"An Acceptable Level of Terrorism": The London Terrorist Attack

No--Not That One

This one:

BBC: "[12] years ago, four suicide bombers with rucksacks full of explosives attacked central London, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more. It was the worst single terrorist atrocity on British soil. A decade on, we look back at how events unfolded on 7 July 2005.

The bombers' journey began at 04:00 BST as three of the group - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and 18-year-old Hasib Hussain - left Leeds, West Yorkshire, in a rented car bound for Luton, Bedfordshire. There they met their fourth accomplice, 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, before heading to the capital by train. They went on to detonate four devices - three on the Underground and one on a double-decker bus.".......

It's only been 12 years--and it's basically been forgotten. Too much water over the dam. I didn't even hear it referenced in today's Parliament attack.

Today: Nonie Darwish: Urgent Messages to the Muslim World

• A dangerous message is being sent to the Muslim world by the West: There is nothing that moderate Muslims or anyone else should fear from radical Islamic terrorism! Look at us Western governments! We are bringing in refugees who cannot be vetted even if they are ISIS infiltrators. In fact, we in the West are so goodhearted that we are encouraging many organizations to operate legally in the West under the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood -- even organizations that are sympathetic to the terrorist group Hamas and that are pledging to overthrow us!
• The West, by taking all the Syrian refugees, is emptying Syria of any kind of resistance to the Caliphate (ISIS). The West's compassion, by taking in the refugees escaping ISIS, will end up leaving only the radicals to rule unopposed in Syria and Iraq. This, in US foreign policy, is not compassion; it is gross negligence and reckless endangerment.
• "Tough love" is badly needed when dealing with the Muslim world. We must say: No, we cannot accept your jihadist aspirations. We cannot accept you forcing your way of life on the world; your way of life is unacceptable to us. Before you send your refugees, you must end your "us against them" jihadist culture. The civilized world no longer finds your aspirations for an Islamic Caliphate tolerable.

From 2005: 

Ron Reagan, Jr.: "Christopher, I'm not sure that I buy the idea that these attacks are a sign that we're actually winning the war on terror. I mean, how many more victories like this do we really want to endure?"

Christopher Hitchens: "Well, it depends on how you think it started, sir. I mean, these movements had taken over Afghanistan, had very nearly taken over Algeria, in a extremely bloody war which actually was eventually won by Algerian society. They had sent death squads to try and kill my friend Salman Rushdie, for the offense of writing a novel in England. They had sent death squads to Austria and Germany, the Iranians had, for example, to try and kill Kurdish Muslim leaders there. If you make the mistake that I thought I heard you making just before we came on the air, of attributing rationality or a motive to this, and to say that it's about anything but itself, you make a great mistake, and you end up where you ended up, saying that the cause of terrorism is fighting against it, the root cause, I mean. Now, you even said, extraordinarily to me, that there was no terrorist problem in Iraq before 2003. Do you know nothing about the subject at all? Do you wonder how Mr. Zarqawi got there under the rule of Saddam Hussein? Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal?"

Jr.: "Well, I'm following the lead of the 9/11 Commission, which..."

Hitch: "Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal, the most wanted man in the world, who was sheltered in Baghdad? The man who pushed Leon Klinghoffer off the boat, was sheltered by Saddam Hussein. The man who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, and you have the nerve to say that terrorism is caused by resisting it? And by deposing governments that endorse it?"

Jr.: "No, actually, I didn't say that, Christopher."

Hitch: "At this stage, after what happened in London yesterday?"

Jr.: "What I did say, though, was that Iraq was not a center of terrorism before we went in there, but it might be now."

Hitch: "How can you know so little about..."

Jr.: "You can make the claim that you just made about any other country in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

Hitch: "Absolutely nonsense."

Jr.: "So do you think we ought to invade Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers from 9/11 came from, following your logic, Christopher?"

Hitch: "Uh, no. Excuse me. The hijackers may have been Saudi and Yemeni, but they were not envoys of the Saudi Arabian government, even when you said the worst..."

Jr.: "Zarqawi is not an envoy of Saddam Hussein, either."

Hitch: "Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?"

Jr.: "I guess because I listen to the 9/11 Commission, and read their report, and they said that Saddam Hussein was not exporting terror. I suppose that's how, Christopher."

Hitch: "Well, then they were wrong, weren't they?"

Jr.: "No, maybe they just needed to listen to you, Christopher."

Hitch: "Well, I'm not sure that they actually did say that. What they did say was they didn't know of any actual operational connection [on Sept. 11]...

Jr.: "That's right. No substantive operational connection."

Hitch: "...which was the Iraqi Baath Party and...excuse me...and Al Qaeda. A direct operational connection. Now, that's because they don't know. They don't say there isn't one. They say they couldn't find one. But I just gave you [a] number, I would have thought, [of] rather suggestive examples."

More Hitch here:

"We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

For a few moments yesterday, Londoners received a taste of what life is like for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose Muslim faith does not protect them from slaughter at the hands of those who think they are not Muslim enough, or are the wrong Muslim.

It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on "our" values or "our" way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush.

A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from that "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes.

Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?

The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose.

They demand the impossible - the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.

We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them will know no peace. Communities that shelter them do not take forever to discover their mistake. And their sordid love of death is as nothing compared to our love of London, which we will defend as always, and which will survive this with ease.".......

Really? Hitch is gone now. London has a Muslim mayor. It seems like it is a greater crime to complain about terrorism than to commit terrorism in today's Britain. "The idea that you can have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening," said Rudy Giuliani of John Kerry in 2004--and we just finished eight dangerous years of that acceptance level.

I didn't hear anything about the 2005 London Attack today. I only heard the dictator Erdogan demand the right to campaign in Europe for the votes of dual citizens in a Turkish referendum--or else.

He said "Turkey is not a country you can pull and push around, not a country whose citizens you can drag on the ground. If Europe continues this way, no European in any part of the world can walk safely on the streets," even as Europeans in London were in fact being pushed, pulled and dragged on the ground while unable to walk safely on the street! 

Mark Steyn, 2002: "Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes -- women's rights, gay rights -- the political class turns squeamishly away.

Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India -- curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers -- but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we're no longer capable of being "judgmental" and "discriminating." We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture -- rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. -- is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, we're slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of our lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations.".......

"We live in the Age of Bad Ideas. Mass Muslim immigration into Western nations seems to me a strong candidate to be regarded as the worst of all the bad ideas we are afflicted with, and pretty convincing evidence that the West is in the grip of some sort of collective insanity. ...

There are fifty majority Muslim nations in the world, covering a fifth of the world's land area. Muslims have plenty of places to live, with national laws and customs that suit them. There is no reason for them to migrate en masse into western countries, and no reason for western countries to let them. Britain is one of the most crowded countries in the world — population density twice China's or Nigeria's. The British are fools to permit mass Muslim immigration."--John Derbyshire, 2008

Zero Hedge: Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co., interviews Danish commentator Iben Thranholm, 2017
ET: Denmark is supposedly the happiest country on the planet. But you have little reason to be happy these days as you find yourself on the receiving end of government censorship, not only for expressing your concerns about the future of your country but also for working for a Russian news outlet. What happened here? You recently wrote a powerful piece about this, expressing your feelings not only as a woman who does not toe the party line but especially as a Christian. 
IT: In 2015 I wrote an article criticizing our politicians who for the most part hate Christianity but nevertheless use Christian values, especially charity and compassion, to promote their own agendas, in particular mass immigration. So I called them out on that.
A few months later I got a call from a politician here who told me that I was on a government blacklist, supposedly acting as a pro-Russian propagandist agent, despite having absolutely no evidence to that effect. I occasionally work for a Russian news outlet, but that’s simply my job as a journalist. 
Today, in a society where supposedly there is freedom of speech, if politicians want to silence their critics they simply accuse them of working for the Kremlin, or having some unexplained ties with Russia. That is what happened to me, and it also happening to high profile politicians and journalists in the US, France and Germany. If you don’t agree with the multicultural policies of Europe then you are labeled a Russian agent. Which is really a form of political or character assassination. 
They are so afraid of the rise of what leftist politicians in Europe call “populism”, which threaten the existence of their beloved European Union. And this year the stakes are very high with elections in France and Germany. So they resort to these kinds of tactics to quash any dissenters. 
So I find myself in a blacklist in a supposedly free country like Denmark, but if a conflict with Russia emerges I can end up in prison under the pretext of being a foreign agent. Again, with no proof and no judicial process. This is very much how totalitarian societies operate. First they put you on a list, then when there is a problem or a made-up reason they will come for you.
ET: You were only expressing views that are consistent with those of many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. There are certainly many people concerned about the future of Western societies. In many ways this evokes memories of the Soviet Union, and the great new society they tried to create, with the disastrous consequences we all know.
That is actually a very real and concerning comparison. After all, communism was a Western idea and it was imposed on Russia, they did not create it. And it did not die with the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, it is still very much alive and roaming around our continent. While it operates differently, the goals are not too dissimilar. The version we have spreading across the West is Cultural Marxism.
We no longer have families, religion, even genders. In Sweden now they have invented a gender neutral term to address little boys and girls at kindergarten. This is a complete change from traditional Western values that have kept Europe safe from outside invasion for centuries. And this is now gone. 
All this talk of multiculturalism and open borders sounds very nice, but in practice it has led to a progressive transformation of our societies, and as Sweden shows not for the better. Less freedoms, less safety, less cohesion; more crime, more fragmentation, more social problems. It really is a struggle of good versus evil, and we in the West can no longer distinguish between the two. I would even call it diabolical disorientation. 
ET: So how long you think before the Christian cross is removed from your flag? And how does the Danish monarchy, which is sworn to protect Danish culture and religion, feel about all of this?
IT: No European politician will stand up for Christianity. Nobody. Expect from perhaps Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orbán. 
There is this unholy alliance between the left and radical Islam. Many Europeans have such a disdain for their own traditions that they would prefer to see Christianity being eradicated even if it might cost their way of life and even personal freedoms in the end. 
We have this bizarre situation where Western feminists support women having to wear a head cloth, along with foregoing many of the rights they should be able to enjoy in our countries. And these women often get penalized by their own communities when they try to assimilate into our society, while the feminists stay quiet. It is all very multicultural and good.
ET: You know Russia well as part of your work. Can you contrast what is happening there relative to the transformation taking place across much of Western Europe?
Believe it or not, we have swapped lanes. Now it is Russia who is adopting Christianity as the West gets rid of it by any means possible. 
Christianity runs very deep in Russia: in their literature, in their arts, in their culture. When the Soviets brutally tried to suppress it, at the cost of countless lives, it survived underground. People still celebrated it in secrecy, performing baptisms and the like behind closed doors. 
President Putin recently inaugurated an enormous statue of St. Vladimir, the patron saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, about 100 yards from the Kremlin walls. If you stand at a certain point across the street from the Kremlin, the cross that he bears is even taller than the star in the Red Square, so the symbolism is very potent. 
In the West, as we discussed, we are going the other way. We can’t discard our values and heritage fast enough. 
ET: There was a 2014 Russian movie, Leviathan, which alluded to this transformation. However it put Orthodox Christianity in a less positive light, essentially being used as an ideological argument to justify the power of the oligarchs in society. President Putin is certainly no saint. Isn’t this all just superficial?
IT: There are people in Russia who are also opposed to their own traditional values and who want a more Westernized Russia. I have not seen that movie so I can’t say if the director supports that view or not. 
People need to go to Russia and see it for themselves. President Putin is only responding to what is happening there and he respects the Russian people’s faith in Orthodoxy.
This is one of the reasons why I believe the West hate the Russians so much. They cannot tolerate the thought of having a resurgent and powerful Christian Russia who openly rejects their Cultural Marxism. And accordingly they demonized it in much of our media and political circles.
ET: So, is Denmark on the brink? Indeed, is the rest of Europe on the brink?
IT: Yes, Denmark is on the brink. And Europe is on the brink. We completely lost our culture, our values and our moral compass. What used to be good is now evil and vice-versa. 
You mentioned Denmark being the happiest country in the world but I am not sure that is true. We have high alcohol consumption and about half a million people on happy pills for a reason. 
Channel 1, our main TV channel here, recently aired a documentary on three Danish girls who converted to Islam out of their own will, not because they got married or anything like that. They all had the same background, coming from broken homes, dealing with alcoholism and so forth – basically part of the legacy of the 1968 revolution we had across Europe. What these girls lacked was structure, and they found it in Islam because it regulates all aspects of your life: how you dress, what you eat, with whom you can socialize with, how to pray, how to interact as a wife and so on. 
That is what the right-wing parties in Europe don’t understand. This is a spiritual battle. There is no political freedom without spiritual freedom. If you go around just forbidding things, like don’t wear the head cloth and so forth, it will not work. Our civilization will gradually disappear.
The only thing that can save Europe right now is a true spiritual, dare I say Christian, revival across the Continent. This played a significant role in the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and East Germany. The churches there provided hidden venues for people to congregate, express ideas and share their faith and hardships.
Since its inception Christianity was always about fighting evil with love, prayer and faith because these three are the key to freedom. And these are the values that the radical left and radical Islam do not tolerate, because of course both demand total obedience to the state and their conception of God, respectively. 
ET: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your courage. You deserve to be in the cover of a magazine, not on some government blacklist. Wish you all the best.
IT: Thank you.