3 Comments, 3 Threads

1. 1. RBMN

   On political correctness, and terrorism, a wise Brit Hume asked something like this on the Fox News panel this morning: “If ethnic profiling is unacceptable to you, how ’bout if we do ‘statistical’ profiling?” His added point: if everybody understands that there’s a good reason for doing it, they should be more offended if it’s not done. Everybody should want what works best.

   July 31, 2005 - 6:44 pm   Link to this Comment | Reply

   

   
2. 2. Syl

   The Butt interview was chilling. Not that most of us didn’t know what his thinking is because we’ve done our homework, nor what his answers to the questions would be, but that here it was all laid out before us in simple words. Whatever we’ve surmised about radical Islam’s beliefs and motives all wrapped up in one insular package…

   My first reaction was that there is no way to argue, to change that mind, to even plant a seed of doubt. The beliefs are self-consistent and there is an Islamist answer to absolutely everything. (1400 years of scholarly defense of the insconsistencies in Islam coupled with the assassination of anyone who disagrees, have resulted in this purity of evil.)

   I found that I didn’t hate him, I simply wished him dead. At least put away forever in a place where he could talk with his false god in isolation.

   I thought the interviewer was excellent. He did not at all put himself into the questions, instead he drew out the beliefs of the interviewee who seemed to hold nothing back. That is a skill I do not and never will have.

   August 1, 2005 - 2:38 am   Link to this Comment | Reply

   

   
3. 3. Knucklehead

   Syl,

   Just began reading the interview after reading the two links Roger gave.

   The first, nuh-duh, stop me in my tracks moment in the interview article was words from the author:

   As a half-Indian, half-Pakistani with a strong connection to this country, I have observed the gulf between what it means to be British Pakistani and British Indian. To be Indian is to come from a safe, ancient country and, more recently, from an emerging power. In contrast, to be Pakistani is to begin with a depleted idea of nationhood. In the 55 years that Pakistan has been a country, it has been a dangerous, violent place, defined by hatred of the otheróIndia.

   What is does it mean to be an salafist, or a Butt hopes to be, an irhabiyun, other than to be consumed by a murderous hatred of the other?

   And then next came this:

   Britishness is the most nominal aspect of identity to many young British Pakistanis. The thinking in Britain’s political class has at last begun to move on this front, but when our tube bombers were growing up, any notion that an idea of Britishness should be imposed on minorities was seen as offensive. Britons themselves were having a hard time believing in Britishness. If you denigrate your own culture you face the risk of your newer arrivals looking for one elsewhere. So far afield in this case, that for many second-generation British Pakistanis, the desert culture of the Arabs held more appeal than either British or subcontinental culture. Three times removed from a durable sense of identity, the energised extra-national worldview of radical Islam became one available identity for second-generation Pakistanis. The few who took it did so with the convert’s zeal: plus Arabe que les Arabes.

   The older generation of Beeston is mystified as to where some of their children found this identity. By all accounts it was not in the mosque.

   These murderers and would be murderers and recruiters of murderers are fantacists! That’s been pointed out before by others (VDH did something on the fantacists angle, didn’t he?), but it never quite hit me before. These loons have cooked up a phony life, a big fantasy, and it includes mass murder.

   August 1, 2005 - 1:51 pm   Link to this Comment | Reply