Nemesis

Con George-Kotzabasis June 23, 2007

“The evil doctrine, the armed forces at the disposal of those professing the doctrine, and the sympathizers with the doctrine in other lands constitute one united threat which must be met by force”. Edmund Burke, writing on the French revolution and of the English citizens who supported it either in word or deed.

In a battle between flaming fundamentalists and mute moderates, who do you think is going to win? Irshad Manji Muslim writer

As we have predicted in the past, the stepping down of radical Hilaly as Mufti of Australia and his replacement by another imam who would be just as radical but who would attempt to cover the sinews of his spiritual radicalism under the garments of moderation, has just happened. The selection by the Australian Council of Imams of the elderly and scholarly Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam of the Preston Mosque to replace Hilaly as Mufti of Australasia, is no less than an attempt by the politically minded advisers of the Australian Council of Imams to cozen and dupe the Australian public that they were substituting a moderate cleric in the person of Sheikh Naji for the radical Hilaly.

But let us see whether our prejudgment of the new Mufti is too hasty and facile by looking at the past conduct and statements of Sheikh Naji. Six years now since the twin towers bombing and all the objective evidence who was behind the attack, the Sheikh still refuses to acknowledge that Osama bin Laden was behind it. His reply is that he has heard people saying that al Qaeda were the perpetrator but he himself has not seeing the evidence. Now the Sheikh is reputed to be a scholarly and intelligent man and one would expect of him to use the latter two qualities in search of the truth. If six years after the event, he still cannot make up his intelligent mind, despite the resounding evidence that is also verified by the statements of bin Laden himself that al Qaeda was the deadly agent, as to the real perpetrator of that dastardly action, then people must come to the conclusion not that the Sheikh does not have the truth in his hands but that he hides it. And the reason why he hides it is that he does not want to alienate himself both from other imams, who also believe that bin Laden was not behind the attack, and of the wider Muslim community which also believes likewise, after hearing their clerics for so long repudiating that the attack was engendered by al Qaeda.

Hence the important question is not what Sheikh Naji truly believes about 9/11 but what he truly represents. That a great number of Muslims, after being indoctrinated for so many years by their radical imams about the evils of the West and the Great Satan America have been also radicalized, and it’s exactly this fundamentalist stratum that the Sheikh represents. That there is a majority of fledgling radical Muslims in our midst has been lucidly illustrated by the recently religiously arrogant statements of the head of the Supreme Islamic Shia Council of Australia, Kamal Mousselmani, as reported in the Australian, on June 23-24, 2007. He said, his entire of 30,000 Shi’ites in Australia were avid [my emphasis] supporters of Hezbollah (Party of God) and haters of Israel, considered Hezbollah to be a “resistance group” not a terrorist organization. He continued, “Shia in Australia considers Israel a terrorist organization and also view those who support Israel in the same light”. And with the superciliousness of a fanatic who speaks in the name of God, he said to the reporters attending his press conference, “put those words down, we are not afraid to say that”.

Certainly there is a minority of moderate Muslims within their community but who would dare to swim against the stream of such torrential river of radicalism? This is why the expectation by some civil libertarians and politicians that moderate Muslims can oust the radicals from their position of power and influence, is completely unrealistic at least in the short term. And in “the long term we will all be dead”, to quote John Maynard Keynes.

Furthermore, Sheikh Naji’s record speaks for itself. He officially supported the application for residency of Abdul Nacer Benbrica, who presently awaits trial for alleged terrorist actions in Australia. Asked by a reporter if moderate Muslims should take a stronger stand against extremists, he ducked the question and answered that the media misrepresented the facts about Muslims. What he would say to those Muslims who wanted to go overseas and participate in jihad, he replied, “I don’t know what (the) circumstances outside (Australia) would be”. He also called for the removal of Hezbollah’s military arm from Australia’s proscribed list of terrorist organizations. And in a lame attempt to shift jihad in favor of Australia, not realizing that he was throwing a boomerang in the air, he said that Australian Muslims would participate in a jihad to “protect Australia from its enemies”. (m.e.) Presently Australia is fighting its enemies, extremist Muslims, in Iraq and Afghanistan; is the Sheikh going to send his holy warriors to these theatres of war as an outcome of his pledge to protect Australia? Lastly, asked in his press conference after his election as Mufti about the war in Iraq, he was promptly muzzled by his minders to articulate his views on the issue, pleading his ill-health (he had suffered a stroke), and was quickly whisked away from the tough-fisted questions of some reporters, his advisors replying that he will answer these questions another time.

Hence, the Australian Council of Imams being too clever by half, not only have they picked a seemingly moderate imam to replace Hilaly, so he can pass muster in the eyes of the general community, but a frail one to boot. So whenever Sheikh Naji faced difficult questions of the media his minders would plead his ill-health, thus shielding him from giving an impromptu answer that could compromise his position as a moderate imam, and, also, exposing all those who elected him Mufti as being also avid representatives of the radicalism of their flock since they happen to be its sires.

The general public must not allow itself to be duped by this latest farce of the Muslim clerisy that they are willing and preparing to walk hand-in-hand with the Australian maiden, on the path of moderation, mutual respect, and peace, when their sermons are replete to the brim with the seeds of war against the infidels, the Jews, and the Great Satan, America.

When men’s pride swells in folly, then their tongues become their true accusers Aeschylus

Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s both interesting and revealing that the critics of the war in Iraq, and generally on the war against global terror, have never formulated their position in concrete and effective terms what should have been America’s response to the lethal attack of 9/11; an attack that was far from being an aberration but on the contrary threatened to be the order of the day for the United States and the rest of the civilized world. Other than the pious wishes of “containing” a religious fanatic enemy, whose godly agenda was to destroy the West, by the nostrums of non-belligerence and diplomacy and the abracadabra of the United Nations, and addressing the root causes of terrorism by benign economic means, the critics of the Bush administration never presented a realistic and feasible plan how to deal and confront the immediate threat that terrorism and its state supporters, such as Saddam’s regime–not to mention the Saudis whose second major export commodity to the West, after oil, is terror, through their financing of Mosques and Madrasas in the cities of the Western world–posed against Western civilization.

This cognitive absence of the war critics and of the media in the designation of a pragmatic strategic articulation of what America should have done toward the protection of its mainland and its people from the impending fanatic thrusts of a mortal foe, speaks volumes of their moral and intellectual effeteness and lack of imagination. As a compensation for their absence at this critical roll call of the times to “abort” the birth of global terror, they present themselves now, with the benefit of hindsight, as prophets who predicted the disastrous consequences that the war would have in Iraq and in the Middle East in general.

One such prophet or rather prophetess from The New York Times punditry, is the enchantingly charming Maureen Dowd. But like a scorpion whose nature is to bite she stings both Bush and Cheney with her sarcastic and vitriolic tongue. In her latest Op-Ed of the Times Bush’s Fleurs du Mal, with exquisite sweet phrases and metaphors that are like French éclairs, which for her diabetic readers consuming them would be deadly—but I guess it’s better to take leave of this world with a sweet tongue than a bitter one—she lambastes and drags Bush into her swamp of sarcasm by accusing him of being a “loop of sophistry,” and asserts that as a result of his war “terrorists moved into George Bush’s Iraq not…in Hussein’s,” implying that the latter had no links with terrorists nor did he support them–when there is ample and glaring evidence that he did, both in Sudan, during the short domicile of bin Laden in the country, and in the Palestinian territories–as well as insinuating, like so many other pundits, that it was Bush that gestated the increasing number of terrorists in Iraq by hopping in bed with the neocon architects of the war. Further with unparalleled flippancy she places Bush among “presidents who race to war because they want to be seen as hard, not soft”, using in this case the same sophistry that she accuses Bush of using, i.e., the war issued from the psychological and ideological malfunctions of the President and his entourage, and not from the geopolitical and national interests of the United States.

The “race” to war was not a display of machismo by the Bush administration, as Dowd avers, but a demonstration of political awareness and astuteness that the US and Western civilization were going to be locked in a long battle with a formidable, fiendish, and deadly foe. It was a race to prevent the future coupling of terrorists with rogue states that possessed weapons of mass destruction and nuclear ones whose use by the terrorists against the cities of the West would bring the end of Western civilization. That this threat is not a fairy tale but a real and continuous one has been lucidly illustrated by the recent arrests of the Islamist terrorists who were planning to blow up the JFK International Airport in New York, which according to the officials who apprehended the partly home-grown terrorists would have been much more devastating than the 9/11 attack.

The media as the fourth estate in a democracy, does not only protect its citizens from the abuses and the corrupt practices of governments and private corporations, but also from the threats of external and internal enemies who imperil the lives of its people and the vital interests of the nation. One would have expected therefore that in times of war, as the United States presently is engaged in fighting a mortal foe, the media’s primary responsibility would have been to unite Americans and rally them behind their government. And while not absconding for a minute from its responsibility to highlight and criticize the government’s fault lines in the conduct of the war, it must do this constructively and creatively with the aim of correcting the Administration’s mistakes, and not taking its eyes for a moment off the ball that this is a war that America definitively must win.

Regrettably and tragically what we see in the major outlets of the American media is a dereliction of its duty to unite its people in this major and critical war against global terror. The media is more interested in sensationalizing the negative parts of the war splashing on its pages and in the air its ugly and gory aspects instead of underlining the difficulties that arise from fighting an elusive, determined, and fanatic enemy. As if wars can be fought clinically without cruelty. War is the greatest atrocity of all and within its context it’s inevitable that some atrocities will be committed even by the best disciplined of armies, especially when the enemy appears and commits his murderous actions in civilian clothes whom those who fight him cannot identify before he commits his heinous action. And on this issue the media is locked in an illogical bind. While emphasizing the traumatic experiences that US soldiers—traumas that will probably carry for the rest of their lives– are experiencing in this “ghostly” war, seeing their buddies killed by road bombs and by insurgents clad in civilian clothes, they expect these soldiers to remain cool and not to break their discipline under this enormous stress and pressure of this kind of war.

The American media has reneged itself from its moral, political, and intellectual responsibility to be objective about the real stakes of the war in Iraq, and sold its soul to populism and ratings. Its sotto voce position on the devastating consequences that a premature withdrawal from Iraq will have upon the prestige and the continued ability of the US as the sole superpower to provide stability and peace to the rest of the world is historically tragic and inexcusable. Demeaning its cognitive and intellectual power, it’s in a race to jeopardize and defeat the geopolitical and vital interests of the USA, led by the dowager of journalism The New York Times under the masthead, all the punditry that is fit to defeat America.

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to:

Ali is pop star of intolerance Greg Barns On Line Opinion June 4, 2007

Greg, in your moral equivalence between Christian-Jews and Muslims you nullify your intelligence, your sense of history and reality. Certainly there are fanatic Christians and Jews, but they don’t threaten the existence of Western civilization as fanatic Muslims do.

Moreover, life for Muslims is difficult because of their bigoted attachment to an atavistic religion, not because of the “pop star”, to quote you, status of Hirsi Ali. Further, by giving fanatic Muslims a piggyback you play the role, in the unfathomable depths of your ignorance, of the tortoise, in the unforgettable fable of Orson Welles, The Scorpion and the Tortoise. When the former convinced the latter that in its transportation on the back of the tortoise from one side of the river to the other, it would be silly to sting it as it itself would drown, nonetheless, midstream it did sting it. And in the dying question of the tortoise why it stung it, the drowning scorpion replied, “this is my nature”.

Likewise you will be stung by the “Muslim Scorpion” that you carry on your back.