Monk

"There's just a lot of very frustrated, very fed up, young guys around," reflected Logan Wilmont, an advertising director from Belfast, which has certainly seen its own fair share of unrest. "They're living at a time where they can't have anything. We're living in a broken moment."

-- Portia Walker for Foreign Policy

This is in reference to what I've been calling the London riots, though they have spread beyond and are often called the UK riots. And, frankly, I am more inclined to think we are living in a broken world, and what's going on in Britain is just one of the more stark manifestations of a breakdown in our Western democracies in general, as interests and aspirations run smack against a wall of new economic limitations, not to mention the more callous greed of our wealthy owners.

I also want to get a part of another conservative diatribe against the poor and the London riots, though only because of the Amy Wiinehouse reference.

While I am at it, I will also include an excerpt from a CNN report that gives a surprising account of the background of some of the looters, that this is not just a case of poor minority youths.

( Column excerpt )

A conservative Brit, who I think is living and working in America, has an interesting and dark reaction to the London riots. You would think that paople should understand that there is a cost when you insist on cheap labor, but the rich must have their extra millions and the middle class must have its lower prices.

If you cannot see other peoples as being like you, especially when they have this darker skin, then you should at least not seek to exploit them, but I take it this is apparently impossible.
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Why does the British government not do its duty? Because it is the government of a modern Western nation, sunk like the rest of us in trembling, whimpering guilt over class and race.

Through British veins runs the poisonous fake idealism of “human rights” and “sensitivity,” of happy-clappy multicultural groveling and sick, weak, deracinated moral universalism — the rotten fruit of a debased, sentimentalized Christianity.

When not begging for forgiveness and chastisement from those who rightfully despise him, the modern Brit is lost in contemplation of his shiny new car or tweeting new gadget; or else he has given over all his attention to some vapid TV production or soccer team.

I treasure my faint, fading recollections of Britain when she was still, for a few years longer, a nation.

Today Britain is merely a place, a bazaar. Let it burn!

-- John Derbyshire

The Brits are having a major scandal affecting all three of the major parties. The legislators have been helping themselves to too many perks and porn from the public purse, while the common folks have been losing jobs and homes in this economic downturn. One young student even clamors that they need their own Barack Obama, that they need change. Yeah, well, as more and more Americans could tell you: Barack Obama isn't necessarily all that - definitely no magic man. In any case, you can see that politics is getting more tetchy everywhere.

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Mr. Blair committed funds to improve the teaching of Islamic studies in British universities; announced a new effort to develop "minimum standards" for imams in Britain; and, most significantly, declared that henceforth the government would be giving "priority, in its support and funding decisions, to those leadership organizations actively working to tackle violent extremism." Routine but vague press releases against terrorism would no longer do.

-- James Woolsey and Nina Shea for The Wall Street Journal

Here is an interesting piece about how the British have apparently been taking more effective action in discriminating between extremist and moderate Muslims, and showing by contrast how poorly the Bush Administration has been acting in this regard, arguably distorted by all that oil money. For all the aggressive action taken in going to war in Iraq, you might like to think they would act smart in some of the simpler things to counter extremism and terrorism, but I guess that would be unrealistic.

( article )

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It's funny. Now that we have a firmer leader in France with Sarkozy, it looks like we have a rather 'Frenchy' leader in Britain's new prime minister, Gordon Brown, who seems to buy into the idea that Islamophobia is a bigger problem then the Islamist/jihadist terrorists:

Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the word "Muslim" — and presumably "Islamic" or "Islamist" — in connection with the terrorist crisis. He has also put an end to the phrase "war on terror."

And Mr. Brown joins those who look upon terrorist incidences as criminal acts rather than acts of war. 9/11 or carjacking, what's the difference? When it comes to the inhumane butchery that we have read about today, the killing of Muslim school children, I guess that is just the reflection of different cultural values, and it would be wrong to judge under the enlightenment of cultural relativism as well.

Well, Mr. Brown is new and the Brits are eminently sensible people, maybe he will come around, especially as things promise to get worse with more 'crimes'.


(Source: Melanie Phillips for USA Today)

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CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Qaeda's No. 2 issued a new audiotape on Tuesday threatening to retaliate against Britain for having honored the novelist Salman Rushdie, a U.S.-based monitoring group said.

-- Associated Press

It's official. Besides Rushdie, they are going after Britain. I guess killing Muslim schoolgirls is not enough on their plate.

Of course, this is all the fault of Israel and the West.

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With respect to that London plot, it is noted how a couple of the terror suspects are doctors, with the suspected al-Qaida ringleader being a brilliant neurologist working in Britian's National Health Service. Andrew Sullivan makes some pointed observations:

They're not alienated youth, or poverty-stricken Arabs. They're educated, professional religious fanatics.

... What we're seeing here is what we've seen for years. Al Qaeda is composed mainly of prosperous middle-class types, consumed with resentment of the West's freedoms, and determined to kill as many in the name of Allah. Yes, there's no doubt that the occupation of Iraq has made us more vulnerable to these religious nutters. But they were there before Iraq, and they will be here for a long time. And they are not all illegal immigrants. Many are legal, professional and devoutly murderous.

We have known that we are not talking about the poorest and the most oppressed, but it is perhaps helpful to be reminded. It's ideological and extremist.


(Source: Andrew Sullivan)

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Here is an update on the controversy over the Niqab in Britain. At least they are in a country where they are free to dress as they please. I'd hate to see what would happen to women in, say, Saudi Arabia or Iran dressing in a nice mini-skirt and halter top - forget the scarf! I wonder if this is a difference they appreciate. Even they should hope the future runs more Westernly that Wahhabian.

( article )

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Next week Britain will get a new prime minister. The man who takes over will be perhaps the most knowledgeably pro-American politician to enter Downing Street since Winston Churchill. He is steeped in American history and has long been a profound admirer of the world's only superpower. While anti-American sentiment has exploded around the world in the last five years, he has been a steadfast defender of the U.S. model. He prides himself on his close ties with America's leaders and has consciously tried to emulate much of what the U.S. has done in public policy in the last decade.

-- Gerard Baker, "Meet Britain's New Prime Minister" at RealClearPolitics.com

After Tony Blair's problems with following too closely the American line on the War on Terror and Iraq, it looks like Britain still will not stray too far from her great Atlantic sibling. Indeed, America's position in Europe would seem to be looking up when you also taken into consideration the Sarkozy victory in France. Imagine if we'd actually had a strong and capable leader in the White House!

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Christopher Hitchens rehashes the themes of Londonistan and the coddling of violent Islamist revolutionaries:

The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.

... It's impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie's death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.

When one reads these things, there is the hope that there is a note of the hysterical in it, and that we are just excited by the prospect of a big storm, making a big deal out of a few crazy radicals, but it remains to be seen. And I suppose that it is often a few radicals that change the world.


(Source: Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair)

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