Brown Starts Off on the Wrong Foot--Or Is That the Right Knee?

I'm missing Tony Blair already.

In what has to be the absolute worst way to deal with the terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Britan’s brand-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown “has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the terrorism crisis.”

According to the Daily Express, (“BROWN: DON'T SAY TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS”),

“The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase 'war on ­terror' is to be dropped.

“The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more 'consensual' tone than existed under Tony Blair…..Mr Brown’s spokesman acknowledged yesterday that ministers had been given specific guidelines to avoid inflammatory language.

“'There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the UK,' the spokesman said. 'It is important that the country remains united.'"

Remain united? Doesn't that assume the country's Muslim and nonMuslim populations are already united, are integrating well, which is in serious doubt.

Brown’s spokesman also “confirmed that the phrase ‘war on terror’ – strongly associated with Mr Blair and US President George Bush – has been dropped.

"Officials insist that no direct links with Muslim extremists have been publicly confirmed by police investigating the latest attempted terror attacks. Mr Brown himself did not refer to Muslims or Islam once in a BBC TV interview on Sunday.”

Maybe not, but Brown already said elsewhere on Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.” (“Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings”).

We can still say that Al Qaeda is an Islamic terror organization, right?

Then there are the names of the arrested individuals known so far: Bilal Abdullah, Khalid Ahmed, Sabeel Ahmed, Muhammad Haneef, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, and Asha’s wife, (whom the Daily Mail describes as “burka-wearing”).

Khalil Ahmed, one of the men in the Glasgow attack, set himself on fire after the crash, and was shouting “Allah, Allah,” as he was being detained.

A former member of a radical Islamic group who knew another of the suspects from there, Bilal Abdullah, said Abdullah had once “berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.”

In an incomprehensible contradiction Brown vowed the British people will never yield to terrorism, and he “used an interview with the BBC's Sunday AM to tell Al Qaeda: 'The message that's got to come from the British people is that as one we will not yield, we will not be intimidated.

"And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life."

Well, Mr. Brown, is it Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism you are defying, or some other terrorist movement unrelated to Muslims?

This just isn't making sense. Amir Taheri comments in the New York Post (“’Islamophobia’ Idiocy”):

“Prime Minister Gordon Brown keeps repeating that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam - but, at the same time, keeps inviting ‘Muslim community leaders’ to Downing Street to discuss how to prevent attacks. If the attacks have nothing to do with Islam, why invite Muslim ‘leaders’ rather than Buddhist monks?”

Had the perpetrators of these bombings remained even temporarily unknown to investigators, it might have been at least imaginable for Brown and his government to take a position that prematurely blaming it on Muslims would be unfair.

But given that Brown himself immediately described this as an Al Qaeda attack, that two of the key suspects are named after Mohammed, that one was arrested in her burka, that one attempted self-immolation while calling on Allah, and that British security has all but admitted the suspects were known from terror watch lists tracking Muslim radicals, then the only possible reason for Brown banning references to Muslim terrorism is naked appeasement.

Which never works.

Watch and see if the pattern that emerged after the first London Tube bombings two years ago, as described by Melanie Phillips in her book, Londonistan, repeats itself:

"Instead of gaining a clear-eyed understanding of the ideology that so threatens it, Britain has thus been subverted by it. Instead of fighting this ideology with all the power at its command, Britain makes excuses for it, seeks to appease it--and even turns the blame that should be heaped on it on itself instead. After the [July 2005] London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid ‘Islamophobia,’ the thought-crime that seeks to surpass legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. Consequently, Muslim denial of any religious responsibility for the bombings was echoed and reinforced by government ministers and commentators, who sought to explain the Islamist terror in their midst by blaming, on the one hand, a few ‘unrepresentative’ extremists preachers and, on the other, Muslim poverty and discrimination--even though the bombers came from middle-class homes and had been to university."

In this case, because it is impossible to hide that the London and Glasgow terrorists were medical doctors and, undeniably, not impoverished victims of oppression or war, offical denial must come by way of an all-encompassing blanket form. No connection with Muslims here!

This is a very bad sign for the war against jihad in the UK.

Blair to Islamists: 'You Are the Oppressors'

As former PM Tony Blair rides off into the sunset--or worse, into the truly exitless twilight of the Arab-Israeli “peace process”--we’re gratified to see him making one last charge for common sense against the apologists for Islamists as perpetual victims of the Western countries in which they have freely chosen to live. From the Guardian:

Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists

Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday July 1, 2007
Observer

Tony Blair has launched a powerful attack on 'absurd' British Islamists who have nurtured a false 'sense of grievance' that they are being oppressed by Britain and the United States.

In his most outspoken remarks on Islamists, the former Prime Minister warns that Britain is in danger of losing the battle against terrorists unless mainstream society confronts the threat.

Blair's remarks, in which he also attacks some civil liberty campaigners as 'loopy loo', were made in a Channel 4 documentary recorded last Tuesday on the eve of his departure from Downing Street.

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Blair held out the example of the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan - criticised by Islamists as an example of the heavy-handed imperial West oppressing Muslims - to highlight unfounded claims of grievance.

He asked how it is possible to claim that Afghanistan's Muslims are being oppressed when the Taliban 'used to execute teachers for teaching girls in schools'.

Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.'

Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.'

The Guardian’s political editor Nicholas Watt obviously regrets Blair’s calling the charge of critics that he’s been assaulting British civil liberties “absurd,” as Watt inserts the aside that Blair “normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists.” But there’s no reason to doubt Blair chose his words carefully in this case as well. As Ann Althouse remarks at her blog, “’absurd' is sometimes the right word.”

Although I might have recommended a term with a little more bite than “loopy-loo” to describe the logic of thepro-Islamist critics, the expression reveals just a sliver of the frustration that Mr. Blair has felt after so many years of having to hold back.