London’s Trafalgar Square is the scene of some demonstration every Sunday.
On gray days, these street shows can add a bit of local color to the heart of the British capital. But this past Sunday was sunny and warm — and the “anti-war” gathering provided a sinister note of gray.
A handful of demonstrators had come to tell passersby that the death of David Haines, the British aid worker whose head had just been chopped off by the monsters of the ISIS (Daesh in Arabic) shouldn’t be exploited “as an excuse for another Western invasion in the Middle East.”
“War is no solution,” a ferocious-looking blonde lady told us. “We have to address the grievances of Muslims.”
Deliberately or not, the gray injected into this debate would establish a totally unmerited moral equivalence between Western democracies and terror machines controlled by enemies of humanity.
One trick is to cite a litany of woes for Muslims. Columnist Robert Fisk, for example, reminds President Obama of Muslim grievances. “When will there be a Palestine?” he demands.
In France, both Communist Party leader Pierre Laurent and the ultra-right National Front chief Marine Le Pen complain that America is the key ally of Israel against Palestinians. The subtext is that anti-US and anti-Israeli positions justify even them most heinous of crimes.
The list of Muslim grievances, from Kashmir (“The Brits gave it to the Hindus,” claimed a Muslim speaker at one protest) to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, also found echoes in Birmingham at the eighth United Muslims Convention, with speakers from a dozen countries, including the United States and Australia.
One Iranian, Ayatollah Muhammad Shomali, even said that the Sunni-Shiite killings in Syria and Iraq are fomented by the West.
And never mind the fact that monsters like Daesh were in operation centuries before there was a Kashmir or a Palestine issue.
Another way that “useful idiots” in effect side with Daesh is by claiming that these monsters are protesting against “poverty and underdevelopment.”
Thus the American writer Phyllis Bennis suggests Western democracies should provide “more aid” to Muslim countries that are desperate for development.
Endless ink has gone to spread this claim in recent days — ignoring the fact that Daesh’s backbone consists of fairly wealthy former Baathist army and police, plus 3,000 European and American Muslims who had enough cash to travel to the latest theater of jihad.
More gray comes from the claim that Daesh and similar gangs are not “Islamic,” a position voiced by no less than President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Of course, neither man has the least authority on what is Islamic (Obama’s Muslim background notwithstanding).
And if Daesh has nothing to do with Islam, why do both men appeal to US and British “Muslim leaders” to do something about it? Why did John Kerry visit half a dozen Muslim countries as the core of the proposed anti-Daesh “coalition”?
Paradoxically, this “good Islam-bad Islam” tactic plays right into the hands of people like Abu-Bakar al-Baghdadi, the the Daesh “caliph” who claims he represents the “good Islam.”
The fact is that Islam has no mechanism for excommunication. Anyone who claims to be a Muslim must be treated as one as long as he bears testimony to the one-ness of Allah and the position of Mohammed as the last prophet.
Yet Islam does have mechanisms for putting blue-water between oneself and groups engaged in abhorrent acts.
One such is bara’ah (self-exoneration), which allows for the rejection of what others, including Muslims, are doing that one regards as evil. Another is Itizal (separation), which allows a Muslim to move away from intolerable positions of other Muslims.
The Muslim Council of Britain claims that jihadi monsters don’t represent 1 percent of Muslims worldwide. Even so, 1 percent amounts to 15 million people worldwide, twice the population of most UN member states.
In Britain, it would mean at least 30,000 potential throat-cutters.
The latest throat-cutters — the recent beheaders — may represent the tip of the iceberg.
The terrorists who pulled off the 7/7 terror attacks in London in 2005 and the two jihadists who cut the throat of British soldier Lee Rigby in London in 2013 were also British citizens.
The young men who have been calling for “taking oath of allegiance” (al-bay’ah) to the Daesh caliph on British university campuses are also Muslim British citizens.
And the majority of Britain’s Muslim citizens have adopted an ostrich-like position on Daesh and its ilk.
Having claimed Daesh head-choppers are not connected with Islam, British Muslims shy away from the hard, patient but urgently needed work of fighting these enemies of humanity at all levels, political social and theological, to drain the marshlands that enable them to continue breeding.