Time Immortal

This article in The Age (yeah, yeah, I know…), and also this one at Playfuls, confirms some of the details I speculated on yesterday:

THE arrest of nine men for allegedly planning an Iraqi-style abduction and beheading of a British soldier has come a week after a memorial was held in Birmingham for the nation’s first Muslim soldier to be killed in Afghanistan…..

Details about the suspects have also emerged. They reportedly include a teacher, the 38-year-old owner of a pizza parlour, the son of a grocery store owner, an unemployed father-of-four and another man aged in his 20s.

Two Islamic bookshops were sealed off by police along with a grocery store and Blade Communications, an internet cafe that also sells mobile phones.

One of the bookshops, Maktabah Bookshop, was co-founded by a British former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Moazzamm Begg. Following the London bombings in July 2005, it came under scrutiny for reportedly selling literature that promoted Islamic jihad.

Natch.

I trust, O Reader, that these details come as no surprise whatsoever?

Last week, a memorial stone was laid to commemorate the first Muslim soldier to be killed on active duty in Afghanistan, Pakistan-born Lance Corporal Jabron Hashmi, from Birmingham.When he was killed last year, his family described him as a “hero of Islam”, according The Independent newspaper. But some extremist Islamic websites denounced him as an “apostate” and a “traitor”.

Natch.

I believe I called that one.

Home Secretary John Reid urged restraint from the media when reporting the investigation.

Which is, of course, a totally unnecessary suggestion on his part: the British media, especially, is already loathe to make any mention of Islam in connection with any news of a terror plot; the most one usually notes being mentioned is a vague reference to persons of “South Asian” origin. Finding juicy details about terror plots by Muslims is a rare thing.

Speaking of details, the Playfuls article has some interesting background information:

It appears that the nine men arrested in Birmingham this week had a specific victim in mind. Their target was allegedly to be a lance corporal in his 20s, who was on home leave from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.He would have been one of 330 Muslim personnel in the 180,000- strong British armed forces, of whom only 250 are currently on active service.

Now that says something, doesn’t it? 330 Muslims in the whole of the British armed forces, which makes for a percentage of…what? 0.183%, or thereabouts?

This gets back to what Mark Steyn (among others) has referred to as the emerging trend towards a pan-Islamic identity that transcends any semblance of loyalty to the nation one elects to live in: queen and country be damned.

This raises any number of logical problems for a person that adopts such a viewpoint: if one was born in that nation and feels no loyalty to it, why would one elect to stay there? And if one is an immigrant to that nation but feels no loyalty to it, why would one have immigrated in the first place? And yet that is what happens, time and again.

There’s some other data worth mentioning:

Recent opinion polls have confirmed a growing divide between young British Muslims and the generation of their parents.A survey of 1,003 Muslims by the think-tank Policy Exchange showed that 37 per cent of young people between 16 and 24 would “prefer to live under Sharia law”, compared with 17 per cent of their elders.

According to the poll, 74 per cent of youngsters would prefer Muslim women to choose to wear the hijab (Muslim headscarf), compared with 28 per cent of the over 55s.

The figure of those “admiring” organizsations like al-Qaeda was put at 13 per cent for the young and three per cent for the older generation.

“There is clearly a conflict within British Islam between a moderate majority that accepts the norms of Western democracy and a growing minority that does not,” said Munira Mirza, lead author of the survey.

The elderly don’t join the military; the young do. And what we’re seeing emerging in Britain (and in many other places in the world!) is a trend amongst the young to not only feel no particular loyalty to their home nation (by birth or by migration), but in fact to feel a peculiar hostility to that nation, to its laws, to its culture, and to its people. 37% of young British Muslims favour the implementation of an oppressive legal regime that is, in almost every imaginable way, set in opposition to Western society, its mores and its ideals. 74% of young British Muslims favour misogyny (which is really what the hijab represents, first and foremost). Such things as this fly in the face of the freedoms Western societies place great value on.

That said, it of course comes as no surprise that such a pitifully low number of young Muslims have taken up the call of queen and country and donned the uniform of the British military.

Nor does it come as a surprise that what few of them have done so are, by many within their own faith community, denounced as apostates and traitors. And so a plot emerging to behead (what is it about Muslims and beheading?) a British soldier who happens also to be Muslim is, in a sense, no surprise: in fact, it is to be expected from a culture that seems to split into two groups: the youth that enthusiastically believe in the use of violence in dealing with apostates, and the others who may privately disagree with them but elect to remain silent and not voice their discontent.

The only oddity in this whole incident is that the terror cell wasn’t going for the usual “mass casualty” incident, but for the “propaganda video” outcome instead. I suppose it was only a matter of time, though, before such things as this made the jump from the Middle East to more civilized locales. Why just last year here in Canada there was a plot to behead the Prime Minister (an outcome which, no doubt, would have given some of my friends and family the giggles).

We need more good poetry, I think, about “barbarians at the gates”. Or maybe we need to resurrect some of the old verse that speaks to that effect in our high school curricula.