2.5 Cheers for Blair!
Tony Blair, who has been somewhat confused at times, has come out with an important message for the abject collaborators in the English-speaking countries. (His message is not needed by France, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy, who have already figured it out and are now implementing it.)

Blair notes that Sheikh Osama fuels Jihad with a narrative that all Muslims have been oppressed and disrespected by the West for a long time.

The practitioners of extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream [Muslim] thinking.

[Osama's narrative says] that Islam is basically oppressed by the west; disrespected and treated unfairly; that the military action we took post-9/11 was against countries because they are Muslim; and that in the Middle East we ignore the injustice done to the Palestinians in our desire to support Israel, because the Palestinians are Muslims, and the Israelis Jews. It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs and organisations.

The irony is that the many Muslims who believe passionately in co-existence and tolerance are not empowered but frequently disempowered by our refusal to confront the narrative. We think if we sympathise with the narrative – that essentially this extremism has arisen as a result, partly, of our actions – we meet it half way, we help the modernisers to be more persuasive. We don't. We indulge it and we weaken them.

We didn't have this problem in WW2. We treated all Japs and Krauts as enemies until proven otherwise, with the result that many Japs and Krauts came forward courageously to prove otherwise and to get out of the camps. If we had granted that Hitler and Tojo were "probably right but misguided in using a tiny bit too much violence", the Japs in California would have felt fully justified in continuing their internal sabotage, and the pro-American Japs would have felt no particular pressure to break away from their tribe.

Worse, a reaction springs up amongst our people that we are pandering to this narrative and they start to resent Muslims as a whole. This is because implicit in this indulgence is an acceptance of the argument that Islam and, for want of a better term, 'the west' are in conflict.

Here's where Tony loses the trail. Our people "react" to the pandering because it's pandering, dammit! We "react" because we know surrender and collaboration when we see it. Blair's explanation makes no sense. And our people resent "Muslims as a whole" because we see precisely zero evidence of the supposed differences among them. Why? Because our governments have given the normal Muslims no motivation to show their differences.

There certainly are differences. Most Persians, Indonesians and Turks are Muslims with a normal desire for peace, security and family, and no taste for Jihad.

Arabs are the source of this war, not Muslims. (As Polistra has been trying to point out for a long time, and as Sheikh Osama himself has told us.)

= = = = =

Aside from abject weakness of mind and spirit, there are two specific reasons for our failure to force the difference.

(1) On the theoretical level, we've been stupefied by egalitarianism and non-discrimination ( = non-thinking) since 1948. We cannot bring ourselves to distinguish people by race or ethnicity, even when the distinction is transparent, self-admitted by Sheikh Osama, and nearly perfect. Instead, we have to attribute all differences to ideology, so that we can pretend everyone would be the same if they had the chance. This focus on ideology leaves us in fuzzy territory because the theology of Arab vermin is not all that different from the theology of the more normal Muslims. We end up wandering in the maze of Sunni, Wahhabi and Shia, all of which are beside the point. It's Arab genes and Arab culture, not theology, and you can't change genes and culture by exposure to feminism, or by conducting Free And Fair Elections Supervised By Jimmy Carter. (For Christ's sake, it was Sayyid Qutb's exposure to "liberated" American girls that started modern Jihad! Why in hell do we think we can stop it by another dose of the same toxic shit, which has also been poisonous to Americans? Clap on / clap off doesn't work with long-lasting cultural forces.)

(2) On the crude practical level, British and American governments owe their soul to the Saudi store. The Bush family has tight connections to the Saudi royals and thence to the bin Laden clan. You can't fight a proper war under those conditions, and there is plenty of rational evidence that we haven't been fighting a war at all. We've only been helping the Saudis to get rid of nations and factions they dislike.
  ¶ 5:31 PM