Hitchens Q&A on this article is very good too.
vanityfair.com
Excerpts:
From your story this month, I get the feeling you think extremists such as Abu Hamza, the former Finsbury Park Mosque imam, should not go unnoticed. Would you eavesdrop on suspected extremists in Britain?
You don't have to eavesdrop on someone who gets up in public and says, "Kill the Jews."
True—
Someone who's bellowing racism and malice through a megaphone, I don't need to tap his fucking phone.
But you might want to tap the phone of the people who are listening to him.
If the Metropolitan Police are not listening to his phone and the phones of people like him, then they should be impeached and removed from office. I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting that warrant.
A London police official went on television after the July 7 bombings to say that the words "Islam" and "terrorism" do not go together. Is he misunderstanding the threat?
The reply to this fatuous remark was published in an Arab magazine. It said that it is not true that all Muslims are terrorists, but it is true that almost all terrorists are Muslims. We have to face this problem. Blair is quite firmly convinced that by making concessions on almost every front to Islamist demands, this will reduce the terrorist population. He thinks it's amenable to reason, in other words, and to reform. And I like his mind, in a way. But I doubt it very much. When the soft Blair-ites say the problem is not Islam, or the problem is not religion, I have to say very firmly, "To the contrary. It is an absolutely identical fit between the two."
Between terror and Islam?
Yes. |
