A moving experience.

More here. (H/T, Vitruvius.)

Further to my post on the mental contortions of middle-class Communist Seumas Milne and his disregard for facts, here’s another example of wilful delusion, suitably debunked. Over at Harry’s Place, David T (no relation) launches a fine broadside against Guardian regular Madeleine Bunting and her fanciful grasp of history and Islamist ambition. The piece is a little too long to summarise, but well worth reading in full:

“It is pernicious nonsense for Madeleine Bunting to seek to understand clerical fascists like Qutb and Mawdudi as ‘anti-colonialists’, whose rhetoric was sometimes a bit fruity. Mawdudi, as we’ve seen, was an advocate of murderous sectarianism within Pakistan, and whose philosophy had more to do with persecuting religious minorities and rival nationalists, than with ‘anti-colonialism’.”

More here. Laugh at other Bunting wisdom here and here.

I know, I know. I said I’d be away until Monday. But I felt strangely drawn to the latest efforts of embittered Communist Seumas Milne. Still misinforming Guardian readers with undiminished zeal, Milne once again reheats his “root causes” schtick and denounces Ed Hussein and Hassan Butt as “NeoCon poster boys.” (I’m guessing he’s not too keen on Tawfik Hamid, Tanveer Ahmed or the dissident exile Tahir Aslam Gora either.) Apparently, we mustn’t listen to what jihadists and ex-jihadists tell us about their own motives, because – pah – what the hell could they know? In MilneWorld™, Tariq Ramadan is best described as a “liberal academic” and when middle-class Muslim zealots try to kill innocent people – and nightclubbing women in particular – this must be “retaliation” against imperialist “oppression”. And nothing whatsoever to do with nihilistic fantasies, sexual resentment and an urge to be a player in an Islamist psychodrama. 

With eerie seriousness, Milne argues that,

“If the bombers’ real focus was, say, sexually liberal Western lifestyles, they would presumably be attacking cities like Amsterdam and Stockholm.”

Setting aside the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the effective exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the numerous death threats against half a dozen Dutch authors, artists and politicians, I suppose we should simply ignore the arrest of nine would-be jihadists in Denmark in September 2006, and before that another four in Stockholm and Malmo in April 2004. And I guess we should overlook the planned terror attacks on a church in Uppsala, and disregard the Stockholm mosque selling cassettes calling for “holy war”. Perhaps Seumas Milne is somehow, conveniently, unaware of the rapid rise of fundamentalist Islam in Stockholm and the sustained campaigns of violence and intimidation against bus drivers, paramedics and firefighters in “Muslim only” areas of several Scandinavian cities. And presumably we should avert our eyes from the repeated targeting of London nightclubs, where “sexually liberal Western lifestyles” would no doubt be in full hedonistic effect.

Regular readers will, of course, remember just how credible and trustworthy Comrade Milne can be.

From yesterday’s Observer: 

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy… By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”

More via Norm and Harry’s Place. Related: this and this.

The last few days here have been a kind of Rushdie and Related Topics Week. Assuming no further Rushdie-related events materialise, I thought I’d wind up this saga, at least for now, with a few words from the man himself. Here’s an extract from a lecture presented by the Centre for Enquiry and given at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on October 11th, 2006:

“I suppose one has to mention the Danish cartoons. I ran into a young journalist working for a small New York magazine who said… his proprietor refused to publish the cartoons because he was worried about his offices getting bombed. This kind of cravenness was worldwide. And the name that cravenness was given was respect. When people said they didn’t publish them out of respect for Muslims, what they meant is they didn’t publish them because they were afraid of their offices getting bombed. And when you create that kind of climate of fear, when you concede… you don’t as a result have less intimidation. I mean as a result you have more intimidation.

I think, with the cartoons, there were two quite separate issues. One is whether you thought the cartoons were good or bad and should have been published or shouldn’t have been… and those are the decisions that every newspaper editor makes every day, and different editors would make different decisions. But the second issue is when the subject of intimidation enters, and the question is how do you respond to intimidation, and do you give in to it or do you not give in to it. I think that when the intimidation became as heavy as it did, the only proper response was everybody should have published the cartoons the next day. And not to do that was a way of showing that threats work…

This is a curious climate that we’re living in, where people are falling over backwards not to name the phenomenon that’s taking place, which is a progressive intimidation of the world in which we live. I’m not talking about these great big geopolitical things going on elsewhere in the world; I’m talking about what is in our own hands to discuss and argue about and fix – what is happening in our town, what is happening in our culture. And the way in which things that we in this room value a great deal are being eroded by this kind of intimidation and cowardice, and by an unwillingness to call things by their true name.”

The full lecture can be heard here or downloaded as an mp3 file. A transcript is available here.