Blair must overturn 40 years of mistakes
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 02/08/2005)
On July 7, when the official explanation was still "power surges", I thought of Conrad's great novel The Secret Agent and its signature image of the lone terrorist padding the streets of London with a bomb strapped to his chest: "He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable - and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men."
The power of the image lies in the bomber's isolation from the tide of Londoners all around him, all blissfully unaware. But, as became clear very quickly after the July 7 slaughter, that's not quite the world we live in.
It's not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there's a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.
And at the end of this chain of shades of grey is you. And, be honest, were you surprised at any of the developments of the past four weeks? Was it really shocking to you that young men born and bred in the United Kingdom are willing to take bombs on to the Tube and buses? Were you stunned that cells of Islamic terrorists from countries with which Britain has very few traditional or historical ties are living at taxpayers' expense in London council flats? Were you knocked for six to discover that bookstores in Leeds sell video games where Muslim men can play at slaughtering infidels? Were you flabbergasted to hear Birmingham's senior and famously "moderate" Islamic cleric, invited along by the West Midlands Police to their press conference, argue that the men named as responsible for the attacks were merely innocent commuters?
Or were you utterly unsurprised by any of this? Was it, indeed, all too predictable? If it were only the bomber, it would be relatively easy. The more we know about the events of July 7, the more it seems likely that at least some of the suicide bombers were set up, that they were happy to kill others but not themselves. That's good news: it suggests that the jihad has limited appeal in Leeds, at least as a participatory sport. If, as the clichés have it, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were really creating "a thousand bin Ladens" every day, there'd be bombs on the Tube every day. But, if you have to sucker suicide bombers into signing up for the gig, that indicates a certain operational weakness.
Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he's a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of "militants", even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation's own Tube station at Shepherd's Bush. "Why do they hate us?" was never the right question. "Why do they despise us?" is a better one.
It's these insulating circles of grey - the imams, lobby groups, media, bishops, politicians - that bulk up the loser death-cult and make it a potent force. We complain about "unassimilated" Muslim immigrants, but in some respects they've assimilated too well. Witness the suspected Tube bomber who on his arrest last week cried: "I have rights!" He and his colleagues demonstrate an impressive mastery of the salient features of the advanced social democratic state - the legalisms, the ethnic pandering, the bureaucratic inertia.
In Mayor Giuliani's New York, they used to talk of the "broken window" theory of crime - that if outward symptoms of petty crime were on display for months on end (broken windows) it signalled to more serious criminals that the town was open to do-badders; crack down on petty criminals and you create a less favourable climate for the hard cases. Her Majesty's Government might usefully learn from that: right now it's the windows of the kingdom that are broken, and through them climbs pretty much anyone who wants to be here. In 2001, after a Dutch crackdown on benefit fraud, 10,000 Somalis moved from Holland to one East Midlands town - Leicester. Why wouldn't a Somali jihadist fancy his chances in such a country?
Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.
He has to regain control of Britain's borders from the EU and of Britain's education system from the teachers' unions and of Britain's welfare programmes from wily Somalis and others. In 20 years' time, no one will remember whether Tony Blair abolished the House of Lords or foxhunting: that's poseur stuff. They'll judge him on whether or not he funked the central challenge of the times. If "the images of ruin and destruction" come to pass, it will not be because of the bombers but because of a state that lacked the cultural confidence to challenge them.
telegraph.co.uk |
