Nemesis

           MIGRANT HISTORY REPEATS

            Waleed Aly The Australian-February 23, 2006

            WHY MUSLIM LEADERS DARE NOT
            
            SPEAK THE TRUTH?

  Con George-kotzabasis

Waleed Aly’s article is a display of dazzling historical and sociological acrobatics on immigration that leaves his audience breathless. But in his attempt to win the applause of the latter, he forces himself to take some foolhardy risks on the threadbare wire of his argument trying to prove its correctness, that make him lose his reflective balance and fall on a nettles ground that bounces him into the embrace of the seventy virgins. What is more dangerous, to be historically and sociologically incorrect or to be in the company of seventy virgins, is for others to judge.

But let us deal with the premise of his argument and the historical facts of immigration as he presents them, with which he builds his “matchsticks” sociological theory of Muslim terrorism to make his case. His contention is that the so-called local Islamic terrorism of our contemporary times is no different from the Mafiosi terrorism of the 60s, from the Vietnamese triad gangs of the 80s, and treating the Greeks and the Catholics more gently, from the Mediterranean Back welfare fraud of the former and the allegiance of the latter to the Pope. No doubt, all these actions of the above groups are contrary to Australian values, nonetheless they arise from a minority of their communities and therefore it would be both illogical and unfair to blacken their whole communities for the actions of few. Neither, the sociological “deviancy” of a Trimboli or a Condello could denigrate the Italian community in toto and its great achievements as assimilated migrants in this country. Therefore, in similar mode, the beliefs and actions of a small number of Muslim radicals have a sociological pedigree going back to the 60s and 80s, and are of a passing nature, as the deviancy of the few radicals, as it happened with other immigrant groups in the past, will be absorbed within the majority of assimilated Muslims to Australian values in the near future.  Hence, according to Aly, history will be repeating itself, neither as a tragedy nor as a farce, as Marx believed, but as progress toward the embracing of Australian laws and values by all immigrant communities, including Muslims.  

In scope and depth this proposition is as serious as claiming, that soft “pasta” made terrorism is similar to religious fanatic terrorism that is fomented by an Islamofascist suicidal ideology and whose reach is global.  That religion, which plays such an authoritarian and dominant role among Muslims, can be relegated to sociology. To keep his canoe theory afloat in the billowing waters of reality, Aly, like a magician has to conjure away the history of Islam as a supremacist religion, which the precepts of its prophet Mohammed reveal and attest.  He also has to hide the fact, that this superiority of Muslim religion and culture inspires the minds and senses of most Muslims. Therefore, any assertion by Muslims that they support and ardently embrace multiculturalism is not only disingenuous but a blatant lie. To expect of them to accept multiculturalism will be akin of expecting them to become votaries of polytheism.

Aly”s argument, that Muslims will be as easily assimilated to Western values as other migrant groups have done from Christian and Buddhist backgrounds, is demolished by his co-religionists leaders.  The Montreal Muslim News, on February 26, among whom one of its hosts is the President of The Muslim Council of Montreal who is considered to be by all media outlets the representative of the views of the community, in criticizing the comments of Treasurer Costello that all citizens should accept the laws and values of Australia, stated the following: “If we look deeply into the sickness that passes for ‘western values’ one can see why we chose Allah over human made systems of morality and conduct”.  It’s this rigid, bigoted, and supremacist beliefs of Muslims that makes Western values terra rejectaneus to them. One also must take note of the historical fact, that unlike Christianity which had its Reformation that Luther nailed on the door of dogmatic papacy, Islam never had its reformation and it’s still “mind-locked” in the dark ages of the 8th Century and therefore it’s completely incapable spiritually of immersing itself in the torrential stream of modernity. This is the reason why, despite the Midas wealth of many Muslim countries, their peoples live in poverty and in cultural ghettos isolated and detached from the modern world under authoritarian regimes. And this is why when they emigrate to the West they remain in their religious and social ghettoes, instead of reaching out from the windows of opportunity that a dynamic free enterprise economy is offering them and reaping the economic and social benefits that emanate from Western education, and engagement with the advanced world of globalization. Hence, bailing out from high rates of mostly voluntary unemployment and dependency on welfare, with all their dire social consequences.  But the question is how can a group of people who spent so much time (praying seven times a day) in the affairs of the other world succeed in the affairs of this one?

All the interactions that Muslims have, even in their dress and in their appearance, e.g. hijabs, white caps, and beards, with other Australians are motivated first and foremost by their religion. To claim as Aly does, that Muslim migrants are “rejecting culture altogether, Western or other wise’’ and leaving it at that without probing and answering, especially, why they reject the Western variety, is to say the least shallow sociology. They are rejecting it because being chained from head to foot with the rigidity of their culture are unwilling to break their chains and thus become free to accept the tenets of a modern world that will lead them to social and individual success. Ultimately therefore, they reject Western society because deep down they feel that they will fail in all their endeavors to succeed. Hence, like all failed cultures, they will scapegoat all the successful ones and blame them for their own shortcomings. And for this vicious circle failure, they will seek and find solace in, and embrace, the millenarian teachings of fundamentalist Islam and its Jihad against the great Satan America and its future promise of a caliphate and paradisiacal bliss.  

It’s for all the above reasons and the following fact that the claim of Aly that terrorism in Australia is a “fringe element”, to quote him, is as far from the truth, if it’s not a “warring” lie-as according to Mohammed in war telling lies by Muslims is justifiable- when the radical Sheikh Omran of Melbourne, who considers bin Laden to be a good man, has more than ten thousand followers.

One remains nonplussed, why an intelligent person such as Waleed Aly, leaves all the above facts out from his article? And dons the top hat of a conjuror that attempts to present the beliefs and deeds of religious fanaticism as being sociological and similar to the innocuous, by comparison, deviancy of a Condello from the mainstream? What does he have to hide? It’s up to his keen readers to answer the non-answer of Waleed that dares not speak the truth.

This article was written on March 2, 2006          

RECOMMENDATION TO THE USA PRESIDENT

This letter was sent to the USA President on March 21,2006

Dear Mr. President

It’s admirable to see, that in your National Security Strategy you continue to stand like a Titan against your Democratic opponents and the rabble-rattlers of the media, in respect of your historically insightful strategy of pre-emptive war.

Humbly, I would like to make the following suggestions in regard to the great threat emanating from Iran in its determination to acquire nuclear weapons. I don’t believe that conventional realist diplomacy will convince the Ahmadinejad regime, especially when the latter can see the fraction that exists among the major nations that try to stop it from acquiring its nuclear arsenal, as exemplified by Russia and China, to change course and submit to the demands of this seemingly powerful combination of nations. I believe that only a diplomacy that is backed by the threat of an unequivocally resolute use of military action against Iran, if the latter does not conform to its dictates, and which makes it quite clear to its leaders that such action will not only target its nuclear plants, but, also, its political and religious leadership in toto as well as the higher echelons of the military. I think that such a “kiss of death” diplomacy pressed upon the foreheads of the triangular leadership of Iran, has the great potential to sow the seeds of division within it that could oust the radicals and replace them by moderates, who would be keen to accept the injunctions of this “armed” diplomacy.

Thus a “palace revolt” against the theocratic regime could be instigated by means of diplomacy, and usher your policy of regime change in the most peaceful way. And needless to say only the USA under your leadership could exercise this diplomacy. Of course such diplomacy will not attract multilateral support. This, however, will not be an obstacle to your resolute leadership.  But you will have the support of the Coalition of the willing, and that will be enough on this high stakes issue. The probability of achieving this peaceful transformation of regime change is far from being a long shot. But if uncertainty, that rules in the affairs of men and beyond, uncannily plays its mischievous role and negates this probability, then you will have no other option but to resort to a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s nuclear plants and against its triangular leadership.

Mr. President, it’s a terrible and tragic burden to carry on your shoulders. But that is the price that statesmanship must pay in this most dangerous times that issue from the coupling of terrorists and rogue states armed with nuclear weapons.

Respectfully,

Con George-Kotzabasis

                              Alea jacta est      

Melbourne Australia

                    “LIES” ABOUT THE WAR THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL.
  
                    Con George-Kotzabasis

A chirping sound and fury of a swarm of crickets from their grassy, weedless, “manicured estates” of politics, the media, academes, and bishoprics, are endeavouring to muffle the sound of reason as to why America and its staunch and historically insightful allies went to war against Saddam Hussein.

The critics of the war, in their impassioned fiery endeavour, to impugn and discredit the Bush, Blair, and Howard governments, are far from being morally and intellectually hampered from using meretricious arguments to make their case against the war. The English essayist Chesterton observed, ‘where is the best place to hide a leaf’? His answer was in a tree. The opponents of the war observe, ‘where is the best place to hide the truth’? Their answer is in a lie. Hence, they fabricated the biggest lie of all, with the aim to conceal the truth about the war. After their lugubrious doomsday cries and forecasts about hundreds of thousands of casualties, of humanitarian disasters, floods of refugees, and bogged-down Vietnams, all of which failed to materialize, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, they now “pin-up” their arguments on the Americans’ unsuccessful efforts to find weapons of mass destruction  (WMD), and on the inability of its armed forces to win the peace in Iraq.  It is as if they expect that these two goals could be accomplished in parallel with the ending of major combat operations, in a regime which brutally oppressed its own people for thirty years, and which practised the concealment of its development of WMD in the form of an exact science. Despite Iraq’s swift defeat in the war, it still has a paladin of sturdy supporters, whose lament of losing power is inevitably transformed into a vigorous opposition to the American-led coalition forces.                                                                                                

The peaceniks, desperate to find a straw to save themselves from intellectual drowning in this ocean of failed predictions and “displaced” conceptions, have now concocted this lie – that the American, British, and Australian administrations were mendacious to their peoples about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the civilized world. In this forlorn effort to justify their position, they brazenly and shamelessly distort David Kay’s report to Congress about Hussein’s WMD, by focusing on the present fact that no such weapons have been found, and triumphantly deduce from this, that Hussein was not an imminent threat against the West. But in this ignominious exercise, they totally disregard the other crucial elements of his findings that clearly substantiate, that the regime retained intact an infrastructure that could develop WMD at short notice.

The eminent columnist of the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in his column of the …Post on 10 October wrote that Iraq maintained ‘an infrastructure                    (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could “break out” and ramp up production of [WMD] when needed… Just in Time… That David Kay found the infrastructure but, as yet, no finished product’. And again, as reported in the Washington Post on 7 October, David Kay had found strains of an organism in a scientist’s home that could be used to produce biological agents. He had also found documents for resuming uranium enrichment efforts for the development of nuclear weapons and a clandestine network of laboratories that contained equipment for continuing chemical-biological weapons research, as well as SA-2 surface-to-air missiles which could be transformed into ballistic missiles with a range of 250 miles, exceeding the 150 miles range which Iraq was allowed to have by the UN.

This is the thundering truth about Hussein’s secret program – that he could indeed activate the development of WMD, whenever his regime thought it would be safe to do so. It is this fact that the critics of the war are vainly attempting to muffle and still. The ABC presenter of the 7.30 Report, Kerry O’Brien, in his interview with the U.S. Ambassador, Tom Schieffer, picked selectively from the Kay report to make his flimsy case about the unnecessariness of the war in Iraq – and who obsessively and indefatigably has been doing so even before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq – and leaving out the key elements of the report which verified without any doubt, that the Hussein regime had the capability to develop and produce WMD at a time of its own choosing.  

Moreover, it is inconceivable, that while Iran, Hussein’s arch enemy and rival in the region, had plans to develop nuclear weapons, Hussein would not have known this, and had he known it, he would commit geopolitical harakiri, by choosing to go into “nuclear hibernation” and that he would unilaterally and altruistically cease all his plans to develop the same weapons. Such an action on his part, would strategically have placed him in a most vulnerable position, and would have made him a hostage to his primary foe in the region. Furthermore, such conduct would entail, the discarding and abandonment of all his ambitions and grandiose plans to be the new Saladin of the Arab world, which would be completely out of character. This kind of transubstantiation, from a ruthless ambitious dictator to a votary of the Dalai Lama, would be the mother of all miracles.

This logic just does not click. Yet it is by this reasoning that the opponents of the war are “constructing” their case against it. As their core argument was and is, that Hussein was never an imminent threat against the West, and they crown the “correctness” of their contention with the fact that no WMD have been found. But I dare say, that not before long, this crown will be a crown of thorns around their heads, and there will be no intellectual resurrection from the naivety that nailed them on the “believers” cross of the bloodthirsty dictator. That this sleight of hand artist was able to dupe and blindfold them in regards to the clandestine network of laboratories and scientists he had in place that could produce WMD on his orders at the appointed time, will be to their eternal shame.

As for the word ‘imminent’, that is also a spurious invention of the opponents of the war. Neither Bush nor Blair, nor any other senior member of their administrations, ever said that Hussein’s regime posed an imminent threat to the free world. What President Bush said, was that Hussein’s development and possession of WMD and his links with terrorism, posed a ‘grave and gathering danger’ against the civilized world. In a world of global terror however, this future gathering danger is not years ahead but too near at hand not to consider it as imminent. Indeed, in a world of unleashed fanatic terror, all the actions that the latter could launch are imminent. The terrorists pose a continuous threat to the world therefore it would be the culmination of foolishness on the part of those who are been targeted, not to take these threats as imminent. Also, the rogue states that directly and indirectly support terrorists are themselves deeply enmeshed in this web of imminence. On a scale of a continuum of threats, what is imminent? What can happen in one day, in one week, in one month, in one year, to paraphrase the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld? It is this hard question, that the critics of the war are avoid answering, as a result of their intellectual flabbiness and lack of moral and political integrity.

Statesmen who face a great portentous danger, as presently posed by an ‘emerging nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction’, to quote Secretary Rumsfeld, will not await for the elusive perfect intelligence, perfect information, before they take decisive and unrelenting action against a formidable and deadly foe. In the realm of human affairs, uncertainty is the absolute sovereign. It is in this context of uncertainty that political leaders prudently and intrepidly, but not foolhardily, have to make their determining and momentous decisions. In the case of the war against Iraq, the Bush and Blair governments had to decide on the sort of action they would take on the basis of (a) the information they had received from their intelligence agencies, whose assessments were based on the calculus of probability, not on certainty (the latter being unattainable), that Iraq possessed WMD, and had plans in place to develop nuclear weapons, and that Hussein would not be squeamish in using them, either directly against his enemies, as he did in his war against Iran and on his own people, or through proxies, i.e., terrorists; and (b) on Hussein’s demonstration of his geopolitical ambitions for the region,  the ruthless means he would use to achieve them, and the links he had with global terror, in a span of thirty years of dictatorial rule.

No wise and responsible political leadership, in such critical conditions, would tarry its crucial decisions, until the interminable debates of the experts, as to whether, in the present case, the aluminium tubes were for uranium enrichment or for rocket construction – and if there were going to be used for rockets, the latter could still carry WMD – had reached majority or unanimous agreement as to their use. Even such an agreement could never be foolproof and could only be tested in the real conditions to which it would be applicable. Moreover as experts in intelligence can make mistakes in their appraisals, so too experts in other fields are not immune from making mistakes.  

This is the resounding truth as to why Bush, Blair, and Howard, decided to go to war in Iraq. As the latter is not only pivotal to the future defeat of global terror ( if one is serious in defeating global terror, one has also to fight its state sponsors. It is a war on two fronts. ) But also, in its strategic goal to prevent the “apocalyptic” coupling of terror and rogue states.

The ominous and deadly challenge of fanatic terrorism demands leaders of Gulliverian stature, not Lilliputians. The imposing lesson of history is, that in hard times, such as our own, it is the “hard” men that prevail. Flaccid and indecisive leaders, who wait for the will-o’-the-wisp of perfect intelligence and information, before they commit themselves to decisive action, are cast aside and thrown among the debris of history.

CON GEORGE-KOTZABASIS ( FORMER DIRECTOR OF SBS TELEVISION 1986-1996 )

The article was written on
30 OCTOBER 2003

MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA