Generous Condescension

Dhimmi's At Home

Further to our piece on Boko Haram, Andrew Bolt of Australia provides another take--on a Lord Haw Haw-type figure who is one of Australia's foremost apologists for Islamic oppression.  He is a media favourite.

His counsel on Boko Haram?  They are a splintered group, so diverse that they are impossible to identify or discuss. You know, like Al Qaeda.

WALEED Aly is the model moderate Muslim, used by the media to persuade us we have little to fear from Islam but our own bigotry. 
 
His rewards have been great. Once the spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, he is now an ABC radio host, a Channel 10 co-presenter and an Age columnist.  He is even a politics lecturer at Monash University’s Global Terrorism Research Centre, despite having no doctorate and having qualified in engineering and law.  This week Aly showed the style that’s made him such a pet of the establishment Left but a worry to me.


Nigeria’s Boko Haram group last month kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from a boarding school and its leader announced they were “slaves” he would sell. Two are already said to be dead.  As so often when Muslim terrorists strike, Aly was brought on by Channel Ten’s The Project to explain away our fears as “an expert in terrorism”.

“So who is this group exactly?” he was asked.  Not once in his answer did “Muslim” or “Islamic” pass Aly’s lips.  “They are a really, really hard group to define because they are so splintered and so diverse,” he said.  “What we do know though is that the broader movement is a terrorist movement and they’ve been wanting to overthrow the Nigerian government and establish a government of their own.  But beyond that, this particular group, who have done this particular thing, it’s hard to identify who they are and they might just be vigilantes.”

Bolt responds in his inimitable style:

From a lecturer from a Global Terrorism Research Centre, this answer is astonishingly uninformed.  There is no mystery about who took the girls.  Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, has already shot a video of himself — part of which The Project showed — saying “I abducted your girls,”, a boast not doubted by the Nigerian government.

Some girls who escaped confirm the kidnappers were Boko Haram terrorists who shouted “Allahu Akhbar,’ (God is great)” as they attacked the school.  Nor is there any mystery about Boko Haram’s agenda.  Boko Haram means “Western education is sinful” — haram being the loaned Arabic word meaning sinful or forbidden by Allah. The group’s official title is Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad.

In his latest video Shekau stated his group’s agenda so clearly a true terrorism expert could not have missed it.  This was “a war against Christians”, Shekau shouted, and “real Muslims, who are following Salafism” should support him.  “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”

And Boko Haram has indeed killed — thousands of civilians, mostly Christians.  No, Waleed, these are no mere “vigilantes” or revolutionaries simply wanting to “establish a government of their own”.  They are yet another variety of the Muslim extremists who have struck from Moscow to Mumbai, Bali to London, Syria to New York.

Why, then are folk like Aly so lionised by the media in Australia?  Well, it appears it all comes down to white-guilt and self-loathing coupled with a determination not to criticise Islam in any way, shape, or form.  "Islam is not the problem.  We are the problem."  In some perverse, Freudian kind of way that attitude somehow seems to make the members of the Commentariat feel better about themselves. 

But my criticism is less of Aly himself than of those who buy and promote what he sells.  Much of the media seems far too eager to be told we have no real problem other than, as Aly wrote recently, that “plenty of white people (even ordinary reasonable ones) are good at telling coloured people what they should and shouldn’t find racist”. In other words, the real problem is the white “us”, not a “them”.

We see this self-loathing evasion too often for our safety.  Aly protects the media class from having to confront the difficult: is Islam a threat? What have we imported and what danger would we run by importing more? No wonder he’s done well.

It's the modern Western counterpoint to Islamic authoritarianism.  Capitulation.  Islam calls it dhimmi-ism--servile submission.