a new state,
It will grow into a new Caliphate.
For over 300 years will its power last.
But the Shadow won't be pleased when this has passed.
#3
A medieval sage wrote:
that in the year 1999, the month of July,
The great King of Terror would descend from the sky.
But under the watchful vigilance of a world in wait,
The future was postponed over two years beyond its date.
From the fires of a great war was forged the Rule by Five.
Many years have passed, and it continues to survive.
But the Shadow of the great King of Terror heeds no state.
The Old World Order makes war with its new religion of hate.
#4
In a time when Venus shall eclipse Mars,
A great yearning will awaken to reach the stars.
A Green Tide shall sweep over the lands,
Where today there is nothing but desert sands.
#11
Revived in the New World were the legions of Rome,
Who sought to make the world its new home.
The son of its chief shall be the last man to command,
But there will be more after him to rule the land.
My interpretation on #5 & #4:
Mirkwood is the Tolkienesque metaphor for Afghanistan, "speak in song" undoubtedly refers to tonal languages, the "Sea of Rhun" is far to the east in the Tolkien world. In that light, that makes #13 particularly interesting and revealing...
#4 is almost certainly not an astrological reference, but a reference to the symbols for Venus & Mars which are also, respectively, the female and male gender icons. That makes #11 particularly of interest.
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