Plot foiled, plot missed

Yesterday, in a coordinated operation across the country, police and security forces apprehended 24 people involved in a plot to blow up a number of commercial airliners en route to the USA. But apparently, the real news on those arrests, as seen through the eyes of the many respected figures from the British Muslim community who have already responded in this morning's papers: this whole thing is more likely to be a plot to frame Muslims and scapegoat Islam than it is to be a thwarted terrorist attack by Islamic fascists (now Bush uses this term too, I shall feel free).

This is coupled with Jon Snow's documentary this week, showing the staggering proportion of British Muslims who think Israel and America might have been behind 9/11 (45% said they were and another 35% said they didn't know either way). Oh, did I mention that just 29% believed the Holocaust happened as the history books show (the rest thought it didn't, was exagerrated, didn't know, or had never heard of it).

Here are some choice comments from my fellow right-wing nut-jobs:

"By Thursday morning security forces had arrested some 21 suspects. All are British citizens. All are Muslims. It is not a stretch of the imagination to assume that these British Muslims are jihadists. Indeed, it can probably be assumed that, like their predecessors last July 7, they made their decision to commit an unspeakable atrocity against their countrymen to advance Islam's takeover of Britain... why is the jihad picking up steam now? Why are fanatical Muslims on the march this summer? It would seem that the answer to this question is found in the increased cultural weakness of the two states leading the war against radical Islam: the US and Britain. In both countries, for the past two years, the forces of leftist radicalism and appeasement have been on the rise." Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post, 11 August 2006

"Britain, like much of Europe, has discarded the anchors that held society in place and enabled it to endure in times of uncertainty. Churches are being turned into mosques... Britain has made a virtue of its post-colonial guilt and its own loss of values by embracing multiculturalism, a fuzzy notion which holds that all cultures, all standards, all values are of equal merit. Into this morass of uncertainty step the young Muslims, certain of their belief and confident in their identity. Like the stranded passengers at London's airports, wandering around glassy eyed and lost, Britain has become a soft target for these new Islamists. They know exactly who they are and where they are going." Douglas Davis in the National Post, 11 August 2006

"Islam has an identity crisis that it must combat. A virulent strain that mixes testosterone and a nihilistic theology has afflicted a small minority of young Muslims... There will also be critics and cynics who are not Muslim, who would like to believe that if only foreign policy would change, the threat would immediately recede and the extremism evaporate. Those who would commit mass murder are not to be appeased by this or that policy fluctuation. Jihadists see Western society as innately evil, an existential threat to their puritanical, obscurantist version of Islam. They cannot come to terms with sexual equality, Western values, tolerance or democracy. To them, the Palestinian or Iraqi contexts are only settings for the introduction of an ideology that is utterly intolerant and regards moderate Muslims as apostates. If policy on either changed, they would look for other justifications for their fanaticism." Editorial in the London Times, 11 August 2006

Not sure I have all that much to add, except to thank the paranoiacs at Islamophobia Watch, who collated the articles above to add to their list of people who criticise too much. I look forward to them trawling and adding some of my articles; I would consider it a badge of honour to be placed alongside the editors of the Times, Caroline Glick, Julie Burchill et al, in the annals of outspoken enmity to Islamic fascism.