Failing to Focus on What's at Stake with Islamism in the UK.

Nick Cohen has been spectacularly failing to focus on what is at stake with regards the clash between Islamist ideology, the terrorist threat and the values of liberalism yet again in his weekly Observer column.He writes ( How Radical Islam seduced the Academics ),

A few months ago, I sat in a magnificent Victorian lecture hall at University College London...

By the time UCL organised a public debate on the Abdulmutallab affair, reporters had established that the Nigerian student had lost himself in London's political netherworld, where the white far left meets the religious far right.

I had come along with hundreds of others because, on Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former UCL student, tried to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear and kill the 278 passengers and crew on Northwest Airlines' flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

After such a narrow escape from mass murder, I thought that no one could deny that the universities needed to confront campus sectarianism. I reckoned without the limitless capacity for self-delusion of British academe.

As president of UCL Islamic Society, Abdulmutallab had presided over an "antiterror week", which featured a promotional video of clips of violence, accompanied by hypnotic music.

The film-maker had inserted footage of George Galloway saying the west believed Palestinian blood was cheaper than Israeli blood, and Amnesty International's latest pin-up, Moazzam Begg, alleging the Americans tortured him at Guantánamo Bay.

As usual Cohen fails to make a coherent case by simply opening up a supposed discussion about Islamism with scattergun denunciation and by ranting about the undoubtedly contorted way that aspects of the far left ( assorted Trotskyists of the SWP et al ) have allied with Islamists.

Yet the SWP is a crackpot fringe of little or no consequence. With regards the UCL administration, it can hardly ban Islamic Societies nor even Islamist organisations which do not explicitly incite or promote violence against others, no matter how abhorrent such politics is.

Few have picked up on the contradictions inherent in this blustering polemic. Namely that academics are universally smeared as craven and weak in the face of "clerical fascism" and that only a forthright defence of liberal values can ward off the brainwashing and campus sectarianism.

Cohen fails to suggest what UCL could have done. The most obvious thing is for those opposed to Islamism to show up and politely interrogate the speakers and show up the paranoid political style behind some Islamist propaganda. There is some truth in Cohen's assertion that too many people are afraid.

Either that or they are indifferent, as many non-Muslim students tend to be, with their obsession with bragging about how drunk, stoned or shagged they have been at "uni" recently. Those who feel morally superior have always harboured resentments about this and learn how to detest the society around them.

Yet that does not necessarily result from Islam itself but from a blend of the apocalyptic aspects within Islam, which has existed within all monotheistic religions since their inception, blended with modernistic ideologies which hold that Muslim oppression is the consequence of Western Imperialism.

Despite being a crude oversimplification, that connection was given traction by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 which Cohen supported and also the invasion of Afghanistan, one crucially concerned with The Great Game and the geopolitical struggle to get the TAPI pipeline built.

Islamists are curiously a mirror image of the messianic neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who supported and launched the invasion of Iraq and those who see an essential "clash of civilisations" across the globe having emerged after 1989-1990.

Both are curiously reliant on the other: Islamists need the West to be imperialist to feed the resentment against it which would exist not only due to the belief that the West has condoned dictatorships and shown lethal double standards with regards the Middle East since the decline of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Likewise, neoconservative fanatics needed the emergency feeling of the "war on terror" and the notion that there was an "enemy within" connected to the enemy without" to rationalise its foreign policy of invading nations like Iraq to control the oil.

The reason why progressive politicians espouse "war on terror" platitudes and "they threaten our values" without ever getting stuck in polemically to Islamism is that if it did not exist they would need to invent it: moreover, the evidence points to the fact that this has been the case.

Members of the intelligence services have continuously used the term "blowback" to the way the CIA and MI6 colluded with radical Islamists after 1979 by funding them as proxies from Afghanistan in the 1980s to the Balkans in the 1990s and in Central Asia.

Much of that was carried out as a tool of realpolitik to get rid of the wrong sort of post-Soviet kleptocrat and replace them with those willing to do the bidding of the USA with regards the construction of pipelines and to benefit its geostrategic interests.

As important as it is to challenge the enfevered pedants and deracinated ideologues of Islamism that rationalise hatred for the entirety of Western Civilisation, it is also important to challenge those destroying it by bogging its armies down in resource wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The real challenge must be for the West to wean itself of oil and findways of conserving supplies and urgently developing alternatives. Galloway and the SWP etc are sideshows. Subtle police methods can be used to nab plotters without public alarm.