Tuesday, July 12, 2005
"To divide Muslims from non-Muslims"
If you were Osama Bin Laden, or one of his henchmen, and you were looking to recruit an apologist to convey useful idiocy on your behalf in the west, the chances are that you would choose "The Independent"'s Robert Fisk.
Matter of fact, Bin Laden has glowingly and famously so nominated Fisk before, in the shadowy tape recording before Bush's re-election.
You can understand why Bin Laden loves Fisk.
Relentless in vindictive hyperbole, shameless in his bias and his hatred, sharing the same key enemies as Osama, and superbly positioned atop far-left literati, Fisk is ideal to let Britons know they deserved to be mass murdered on July 7.
Lo and behold comes July 8 and, before the subway dust has settled and before the rats have started to chew their prey, that is precisely what this ugly little man sets out to do, for example here.
Yet as futile and easy as it is deconstruct the monotone pontificating, he has therein made an important point (albeit in a different context):
"(T)his is part of the point of yesterday's bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims"
All of us in the west knows the visceral anger that has welled since the terror attacks, the course investigations have taken, the target of suspicion. All of us have heard and read angry and blanket reactions, and felt a temptation to target their own ire.
Many of us have been taught not to generalise or to draw ignorant conclusions.
Now is the time to heed that lesson, to keep in mind that many more Iraqis have been slaughtered in Iraq than Americans, that millions of these people came out to democratically vote while under extreme threat. That the likes of Bin Laden wish to sway Muslims to their support, and that only a miniscule spattering of haters currently lend such support.
It requires the illusion of enmity and the perversion of the spirit to kill yourself and others in a lemming attack, or to cheer the result of one.
Let's not create the illusion.
