RUTHFULLY YOURS

Murray Walters is a Brisbane psychiatrist
Once more we are treated to sermons by those who demand we ponder the grievances behind the Brussels slaughter. For them, the unthinkable truth that Islamists hate us must be always obfuscated. In this regard they match those bishops who could not fully grasp the evil of pederast clerics.

Another insane act of mass murder, followed hot on its heels by the usual piffle about disenfranchisement, powerlessness, and other exculpatory historicisms. The “minimisers” were keen to get their camera time, barely waiting for atomised human flesh to be scraped from an airport’s bomb-shattered departures hall before demanding that this latest slaughter be contextualised and their simple “truth” accepted as gospel. There is a mad futility to doing anything about it, they say, other than drawing maudlin pictures, lighting candles, singing “Imagine” and exchanging empty slogans about “standing with Paris”. Sorry, that was the last massacre, this time it was Brussels. It’s getting hard to keep up these days.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian was amongst the first to occupy the apologists’ lectern, reminding us that “political terror is as old as war,” and that “…what is not stupid is seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror, and then to diminish the potency of the incident itself”. Re-iterating a well-worn theme, he mouthed the purported wisdom that “a response to terror requires patience and restraint.” In other words, do nothing, mouth pieties and hope Allah’s suicide bombers go away. Or at least find someone else to terrorise.

Call me a callous, cynical sort if you will, but isn’t it funny how no one has urged “alleviating, not aggravating” or “patience and restraint” during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Cardinal George Pell might have had a darn sight easier time of it if the same logic had been applied. After all, paedophilia is also as “old as war”. In fact, like old-fashioned rape, it’s often an integral aspect of it.

Here’s Jenkins again:

There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks. Since they are random, no protection can defend that community from them. No amount of police work or surveillance, no deployment of armies or navies, let alone of missiles or nuclear weapons, can guard against them. Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?