“Muhammad, Mummy thinks maybe that’s not a good idea…”

A typically pathetic post-7/07 column by Londoner Alice Miles, focusing, as most of these columns do, on “How are we doing in the aftermath, how do we feel.” We’ll be seeing endless amounts of this sort of therapeutic trash from now on in place of a serious response to the jihadist threat within. True, Miles ends on a quasi hardline note:

No one should stigmatise any community, the police said yesterday. But those bombers have stigmatised the communities that made them, and we should spare a thought for the devastation wrought on those communities; but then we should insist that they cannot continue in a state of alienation from the rest of society. That is a challenge for them, and for all of us. They, too, must become ordinary.

But, my dear (I feel like saying to Miss Miles), what if our Moslem friends don’t become “ordinary”? What will you say and do then? This is the interminable trap of the various “peace” processes, the “moderation” processes, with the seemingly insistent statement by the Western partners to the process that the non-Westerners “must” do something, but with absolutely no sanctions and no plan B in place in the event that they don’t do what is demanded of them. It is like your typical contemporary mother saying weakly and detachedly to her child, “Don’t do that, honey, don’t do that,” and the child does it anyway, and the mother doesn’t react to the disobedient behavior but continues her unserious promptings as before. Columns such as Miss Miles’ seem virtually designed to trigger more terrorist attacks, to express the sheer contempt that Moslems must feel for Westerners who, instead of cracking down on the Moslems and throwing them out on their collective rear, plead with them to “change,” pretty please.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2005 01:40 AM | Send