allah be blessed, page-19

re: allah be blessed/civil war/interview Interview with Christopher Hitchens on Breakfast, Radio National.
Very revealing and interesting interview, speaking of Muslims fighting Muslims and the civil war that is resulting with some believing the others are "not true Muslims".
Hitchens is a journalist and columnist and author.

BREAKFAST
Friday, 8 July 2005


FRAN KELLY: As the shock of London’s bomb blasts starts to sink in, we have to ask what the implications of this will be, not only for the West but for the Muslim world too. Is this, in fact, a new phase we’re seeing in Islamic attacks? To help us with this, we’re joined now from California by Christopher Hitchens, journalist, author and columnist with Vanity Fair magazine.

Christopher, I know you’ve been bombarded with calls from British newspapers for the last however long, so thanks for fitting us in.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: It was nice of you to ask me.

FRAN KELLY: Christopher, these series of bombings in London, do they indicate we’re moving into a new phase of attacks now by Islamic fundamentalist groups?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, I’m sorry to say, I think that it does have that implication because in September 2001, for example, it drew the attention of everyone to the existence of a kind of pirate state in Afghanistan, run by gruesome medievalists, with which we’d been declining to deal, with unfinished business. As time wore on, as you know, there’s a huge argument about this. But a case was made that there was at least one other state in the region—the Iraqi Ba’ath estate of Saddam Hussein—that was at least sympathetic to Jihad in general, if not to Bin Laden in particular.

Again, there was something to reply to. In effect, one could say: you think you can change our regime or our society, you’re wrong, but we will change yours. But the number of such options now is dwindling, shall we say, or has hit diminishing returns and what we’re looking at is the very strong likelihood that these murderers in London today are home grown. They’re British citizens and subjects and that we’ll have to consider Europe as in some ways part of the Muslim world, or let’s not treat it so absolutely all the Muslim world as part of Europe but that the civil war that is going on within Islamic communities does extend into most European capitals now.

FRAN KELLY: Christopher, what do you mean when you say the civil war going on within Islamic communities?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, within Islam and within Islamic communities. I’ve never believed that this is a war on terror or terrorism. I think that there has been, for a good number of years now, a civil war—probably more than one—within Islam between, on the one side those who favour Sharia law and its imposition by Jihad, not just on all Muslims but on all non-Muslims too.

And on the other, the large majority of Muslims, I think, who don’t wish to return to the Caliphate or to the desert ... the Jihadist forces hope to win this war to subjugate their own coalitionists by exporting it to our societies—to places like, well, London, most recently, to Bali, to Amsterdam, to Madrid and of course most memorably to New York. And so we’re caught up in a civil war that’s raging within Islam and it’s now not so much an intervention from outside as New York was but an indigenous participation by supporters of the Bin Ladenist line who actually live in and come from what has hitherto been rather lazily called ‘western’ or ‘European society’.

FRAN KELLY: Christopher, there’s a lot more I need and want to ask you. This is actually a terrible line. If it’s okay with you, we might drop off this line and call you back and come straight back to you.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Goodness, are we live?

FRAN KELLY: We are live and this line is bad so ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I’m so sorry, I can hear you perfectly. I’ll hang up right away.

FRAN KELLY: And we’ll call you back. We’ll be back with you in a couple of minutes. Thanks very much, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Okay, bye.

[Break in transmission]

FRAN KELLY: Now, let’s head back to California where Christopher Hitchens had to be rudely interrupted because the phone line was so bad. Christopher, we’re back with you now. You were making the point about this not being just an attack on the West, which is the way it’s been described and the context it has been put in by most analysts we’ve spoken to this morning. But you say a civil war within Islam is playing itself out.

CHRISTOPEHR HITCHENS: Yes.

FRAN KELLY: What impact does an attack like this have on the war in terms of recruiting new, perhaps young fundamentalists, young Muslims to that cause?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, it’ll be intensely interesting to find out. For example, I know London reasonably well and I recognise the names of all those tube stations, and I will be very surprised indeed if when the body count is completed—if I can use such a disgusting term—that there wouldn’t be at least half a dozen Muslims among the dead. And certainly anyone putting a bomb at, say, Aldgate Station or King’s Cross would have to assume that that would happen. This is often appallingly overlooked by some commentators. They would know that that would happen and they wouldn’t care. Now why is that: because these are the wrong kind of Muslims, because they are not true Muslims, they’re not real Muslims.

Look at the massacre, for example, of the Hazara, the Shiite tribes people in Afghanistan. Look at the way in which senior imams are shot down outside their places of worship in Baghdad and in Karbala and Najak by the forces of Zakawi. Look at what happened to Algeria when the GIA, a Muslim terrorist group, basically ex-communicated the entire population of the country and went to war against them with fire and sword. That was beaten off by the Algerian government and people but at a terrible cost in blood and with the use of very some rough methods, I have to say. That’s what’s going on. People who think this is in some way payback for the Crusades or for Palestine are simply deluding themselves.

The other example I would give would be, for example, the incessant attacks on the secular and partly Hindu government in India by extremists sponsored from Pakistan. This is East versus East in the longest struggle that Jihad has been waging, not East versus West. And so when Prime Minister Blair said this morning: it’s our way of life and our civilisation, I sort of knew what he meant but I thought it was pathetic. He doesn’t seem to have understood the essential point: this is a war for civilisations. It is not a clash of civilisations and the main civilisation that is under attack is Muslim. And several Muslims in London will have discovered that by being blown apart at random this very morning in London, England.

FRAN KELLY: And if you’re right, then the point of an attack like this is not necessarily the number of Muslims who might be blown apart at these train stations; there is a large Muslim community within Britain. Since September 11, relations between the Muslim community and the rest of Britain have become strained. This will just increase that strain, won’t it, and ultimately that will have the impact of splitting that community again?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well it makes people have to decide. The immigration, say, of Ugandan Asians to Britain or Bangladeshis has been a huge success—everybody loves them. They’re hardworking, they’re charming. They’ve worked a lot harder and better than most English people do. They’ve changed our national cuisine for the better. They’ve changed the way English literature is written—the way that novelists like, say Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureishi on every literate person’s shelf.

It’s been a marvellous thing, and these people have, obviously, an attachment to the dialectical relationship between Britain and their countries of origin. But there are some who don’t accept this and their only hope of making any headway is to make life so miserable that a dual loyalty question can be raised. And ultimately, in less developed countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, to make life so chaotic and miserable that people would look forward even to a Taliban regime as an improvement because it would bring law and order.

But the name for this is fascism, okay? It is a deliberate attempt to play on superstition, on racial and confessional and ethnic differences by the cruellest form of violence and spread panic and paranoia and conspiracy theories in the hope of destroying the possibility of democratic discourse. And there can only be one response to that, which is to outlive them, and, in fact, to put it bluntly, to out kill them. If they want to be martyrs, then we have to help them.

FRAN KELLY: You described Tony Blair’s response as pathetic, but isn’t that exactly the language Tony Blair and George W. Bush and other leaders are speaking right now—they’re planning to outlive and out kill them?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, Bush says that sometimes. He also says Islam is a religion of peace, which if he’d said it about Christianity people would have laughed at him. They phrase it wrongly. They say it’s a war on terror, which is a nonsensical bit of phrasing. One has to understand: it is a war among Muslims and we have, if we can describe ourselves as ‘we’ for the moment just for shorthand, every interest in making assertions that the Bin Ladenist fractional minority that wants not to fight against empires but to fight to restore an empire, the ancient Caliphe, and that fights for a particularly sectarian and vicious and exclusive form of Wahabi Salafi Islam. These forces are piteously defeated. And in that enterprise we have a huge number of Muslim allies; they are actual and potential. They don’t want to live in a Taliban world. Who would?

Remember what the grievances are—you know, these people, who’ll say their grievances are Palestine. That’s nothing to do with it. Their grievances are the grievance of the unveiled woman. That’s what they can’t stand to see. They don’t want to see any statues that are not Islamic. In fact, they don’t want to see any representational art of any kind. Remember the Bamiyan Buddhas? They don’t want people to be able to listen to music. They don’t object so much to the state of Israel as to the existence of the Jewish people. They declare Hinduism and Shi’ism to be vile heresies, punishable by death. We absolutely disarm ourselves if we grant them any of their first premises—that they’re interested in justice or in a better distribution of resources. They’re fascist, pure and simple.

FRAN KELLY: And the lives led by British Muslims, the great bulk of British Muslims, would be an absolute anathema to them and would be, as you say, something to be destroyed—a target?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, they know that in pubs in England, and Scotland and Wales and Ireland, young Muslims go with their friends and they occasionally take a drink and cheer on the same football teams and the next you know, they’ll be eating pork and going out, walking along hand in hand with women who are not their sisters. This, they feel, has to be stopped. It’s blasphemy. They don’t care who they kill. I don’t think it can be underlined enough. Anyone who says putting a bomb on a bus in rush hour at the time my daughter is going to school is protesting about the war in Iraq is lying to themselves and lying to your audience. It’s the kind of stuff that ceases to be tolerable to me and I really think today should be one of the days that’s remembered for rolling this nonsense back.

FRAN KELLY: Christopher, on that point, thank you again for taking our call today.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Thank you.

FRAN KELLY: Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, author, and for many of us, you’ll know him as a columnist with Vanity Fair magazine.