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Bomb, Maim, Kill first, to ensure ‘Our Truth’ later

Introduction

Theories, opinions, beliefs, delusions, likes, dislikes, and many, many more. We humans live by them. Open minded? Fair minded? Balanced in mind? You must be joking. Throw in the domination of the ego, emotional incontinence, quirkiness in intellect, and you have the unbeatable formula for strict, unyielding fundamentalism, stoking up religious fervour, allied to tunnel-visioned extremism and bang! your terrorist acts. ‘Damaged minds trying to damage other minds’; and impose ‘our truth’ which accepts no other as truth.

I’m sure some liberal intellect will have a great time pulling all that apart as simplistic and one-dimensional. So let me quote the (psychology in the) time-honoured Sanskrit again. This by Shri Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1967 (in Part 1, The Geeta 1935 translation by W.B. Yeats and Purohit Swami was used). These simply expressed yet profound words surely can broaden our understanding even compassion so much.

“Pondering (in mind) on objects of the senses (the external world around him/her and subtle, complex emotion within), a man/woman develops attachment for them; from attachment springs up desire, and desire (thwarted - ie obstacles, sense of powerlessness, uselessness, ineffectiveness) gives rise to anger. From anger arises delusion; from delusion unsteadiness of memory; from unsteadiness of memory, destruction of intellect; through the destruction of intellect he/she perishes (as may others through his/her actions)”.

Maharishi says the verse depicts one who is not turned towards the true Divine. To what is the mind then turned? Images? Imaginings? It will sink deeper into the mire of delusion. Thought, the great force in Man, develops into desire which translates itself into action, bringing glory or disgrace. Anger excites the mind, which loses its balance and power of true, honourable discrimination; it loses proper vision, foresight, right sense of values. There is disconnection from ‘the harmonious rhythm of life’, wisdom fails, the intellect ceases to function…and ever-shifting theories opinions, beliefs dominate and rule.

(Author précis, comment; grateful thanks to Arkana, Penguin Books, 1990)
  One sad reflection of our situation

Near the shops, in southwest Baghdad, a group of Sunni and Shia children were playing football. Two cars pulled up, men got out and began firing machine guns at the group. Nine children died, others seriously injured. The killers drove away. Local men rushed home, got weapons and Sunnis began shooting at Shia houses and Shias began firing on Sunnis. Neighbours who previously had been sitting outside together were shooting at each other. It was two hours before people ventured out to try and help the children. “There is no security plan or reconciliation plan that will stop revenge. I can understand the homicidal rage that possesses a bereaved parent. Those who want to sow chaos and civil war are adopting horrific tactics to ensure stability does not prevail. This country will not survive,” said a witness. (précis of report in UK national newspaper, March 2007)
  He clearly favours a policy of carefully identifying and then killing those (Muslim extremists) who will not heed any other means of peaceful co-existence. Liberty is not free, (in human reality) it comes at the price of regular shedding of blood.
  The leader of Hezbollah said ‘We’re not looking for concessions from the West. We want your concept of civilisation to be over. We want to destroy it and replace it with ours.’ He does not have the power to make this happen, but he encourages the desire.
  History is witness that ‘barbarians’ have always triumphed over the mighty civilisations because of the intrinsic civility of such civilisations.
  He picked up the phone and found that his nephew, a Christian Palestinian working in a coffee shop in Jerusalem, had died in a suicide attack. The attacker blew himself up, killing the nephew, a Palestinian Muslim and two Israeli Jews.
  The British jihadist is breeding. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation? One of the 7/7 murderers in Britain was a cricket enthusiast from Leeds, whose family ran a fish-and-chip shop. You can’t get more assimilated than that.
  Now religion in the hands of this self or corrupt nature serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse state than passions only employed about world matters. Pride, self exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own. (William Law d.1671)
  If you can attempt to blow up the Prime Minister of Great Britain (Brighton 1984), kill five people in the process, still be let out (of prison) after 13 years of a recommended 35 year sentence and express no regret publicly, then a prospective Islamic terrorist might conclude that if caught he (or she) may be released (after not too long) and welcomed back into the fold.
  The instinct that makes morality possible, the ability to feel someone else’s pain, so that there is a desire NOT to hurt them (above all else), is wholly absent.
  While every religion rejects acts of tyranny, injustice and oppression, extremism is found in every religion.
  Islam is a religion of revolutionaries. Such ideas can be transformed easily into terrorist ideas. Slightly change the interpretation and, in the name of their ideals, people will commit not crimes, but feats. (Ali Vyacheslav Polosin, former Russian Orthodox priest now Muslim, Radio Free Europe, August, 2006)
  The Middle East is not about the division of a patch of land. The Palestine Arabs were offered a state of their own in Palestine in 1937, 1948 and 2000. They refused. There can be no negotiation with those whose agenda is non-negotiable. He suggested Britain might be prepared to talk to the ‘more sensible elements’ in Hamas. It took a King and a President to tell him forcibly that there were no sensible elements in Hamas. Talking to it would merely strengthen the terrible threat it posed to the whole region.
  We underestimate the danger from Islam but know we are losing. We are at work and they are at war. (Russian TV episode, July 2006 re Islam radicalism).
  The lesson I would draw, if I were a Muslim fanatic, is that when the (UK present) Government says that it will never deal with terrorists, it is not telling the truth (national newspaper comment, Northern Ireland, 2007 peace settlement).
  The Muslim activist praised the 9/11 bombers. When asked if he might prefer to move to move from Britain, to a country that practices Shari’a, he replied ‘Who says you own Britain anyway?’ This is a question that is going to have to be answered one way or another.
JUST PORTRAY THE REAL ISLAM  
Islam and fundamentalism are associated with terrorism, genocide, murder, bombing, hate, anything that goes against humanity. This has caused a great deal of pain, anxiety, panic and insecurity amongst the Islamists. The Internet and the electronic media is their enemy. They scan the cyber world to monitor what the world is thinking about Islam, countering truth with falsehood and deception, even if they have to twist their own holy scriptures for this. We respond to Islamism by just portraying the real Islam.  
(précis, article by Abul Kazem 2002)  
  Imagine trying to recruit for the American army if your best pitch was, not the opportunity to receive a college-standard education and to learn new skills, but rather you will be required to kill civilians including women and children, and you will die. However, your compensation will be to enjoy a heavenly brothel of virgins once you accomplish your task. There is no shortage of Muslim jihadist suicide troops. The leaderships’ message to them may be barbaric, but it is obviously merging with a deluded but deep-seated world view.
  Non-Muslims in Britain, he declared (himself three decades in Britain), are dirty unclean people who never wash their hands and become ill because of their own sexual promiscuity. Democracy is demon-ocracy. He praised the Shari’ah laws of Islam (for its cutting off of hands and stoning for adultery).
  If I were an Islamic bomber planning at attack in this country (UK) I could hardly failed to be impressed by the lenience with which a previous generation of terrorists have been treated (Northern Ireland, 2007 peace settlement).
  A new political ideology of Islamist terrorism is changing and adapting to our responses. Polarisation increases, there is more socio-economic disadvantage, escalation of violence, all are fertile ground for recruitment, among the influenced or deviating middle class, and university educated, degree-achievers or drop-outs.
  Muslim ‘balance’ is easy to talk about but implementation of something else. Going to extremes is easy, it can be ignorance. They (Muslim or other extremists) do not have to maintain high standards of morals or character, nor restrain anger, nor submit to principles. Muslim balance requires an exemplar, our master Muhammad (pbuh). We begin with our responsibilities not taking our rights, that way you can give.
  The causes of terrorism are found from ethnicity, nationalism, separatism, poverty, economic disadvantage, globalisation, democracy, non-democracy, disaffected intelligentsia or dehumanisation.
  British Muslims became a distinct and hostile political entity. There was murderous incitement, flagrant defiance of law and free speech, religious fanaticism, and supine establishment response. Conspicuous also was the mind-twisting, back to front reasoning routinely now used by Muslims turning violent aggression into victimhood.
  Qutb laid down that Muslims must answer to God alone. Human government was illegitimate, and therefore a proper target for jihad waged by true believers ‘destroying the kingdom of man to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth’.
  Departing away from God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood… and judgement is turned away backward, and justice standeth far off. Truth is fallen in the street and equity cannot enter.(Isaiah 59)
  Killing the infidel is our religion, slaughtering them, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute. (attributed in 2006 to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi)
  The trend for young British-born Muslims to become caught up in overseas military, really religious, conflicts, makes obvious that these Muslims feel no affinity whatsoever with their country of birth, Britain
  However armed response might seem necessary, successful long-term strategy against Islamists and terrorists requires clear understanding of who they are, what they think, how they understand their own motives.
  Whence is it that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false light? Laying claim to information, illuminations of the divine life, particularly to do wonders under extraordinary calls from God? It is this, they have turned to God without turning from themselves, they would be alive to God before they are dead to their own natures. . (William Law d.1671)
  The religious vocabulary hides violent Islamism’s true nature: a modern totalitarian challenge to both traditional Islam and modern democracy.
‘HATE BRITAIN’, LOVE OUR PASSPORTS  
The trend for young British-born Muslims to become caught up in overseas military, really religious, conflicts, makes obvious that these Muslims feel no affinity whatsoever with their country of birth, Britain (four captured and sentenced to execution in the Somali Africa confrontation.). Their loyalty went to the global ‘jihadist’ cause. They ‘hate’ Britain but ‘love’ their British passports when in trouble. This British government, which has so often failed the patriotic majority, has pulled out all stops in rescuing these four. And the government has now allowed them to go free on British streets.  
(Comment column, UK national newspaper, February 2007)  
  If you kill enough of them consistently enough, those disinclined to be violent in the first place will find a way to reform their religion (and sideline Islam’s extremists). Reformation will certainly not be accomplished by the West and an army of Madison Avenue PR ideas specialists.
  Hypocrisy and finding justification, for violence against others, from their religion (Muslim against Muslim) is available to both Muslims and Christians.
  Terrorism is first and foremost an ideological and moral challenge to liberal democracy. Realisation of this, realising its implications, is essential to democracy winning the long-simmering war of ideas and values that exploded in fury 9/11.
  What are the roots - moral, intellectual, political and spiritual – of murderous fanaticism? What are the attitudes, beliefs, motives of these young men and the movements from which they have sprung?
  One UK professor of religious studies was warned off. He was reported for remarking that suicide bombers ‘posed a real problem because normal constraints do not apply if you think your death will lead to God’.
  Victims of terrorists? The innocent have done nothing wrong, why should they suffer? Wrong place, wrong time? Fate? The will of God?
  The affected have raised their voices in the fight against radicals. The silence has ended and the courageous are raising their voices, including the support of educated, democratic Muslim women. All are paying dearly. Should we remain silent out of fear?
  To kill oneself, while wantonly murdering women, children, people of all descriptions and religions, has nothing to do with Islam and one does not have to be a learned theologian to see this.
  He was on trial for a wave of bombings. A victim, badly burned, said “I am a practising Muslim. Did God tell you to bomb babies and pregnant women?” He replied not with Koranic verses but with secular nationalist grievances.
  The four were captured and sentenced to execution in Somali Africa confrontation. Their loyalty went to the global ‘jihadist’ cause. They ‘hate’ Britain but ‘love’ their British passports when in trouble. This British government, which has so often failed the patriotic majority, has now allowed them to go free on British streets.
  While radicals continue to try to spread their beliefs, others say there is no justification for jihad in England. If you have the wrong intention, you can justify your criminal actions from any text, whether it is the Qur’an or Bible or Shakespeare. Radicals quote the Qur’an out of context to justify killing of innocents.
  The 2004 tsunami killed 170,000 Indonesians. I have not noticed any reflection among Islamists as to why Allah punished the militants in their ranks – everything happens after all according to Allah’s Will?
  Nearly every country in the West has had some experience with a terrorist movement or regime, ever since 1793, when the word ‘terror’ first came into use in its modern political sense with the so-called Terror of the French Revolution. Why then is this phenomenon so opaque to Western analysis?
  If terrorism is truly as close to the core of Islamic belief, as both Islamists and their enemies/opponents claim, why does ‘modern’ international Islamist terrorism date back only to 1979 and the Iranian Revolution?
TACKLING TERRORISM THREAT  
Angry UK Muslims can be transformed into potential suicide bombers “in a matter of weeks and months”. The process has accelerated. Stopping radicalisation is (probably) the biggest challenge facing UK police and intelligence services. All face an increasing terrorist threat. The demand on assets and people (to tackle this) is unprecedented. It is “greater than that posed by the Provisional IRA” in the UK past. The “Provos” issued warnings and did not use suicide attacks. “The odds were better”.  
(précis, article by a senior UK policeman in UK national newspaper, February, 2007)  
  Moderate Islam is a myth. It is time to minimise the number of Muslims in Britain as the only practical solution to (the threat of) terrorism.
  Eliminate rancour, resist intolerance, oppose violence, and we will turn back the wave of cruel fanaticism endangering lives, and hindering progress to world peace.
  Early Muslims were in general more tolerant of diversity within their own community and even cited an early tradition to the effect that such diversity is a divine blessing. Deviation and diversity, with rare exceptions, were persecuted only when they offered a serious threat to the existing order.
  There is no clear supreme authority in Islam. Senior clerics however seem to voice support for suicide bombings and the like – in the Middle East, Europe, London, even Australia.
  Islamist terrorists claim to fight on theological grounds. A few verses from the Koran, a few references to the sunnah (deeds of the Prophet pbuh) put an Islamic seal on each operation.
  The accompaniment (to a terrorist operation) draws from a powerful set of religious-sounding references: holy war, enemies of Islam, the Great Satan, the party of God, infidels, idolaters, crusaders, martyrs, sacred soil.
  Many specialist Islamic publications, on sale in London Muslim bookshops, contain diatribes of hate against Israel, or glorify some of the ideologues of Islamist terrorism. One Islamist magazine is published in London and calls repeatedly for human bomb terror operations against the United States.
  Any church leader who preached openly that Christians should kill outside the law (of our country) would be sacked.
  Today worldwide you have an estimated 20,000 extreme Christian fundamentalists. Then you have seven million extreme Muslim fundamentalists. In other words, lunatics today who kill on behalf of God are Christians 20,000 or Islamists seven million.
  When you stop teaching your children that God wants you to hate, that God approves violence and war, not until then will you begin to have the option of being civilised.
  Jailed for seven years, a Muslim ‘preacher of hate’ in the UK is fighting attempts to deport him by claiming he has a human right to live with his family in the country. His appeal is based on article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
  In fighting terrorism, you should use both military and political means, he said. He is wrong. Deploying arms is counter-productive. As for politics, how can an ‘Islamic Caliphate’ demand be treated politically? Its chance of being achieved is zero, but using politics against it would make Britain (and America) less liberal and tolerant places.
  The UK is accused of being ‘a police state for Muslims’ and treating suspects with ‘virtual torture’. There is much to learn about the difference between a tyrannical regime and a democratic nation.
  In Beirut four people died and more than 100 were injured when a university cafeteria argument between two Muslim groups, Sunni and Shiite exploded into a street battle.
WE WERE AT FAULT TOO  
We criticise Islam and Islamists for violence? But Bloodthirsty Europe? In 1096 the first Roman Catholic crusade started with the massacre of 10,000 Jews in the Rhineland. The Byzantine Empire was plundered. The entire population of Jerusalem was killed. In the Holy Land (Saracens), in Spain (Moors), in Germany (Jews) and in Anatolia (Turks) large numbers were killed. And so the unchangeable record goes on – 20,000 Cathars at Beziers by Innocent III, a million people by the Inquisition (to 1836), 100,000 Persians, 40,000 Jews – and 130,000 Muslims in Bulgaria in the 1390’s. After 1492, the New World invasion by the Catholics began. Some say eight million native inhabitants died.  
(Letter in UK national newspaper, December 2006)  
  ‘When will only violence do?’ He assumes that no peace process can happen, that international pressure is meaningless, that peaceful protests never achieved anything. (apart, that is, from Indian de-colonisation, votes for women, the end of apartheid). He assumes they (the Israelis) are mindless automata, agree with their state’s actions, therefore all deserve to die. This plainly and simply is delusional prejudice.
  We in the West should never have the slightest understanding for intolerance, for violence by right or left wing extremists, or violence carried out in the name of a religion.
  Will episodes like the "Satanic Verses" affair, or the self-righteous fury over the Cartoons not be repeated, ad nauseum, into the indefinite future?
  The niqab is not a religious obligation and so, surely, is worn to make a statement, about one's relationship with Islam and the wider world? Might it be tacit support of Islamic fundamentalists and against liberal values?
  In a police state, the rule of law is suspended, people are arrested and held without charge, have no legal representation, can be tortured and murdered. To be arrested in Britain, released a week later, virtually unharmed, is not the actions of a police state.
  (In central Britain) mosques are springing up on almost every street corner, (allowing the) spreading of the message of jihad, not helping the community.
  What can anyone, in the West, feel but incomprehension about the Palestinian suicide bomber who triggered explosives in his car while his two children were in the back?
  Egoism, in the form of I am the Doer, in its narrow individuality (Muslim or other terrorists), resembles a great black poisonous snake. (Ashtavakra Gita)
  One imam was filmed calling for the creation of an Islamic state within a state in Britain before the country is taken over by Muslims.
  An imam told UK youths - King, Queen, House of Commons, if you accept them, you are part of it. If you do not accept it, you (must work to) dismantle it. As a Muslim, you fix a target. There will be no House of Commons when Muslims grow in strength and take over.
  While we are busy bending over backward to ensure religious freedom is available to all, those of a religious orientation desiring to damage other religions operate from within that freedom to wage war against us.
  Muslim against Muslim is acceptable (to terrorists), sometimes even necessary (to them). It matters not that others of their own Islamic faith are murdered, attacked, marginalized. It is martyrdom ideology.
  Terrorists are not simply fighting against the West, democracy, Jews or Christians, their actions are necessary to further the Islamic world-wide cause, and they are for ‘peace’ but only on their terms.
  There are no clearly identifiable Muslim ‘enemy troops’. The tactic is to subvert, infiltrate, built a clandestine position and gain ground in society.
HOW TERRORISTS AVOID PROHIBITION  
It was the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb (d.1966) who introduced to modern Arabs the concept now known as takfir, whereby Islamists can circumvent the Koranic prohibition against killing other Muslims by declaring their enemies to be apostates. The idea dates back to the earliest days of Islam. But Qutb revived it, along with the notion that jihad is one of the central ideas of Islam. Jihad as he saw it was the struggle to reshape contemporary society according to Islamic law. Since 2003, Sunni terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda have invoked the principle of takfir so often that Shiites in Iraq habitually now refer to them as takfiris.  
(The New York Review, October 2006)  
  The Muslim (convert) preacher told worshippers not to believe Islamic terrorists are operating in Britain as all non-Muslims are liars.
  Systematic brainwashing of (UK) Muslims by their religious leaders (at several mosques) is now commonplace, the undercover programme believed.
  We strive for the unity of Mankind through the elimination of Islam, the most insidious doctrine of hate. Islam cannot be reformed. But it can be eradicated. It can not be moulded, but it can be smashed. It is rigid but brittle. That is why Muslims do not tolerate criticism of it.
  There are 1,600 mosques in Britain (some small, in houses) and 3,000 imams. A ‘dangerous minority’ of imams (and guest ‘speakers’) are plainly not balanced in their views and preaching (as the TV programme showed). The enemy within are Islamic clerics influencing young Muslims into hating this country.
  A former Muslim says that everything preached in mosques in Islamic countries is being said in British mosques too. ‘Religious clerics who come to Britain will not change views because they now preach here’.
  The arbitrary brutality that has now come to the streets of this city (London) has caused division, confusion and despair among sincere Muslims. It is ugly. Allah loves beauty, he is beauty – that is a moral absolute. We should have a policy of zero tolerance of those who try to fudge the issue, saying it’s not right here but it’s all right in some places.
  Why do the people who commission this sort of (TV) programme seem to hate our country and our values so, that their first impulse is to see how they can blacken the reputation of those who fight in our name?
  The empirical, rational British mindset is incapable of understanding the hysteria and paranoia unleashed by religious fanaticism. Only despair and rage caused by oppression could drive someone to the inhuman act of suicide bombing.
  We want to avoid the extreme of religious discrimination, and being religiously rich is far more enlightened than being blind to the various religions, cultures and races.
‘HIS TEMPER IS ONE OF FIRE’  
The one who worries and the one who panics is not the real (Muslim) believer and is indeed possibly allied to the demonic forces. And his temper is one of fire and disturbance and agitation, a sense of outraged pride, a defence of the self, a yearning for revenge.  
(précis of address, London 2005, Shaykh Abdal hakim Murad, scholar, author)  
  The Muslim ringleaders (of UK July 7 bombings) justified their actions as revenge for the killings of Muslims in the Middle East. Much has been said about ‘the moral squalor’ of these comments (in Western eyes, maybe) but far less about their sheer incoherence. Most Muslim deaths (in Iraq) are now (have long been) caused by other Muslims.
  As a small group of radical Muslims activists form, many methods of group self-protection are employed, to avoid attracting security surveillance: aliases, avoidance of camera monitoring, regular changes of mobile phones, memorisation of key data, use of secret codes, reference to jihadist manuals on internet for techniques.
  In most cases, the jihadist radicalisation is a process that the Muslim convert or individual experiences with other people. Radical friendships develop to surround the convert/individual and help transmit the rationale/rational, emotional and identity elements which explain their turning to, strengthening their commitment to militant jihadism.
  We need to break the (terrorist) enemy. We destroy him until he sues for peace. It is ugly but it is what war is about. If all we want is to fight to bring him to the table to talk, then our enemy wins, because not losing is enough to achieve his aims.
  All forms of violence against girls and women, including violence in the name of honour, constitute criminal offences. States have an obligation to exercise due diligence to prevent and to investigate such crimes, and to ensure that the perpetrators do not enjoy impunity. States also have an obligation to provide protection for the victims. Not doing so is a violation of human rights. (Nyanko Sabuni, Swedish Minister for Integration and Gender Equality, February 2007, on UK website May 2007)
LAWS NOW NEED RE-VISITING  
Two Libyans, with a spider’s web of terrorist connections, are freed from custody in Britain, avoiding extradition to Tripoli. One is ‘a clear danger to UK national security.’ The second is a ‘global jihadist with links to Taliban and al-Qaeda. They were freed by the special immigration appeals commission, (SIAC), spokesman the judge-chairman, acting within the laws within the Human Rights Act. The Act provides succour for terrorist suspects, the law of unintended consequences.  

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