Here’s a terrific article by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph on the problems, many self-inflicted, that the UK is facing in its fight against Islamic extremism. At its heart, it’s a call for more honesty in dealing with the challenge that Britain – and the West – now faces:

“If the Blairs and Paddicks [a senior London policeman] won’t look at the link between faith and terrorism, how can they ever learn from the evidence in the websites and madrassehs and sermons which incites the trouble and brings like-minded extremists together?”

And this:

“[Compared with the IRA threat] the situation is more serious because we are dealing with a religion, not merely a national aspiration, and the demands of a religion are more absolute than anything else. If fanatics can persuade people that their religion insists that they kill others (and often themselves) in its service, then they will obey. And whereas the IRA, though utterly sadistic and fanatical, kept in mind a political aim which, once achieved, would mean that they need kill no longer, the religious fanatic lacks even this check on his behaviour. From time to time, perhaps, he will kill for a specific reason – to take power in one country, to drive foreign troops out of another – but, in principle, there is no end to his killing until everyone who does not share his particular version of truth is exterminated.

“What strikes one again and again about the reaction of the public authorities, of commentators, of the media, is the terrible lethargy about studying what it is we are up against. We are dealing with an extreme interpretation of one of the great religions of the world.We flap around, looking for moderates and giving them knighthoods, making placatory noises, putting bits of Islam on to the multi-faith menu in schools, banishing Bibles from hospital beds, trying to criminalise the expression of “religious hatred”, blaming George Bush and Tony Blair. But if we do not know the way the faith in question works, its history, its quarrels, its laws and demands, we will not have the faintest chance of distinguishing the true moderate from the fellow-traveller or of bearing down on the fanaticism.”

And Moore has a few words for Ken Livingstone too:

“The mayor of our bombed city has himself got involved with Muslim leaders who say some interesting things. Last year, Mr Livingstone extended a warm welcome in London to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a mainstream, world-famous spiritual leader based in Qatar. Qaradawi has supported suicide bombing against Israelis, the treatment of all Jews as legitimate targets, the whipping of homosexuals and the killing of all Americans – civilian and military – in Iraq. Surely, Ken recognises an ideology here, and a faith of sorts? Yet he praised, rather than condemned, and so now, when the logical extension of such ideas hits King’s Cross and the Edgware Road and kills dozens of his voters, he has to say that such deeds arise from no belief at all.”

As ye sow…

More on the situation in the UK here and here.

There’s a similar message to Moore’s over at Britain’s Social Affairs Unit blog:

“The first thing to do, rather obviously, is to identify the enemy. But the ability to do this seems to elude many people. Within hours of the attack the prospective Tory leader David Davis, speaking on behalf of the Conservative party in the House of Commons announced that “the terrorism that walks the streets of London has no face”. Meanwhile Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick replied to a question in a televised news-briefing by saying that “terrorism and Islam do not go together”. To make such claims is not merely to repeat unsupportable tropes, it is also to infantilise the British public. For what such suggestions are really doing, as American authorities did after 9/11 is treating the British as people who can’t handle the truth, who you have to repeat clichés to, lest they indulge in a spate of Muslim-lynching (a thing without precedent or likelihood). Once again the governments of the West display their signature knee-jerk reactions: self-blame and self-excoriation.”