State of denial in the UK

Melanie Phillips:

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On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0755 approx), the reformed Islamist extremist Hassan Butt patiently spelled out to presenter Jim Naughtie that Islamist terrorists carry out their acts of mass murder as an expression of religious faith and fervour. They do it, he said, ‘for the pleasure of God’. Far from being acts of despair, these terrible atrocities are acts of religious exultation.

If we don’t understand, even now, that what we are facing is a religious war, a jihad against the unbeliever and backsliding Muslims across the world we cannot possibly hope to defend ourselves against it. Yet while former Islamist extremists such as Hassan Butt and Ed Husain are urgently telling us the truth, Gordon Brown’s new administration is shutting its ears and embarking on a suicidally stupid and cowardly strategy. Astoundingly, it has decided to deny the religious element of this jihad altogether, to redefine Islamic terrorism as mere criminality and to ban all terms that call this horror by its proper name. From the Daily Express today, we learn:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in ¬connection with the ¬terrorism crisis. The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase ‘war on ¬terror’ is to be dropped. The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair… Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language. ‘There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,’ the spokesman said. ‘It is important that the country remains united.’

For ‘consensual’, read bowdlerised, censored and dissimulatory; and for ‘united’, read defeated. This is a disastrous beginning to Brown’s premiership. The terrorism we face is a jihad carried out in the name of Islam, mandated by the principal religious authorities in the world of Islam and drawing on theological concepts in Islam. That doesn’t mean all Muslims go along with it; many do not, and many are indeed its victims. But to deny that it is a war which draws its authority from Islamic precepts is to deny the truth. That is why it is not enough for British Muslims to condemn these acts of terror. They have to acknowledge that what drives these acts is a part of the faith to which they subscribe — a part which they must renounce.

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One of the maddening things about Islam is how many of its followers will assert that other Muslims are not Muslims because they engage in non Islamic practices in the name of Islam. It appears that the new Labor government is falling into the same trap. It is as if a referee is not permitted to call a foul on one team because what the player did is a violation of the rules. It would make much more sense for members of the religion to condemn the act and say they do not approve of that conduct in the name of their religion. The Brown government has already begun to lose clarity on who they are fighting. The perps know they are doing it in the name of Islam, so why deny the obvious.

Update: Wretchard says, "This is probably going be a very costly mistake for the Labor party in Britain." One of the rules smart lawyers learn is to never get yourself in an argument where you are trying to make a case against the obvious. It is going to cost you some of your credibility which you should save for more important matters. Smart politicians should also follow that rule.