De Britse historicus Michael Burleigh heeft een nieuw boek geschreven over de geschiedenis van het terrorisme. In de Daily Telegraph vat Nigel Jones de analyse in Blood and Rage
als volgt samen. Most, if not all such terrorists, says Burleigh, whatever the ostensible causes for which they bomb, shoot or stab, share common traits of more interest to the psychiatrist than the rational political analyst.
These include a secure economic background; a chilling disinterest in - or even a sadistic enjoyment of - the suffering they inflict; and a zombie-like distance from the mundane realities of everyday life.
Beyond the terrorists themselves, there is another, larger group that comes under the lash of both Burleigh and Dostoyevsky: the protective penumbra of left-liberal, bien pensant opinion that comfortingly surrounds the terrorists, glossing over or excusing the crimes they commit, and obsessively attacking verbally the society the terrorists assail physically.
It is these fellow-travellers of terrorism - the lenient judges, the lying lawyers, the cosily tenured academics, the establishment 'radicals' with a permanently open microphone at the BBC - who are the real targets of Burleigh's own righteous indignation.
His barely suppressed rage, not only at the casual cruelty he describes, but also at the weaselly excuses and justifications of the terrorists' apologists, make his book - though far from a rant - a refreshing douche of cold anger at our weak postmodern moral evasions.
En zijn aanbevelingen voor de strijd tegen hedendaags Moslim terrorisme.
The most imaginative idea comes from Saudi Arabia - surprisingly for those who view the desert kingdom as a place of medieval barbarism floating on a sea of oil and/or the fount of Wahabism that underpins what passes for Jihadist ideology.
The Saudis stopped the spate of Jihadist attacks that hit them after 9/11 with a jail policy of killing terror by kindness. They taught tyro terrorists the error of their ways by bringing them together with Imams who point out that mass murder is un-Islamic heresy; while also re-connecting these alienated young men with the world of work and anchoring them in society by encouraging them to start families of their own.
Burleigh's other preventative proposals include copying the French, who monitor mosques closely and deport those Imams who preach the Jihadist message of hate. We should also project our own high culture more vigorously so that young Muslim men can see that the Western way of life is not entirely composed of chatroom porn, celebrity game shows and what one would-be British bomber called half-naked 'slags' dancing in night clubs (although, of course, a free society includes these as well).
Lees het hele artikel.
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