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More on Phillips’s empty advocacy of “war”
Melanie Phillips criticizes key members of the present British government who favor re-admitting the Muslim Council of Britain into the government’s favor, from which it was excluded after pro-terrorist statements it made last year. She points out that the MCB is closely associated with Islamist figures such as Yusuf Qaradawi, who calls for the “murder of coalition troops in Iraq, Israelis and Jews everywhere,” and who is a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. She criticizes those in the government who urge an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood against Al Qaeda. They think such an alliance would be a neat idea because the Muslim Brotherhood currently opposes al Qaeda and opposes terrorism on British soil. But, as Phillips points out, the Brotherhood opposes terrorism in Britain because they see it as a tactical mistake, which “threatens to slow down the Islamisation of Britain and the world.” She continues:
[T]he cultural jihad and the terrorist jihad are an unbroken continuum of jihadi extremism—which is why those who argue that the Brotherhood can be used as an antidote to al Qaeda are lethally misguided. Unfortunately, that suicidal “engagement” agenda is now running strongly in Whitehall, and one can hear strong echoes of it in the push to “engage” again with the MCB. A responsible government with its full complement of marbles must never “engage” with the Islamists. It must fight them and destroy them—or else they will destroy it.Phillips’s analysis of the problem is informative and cogent—up until that last sentence where she says that the government “must fight [the Islamists] and destroy them—or else they will destroy it.” What does she mean by this? What “fighting” and “destruction” is she talking about? We know from the current column that if Phillips were heading the British government she would end any engagement with jihadist organizations and she would ban pro-terrorist organizations like Hizb ut Tahrir. But beyond that, what would she do that would constitute a “war”? In fact, as I showed in a previous blog entry, nothing that Phillips actually proposes remotely resembles a “war” against radical Islam. Why then does she repeatedly call for “war”? In her repeated resort to rhetoric that is (to use two of her favorite adverbs) lethally and fatally detached from reality, Phillips resembles the American pro-Bush conservatives, who continually and hysterically cry that we are in a “war” against Islamic extremists when in reality there is no such war, just (1) a holding action in Iraq aimed at stabilizing the situation long enough to allow us to withdraw our forces from that country, and (2) police actions to protect ourselves from terrorism at home. War means seeking victory over one’s enemy. Victory means destroying either the enemy’s ability or his will to keep fighting. As I’ve been arguing for four years, the U.S. does not have and has never had a policy in Iraq aimed at destroying the enemy’s ability or will to keep fighting. Those new to VFR may find interesting this blog entry, where I quote from my writings on this subject over the years.
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