Leak shows Blair told of Iraq war terror link
The News Review:
- Leak shows Blair told of Iraq war terror link
- Liberals should beware of giving rights to people who hate us
- Faith and fear
- Colonial fantasies laid to rest
- Mention the wars, don’t mention America
Leak shows Blair told of Iraq war terror link
Guardian Unlimited – Aug 28, 2005
‘The lines to be used by ministers include measures designed to address Muslim concerns, such as the introduction of religious hatred legislation and tackling educational underachievement among Muslims. But there is nothing to address the concerns raised by Jay eight months earlier. The documents reveal deep divisions at the heart of government over home-grown religious extremism and its connections to British intervention in Iraq. The Prime Minister has consistently said that the bombers were motivated not by a sense of injustice but by a ‘perverted and poisonous misinterpretation of Islam’. Although Iraq was clearly used as a pretext by extremists, he said he believed it was ideology that drove them to kill. To press home the point, Downing Street issued a list of atrocities carried out before intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. The claim was later undermined by the MI5, which said that Iraq was the ‘dominant issue’ for Islamic extremists in Britain.
Liberals should beware of giving rights to people who hate us
Times Online – Aug 28, 2005
If that means sending people back to face possible ill-treatment, then that should be a consideration in the decision after weighing up how serious a threat they are to British citizens. Moreover, if the government can negotiate properly monitored memorandums of understanding on the fair treatment of deportees with countries such as Jordan, then that should surely be welcomed as an extension of western rights into those countries, not rejected by judges, human rights nongovernmental organisations and the United Nations. Much of the threat from Islamist extremism is, of course, home-grown. But over the decades we have also attracted many Islamist militants from abroad to “Londonistan”. Now the government has decided, strongly backed by public opinion, to close that haven and the judges should not stand in its path unless it acts in an obviously unreasonable way.
Faith and fear
The Age – Aug 28, 2005
But when four young men — three of them Britons ofPakistani background who grew up in northern English suburbs likeShaffi’s — exploded bombs that killed 56 people in Londonlast month, to many they also exploded Europe’s multiculturaldream. They weren’t Europe’s first home-grown jihadists. Mohammed Bouyeri — who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Goghlast year for making a film about the Koran’s allegedoppression of women — is a Dutchborn Moroccan. ZacariasMoussaoui — September 11’s so-called 20th hijacker, nowin a US prison — is a French-Algerian who became a born-againMuslim after living in London. According to radical Islam specialist Robert Leiken, writing inthe latest issue of the American journal Foreign Affairs, a studyof 373 jihadists who plotted terrorist acts in Europe and NorthAmerica found that a quarter were western European nationals. Europe’s would-be terrorists have two key traits in common:most are secondgeneration migrants and all are young men. Togetherthey have all Europe rethinking multiculturalism.
Colonial fantasies laid to rest
The Age – Aug 28, 2005
As a child, he read the classics of British and Europeanliterature, but the novel that had a major impact on him and wasthe catalyst for his writing aspirations was Hemingway’s OldMan and the Sea. Since then, he’s always been drawn to20th-century American literature, his favourite novelists beingFaulkner and Steinbeck. There were few home-grown role models for Aw at that time. Askedabout the literary representations of Malaysia available to him asa child, Aw declares: “That’s the big tragedy; there were nonebecause the educated elite in Malaysia read in English. The problemwith Malaysian and South-East Asian literature in general is thatit’s based on an oral tradition; storytelling is this oral thing,so there’s not this huge base of literature. Instead, some of the best-known depictions of Malaysia are bycolonial writers such as Joseph Conrad, Anthony Burgess andespecially Somerset Maugham, for whom Aw has a lifelongaversion. Acceding to his parents’ wishes to acquire a profession, Aw wentto Cambridge University to study law, which he really enjoyed.
Mention the wars, don’t mention America
Telegraph.co.uk – Aug 28, 2005
Unfortunately, however, it also allows him to give full rein to his particularly virulent strain of anti-Americanism. This is post-Iraq war history-writing at its most trenchant and opinionated. Just as after the First World War the Germans longed for a Dolchstosslegende, a stab-in-the-back myth, that could blame the catastrophe of 1918 not on the stoical Germans but on a sinister cabal of socialists, Jews, bankers and defeatists, so Wilson presents a home-grown British Dolchstosslegende which blames Britain’s loss of Great Power status on Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. The reason we have been in decline ever since 1941, he argues, is all down to those scheming, ungrateful, perfidious Yanks. Yet while Wilson presents this (grossly unfair) view of the Special Relationship as a kind of Restoration murder-tragedy where one’s best friend secretly mixes poison into the wine of the victory cup, he also paints an immensely rich, funny, readable portrait of the Britain that is being done to death. Bicycling clubs, Elgar’s music, Gertrude Jekyll gardens and Lutyens houses, the notorious rector of Stiffkey, Laurel and Hardy, Churchill’s Whiggery, the origin of the Lady Godiva myth – the sheer range of Wilson’s knowledge and interests are wittily displayed in a series of learned mini-essays that delight. In the present national debate about Britishness, this book is a significant intellectual contribution; it can be read almost as a prose version of Noël Coward’s wonderful patriotic entertainment Cavalcade…
The reason we have been in decline ever since 1941, he argues, is all down to those scheming, ungrateful, perfidious Yanks. Yet while Wilson presents this (grossly unfair) view of the Special Relationship as a kind of Restoration murder-tragedy where one’s best friend secretly mixes poison into the wine of the victory cup, he also paints an immensely rich, funny, readable portrait of the Britain that is being done to death. Bicycling clubs, Elgar’s music, Gertrude Jekyll gardens and Lutyens houses, the notorious rector of Stiffkey, Laurel and Hardy, Churchill’s Whiggery, the origin of the Lady Godiva myth – the sheer range of Wilson’s knowledge and interests are wittily displayed in a series of learned mini-essays that delight. In the present national debate about Britishness, this book is a significant intellectual contribution; it can be read almost as a prose version of Noël Coward’s wonderful patriotic entertainment Cavalcade. “By 1941 Churchill had peaked as a war leader”, Wilson writes, yet goes on (correctly) to praise “the Grand Rhetoricaster” for stopping the Normandy landings from taking place any earlier than the summer of 1944, which was perhaps Churchill’s greatest strategic contribution of them all.