Ya Bass

There was a quite astonishing piece of Islamist terror-apologia by Ian Bell in The Herald newspaper today

He starts his article reasonably enough, although I would disagree with what he is saying - it's only on those on the extremes of the debate that would consider opposition to Bush to be comparable to actions of a suicide bomber - to say otherwise is just using a rhethorical trick similiar to what he is criticising of painting those holding opposing views as deranged loons without perspective:

Dissent from the occupation of Iraq and you are styled anti-American, a de facto enemy of democracy. Specify the Bush administration, exempt the tens of millions who personify decency, laud a culture so vital it could make your head swim: none of that will help much. Oppose a planetary hegemony and you are no better, it seems, than the most demented suicide bomber. The trick is rhetorical, but almost always effective. If you oppose the things being done in America's name you are, clearly, a fellow traveller of every insane jihadi. You wanted 9/11 to happen, you are soft on terror, weak on values, a descendent, somehow, of every Quisling. Our own prime minister has been exploiting the gimmick ever since Saddam's weaponry failed to materialise: with us or against us, no ifs, buts, maybes, or alternatives. Your choice.

It starts to go downhill quickly from this disagreement with what he is saying, to astonishment at how low he is stooping:

I am anti-American. I oppose this empire. I want it stopped, as brother Malcolm once used to say, by any means necessary.[emphasis added]

By any means necessary? Flying passenger aircraft into buildings full of civilians, bombing nightclubs full of clubbers, bombing subway trains packed full of commuters, bombing UN compounds, bombing embassies, hacking off the heads of aid workers and journalists. By any means necessary is acceptable apparently.

Oh and it's a small but important point; middle aged white men - especially those who bear a passing resemblence to George Galloway as Bell does - look and sound even more ridiculous when they refer to Malcolm X as "brother Malcolm"

Guantanamo exists, remember, simply because the government of the United States cannot bear to trust America's invaluable laws and America's shining constitution. Stalin had the same problems, as it happens, with the impeccable Soviet legal code, and he adopted much the same solution.

Guantanamo is a problem that has to be fixed. It's wrong legally, it's wrong morally and in terms of the War on Terror it is an enormous own goal by the US in the battle for hearts and minds. But some perspective would be nice. Guatanamo has a few hundred prisoners, the Soviet Gulags held over 2 million political prisoners following the purges in 1937 alone. Some of the Soviet camps has a death rate as high as 80% of prisoners in the first months of incarceration. Where does that leave the comparisions between Bush and Stalin?

Yet by pointing this out I am, clearly, the sort of extremist whose visa problems are about to get worse, and then some.

"By any means necessary" - does he not get it? He may not be a militant Islamist strapping on a bomb vest - but he is an extremist who is advocating the support of terrorism and the murder of innocent civilians.

The greatest irony of life under totalitarianism, meanwhile, is that no-one notices. The world goes on. An occasional weirdo will point out that the emperor is wearing full battledress. The rest go shopping at the mall, or celebrate their own courage in the face of unspeakable terror, and forget to realise that they no longer have a sense of scale.

So the US is totalitarian now? Interesting that he goes onto the subject of a sense of scale, this is a journalist who has just compared the flaws of a democracy (and there are many justifiable criticisms to make of the US and particularly some of it's policies in the War on Terror) with Stalins Russia. The suicide of three prisoners with the Gulag. To add a bit of perspective to there is a female prison called Cornton Vale about thirty miles away from where Ian Bell's newspaper The Herald is published and between 1995 and 1998, eight women killed themselves. Since then the suicide rate has declined somewhat and averages about one a year. That is one prison, of approx. 200 inmates.

Even I find these words sticking in my throat. I have no interest in defending, aiding or abetting fundamentalist maniacs. But I return, increasingly, to what once seemed a bizarre mental experiment: how would the world look if America were recognised as an enemy of freedom?

What and have China become the worlds pre-eminent power? That well known bastion of human rights, democracy and freedom. Everything will be alright then, the world will be henceforth be known as Happy Land, and everyone can live in a gumdrop house on lollipop lake!

On the afternoon of 9/11 I wept like a child, like a human being. Never again.

This man has some nerve to call himself a liberal. What sort of mind considers mass murder by theocratic fascists, acceptable - by any means necessary - and yet still go an and characterise the American body politic as being the ones in the throes of an advanced degenerative disease?