The Enemy Whose Name We Dare Not Speak

There is an old saying that if you tell somebody your name, you give them power over you thereafter. I'm not sure exactly why that would follow, other perhaps than if you were doing something you weren't supposed to. Lack of discretion, loose ends, potential witnesses and all that.

New British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on the other hand, is turning that adage upside down:

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

However, the change provoked claims last night that ministers are indulging in yet more political correctness.

Naw - ya think?

Lefties are giving new meaning to the term "craven". Islamic fanatics are openly proclaiming their intention to bomb the UK into submission and acting upon those intentions (if not all that competently of late), and the new British PM is concerned with "offending" their enemies by publicly (and redundantly) identifying them? If there are "moderate" Muslims, shouldn't they be concerned with not "offending" the rest of the British citizenry by not immediately and vociferously condemning the jihadis and distancing themselves from them? Are libs completely without the ability to acknowledge that it is possible after all for Western civilization to occupy the moral/cultural high ground?

Of course, dhimmitude isn't limited to the Laborites. Not to be outdone in the sandal-licking sweepstakes, the Tories upped the ante by elevating a jihadi-symp to a position of wholly inappropriate prominence:

The appointment by the Conservative party of Sayeeda Warsi as shadow minister for Community Cohesion sends the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism and extremism, both domestically and internationally. Mrs. Warsi has been a fierce critic of British antiterror policy, stating that antiterrorism legislation had turned Britain into a “police state.”

According to the London Times, in a 2006 article for the Asian newspaper Awaaz, written while serving as vice chairman of the Conservative party, Warsi described the government’s antiterror proposals as “enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalized fanatic.” She also wrote that “if terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?”

In a BBC-reported press conference outside Downing Street in 2005 just days after the 7/7 bombings, Warsi urged the British government to engage with Islamic extremist groups....

Warsi also dismissed the idea that pressure should be placed upon British Muslims to root out extremists within their midst, commenting that “when you say this is something that the Muslim community needs to weed out, or deal with, that is a very dangerous step to take.” She also urged a public debate over the possible linkage between issues such as the American Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the Iraq war, and the 7/7 bombings: “Although the government may not accept that these were the causes for 7 July, to go into denial mode is not the way forward.”

Etc., etc., etc. "Mrs." Warsi has also demanded that ex-PM Tony Blair "apologize" for Britain's part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and continues to flack for Islamist terror groups from Hamas to al Qaeda to others in Kashmir.

What in the blue hell is the British Conservative Party doing even allowing a Muslim "Tokyo Rose" in their party at all, much less putting her in a position to aid the opposition and propagandize for the enemy? I'd say I wish I knew, except that I don't think I want to better understand so supine an appeasenik mindset.

Would that this mental illness were limited to the Old World. But of course it afflicts our side of the pond as well, all the way to the very top:

This is a pic from President Bush's speech last week at the Islamic Center of Washington (the same venue where he declared Islam to be a "religion of peace" soon after the 9/11 attacks), where he announced the appointment of an American emissary to "listen and learn from" the Organization of the Islamic Conference - the same Saudi-sponsored and Wahhabi-funded bunch that regularly spews rampant radicalism, pro-terrorist, and anti-American sentiments.

Dean Barnett makes note of several stomach turning aspects of this particular presidential address:

***Note how in the picture the President’s female aides have donned make-shift hijabs, sadly symbolizing our attempt to make nicey-nice with the psychotics that want to destroy us.

***Worse still [than Bush's indulgence in the unkillable fantasy of a peaceful Israeli-Palestinian resolution] is the President’s wholesale embrace of the OIC’s pernicious lie that all we’re fighting are “radical fringe elements who pretend that they act in the name of Islam.” As the House of Saud knows all too well, if there were free elections in Saudi Arabia, those “fringe elements” personified by al Qaeda would win handily. In Egypt, the same thing holds with the Muslim Brotherhood playing the role of the “fringe elements” that in truth enjoy the support of the majority of the population. In Palestine? Well, we’ve already seen how things are working out there. The same arguably holds true for the entire region. Perhaps ironically, the sole exception may be Iraq where the heterogeneous nature of the population makes some sort of peaceful accommodation with “the other” a practical imperative.

And, of course, the all-out drive there is to force a US withdrawal and abandonment of Iraq to the "fringe elements" attempting to conquer it, which the President seems destined to eventually accommodate, if this impenetrably naive speech is any indication.

Continuing....

***Does the Pesident still not realize that the hundreds of millions of people who like the idea of Sharia have no interest in [a free, democratic, tolerant, pluralistic] society? Truth be told, they’re quite fond of the idea of a secret police making sure everyone is behaving in appropriate 7th century fashion. And they really don’t like the idea of the Jew, Christian or Zoroastrian next door going about his business sans molestation.

So let's add this up. We are locked in a global struggle to the death - yes, a clash of civilizations - with an enemy that openly proclaims and demonstrates its intent to kill us all and replace our twenty-first century Western democratic culture based on freedom and self-determination with their seventh-century Islamic one based on theocratic despotism. But while they are free to use any tactic, any weapon against us that they wish, no-holds-barred, without any legal or moral restraint (indeed, for the Islamic Fundamentalist, to accept any restraint upon conquering the planet in the name of Allah and his loopy, drug-addled "prophet" would itself be immoral), we cannot fight them militarily (because it will only "breed more terrorists"), cannot condemn them morally (because somewhere there might be a "moderate" Muslim who might be "offended" by it), must delude ourselves with their propaganda (about "fringe elements" "corrupting" a "religion of peace" when the truth is that Islamic Fundamentalists are the true perveyors if Islam), and cannot even acknowledge to ourselves that they are the enemy.

Y'know, when the President said, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that this would be a long war that would outlast his presidency, I fervently hoped he was wrong. Why? Because America historically has never done long wars. Even in the Cold War our active resistance to Soviet imperialism petered out after twenty or so years of on-again, off-again inconclusive, open-ended "limited" regional conflicts, followed by a fifteen year slide into suicidal pacifism that was only stopped short of complete disaster by the timely election of Ronald Reagan.

George W. Bush should have learned that lesson and attempted to win this war quickly by liberating Iran and Syria as well as Afghanistan and Iraq in one fell swoop. Alas, he did not, and shows that he still doesn't truly grasp the nature of the war or of this enemy.

One can only pray that he'll have a Republican successor who does. Otherwise what Winston Churchill once described as "the abyss of a new dark age" in the context of Nazi Germany will come slouching toward Bethlehem - or Mecca - to be born anew.

UPDATE: The Roberts SCOTUS, propelled by a rumored about-face by "swing" Justice Anthony Kennedy, may be about to set all our captured jihadis free....