John O’Sullivan: Terrorism has no bounds

Theo van Gogh and Margaret Hassan were both murdered within days of each other – indeed, since we don’t know the exact date of Hassan’s murder, they might both have perished on the same day.

They were more than a thousand miles apart when they died: Van Gogh was murdered in Holland, Hassan in Iraq. And they were very different people. Van Gogh was a Dutch pornographer who sought to outrage respectable Holland and people of faith; Hassan was an aid worker inspired by faith who spent her life helping the poor.

Above all they had very different attitudes to Islam. Van Gogh felt contempt for the religion and had filmed a documentary in which verses from the Holy Quran were inscribed on the bodies of almost naked women to symbolise Islam’s supposed hostility to women’s rights.

Hassan had converted to the Islamic faith of her Iraqi husband from the Christianity of her native Ireland and seemingly lived according to its rules thereafter.

If they had ever met in life, as they did in death, they would probably have disliked each other deeply – and they would certainly have disapproved of each other. Van Gogh would have dismissed her as a foolish idealist with a masochistic streak; Hassan would have regarded him a heartless and shameless blasphemer.

Brutal deaths

But they died similarly brutal deaths at the hands of the same murderers, namely terrorists, and for much the same reason. What reason is that? Not blasphemy – van Gogh might have been killed on those grounds, but Hassan was a pious Muslim.

Not hostility to Iraq or the Arab world in general – Van Gogh was not especially interested in the Middle East and Hassan loved Iraq, had opposed both US invasions, and had even gone to New York to plead for an end to the UN embargo of the country.

Not opposition to Muslim immigrants into Europe – Hassan was both a Muslim and an immigrant herself (though into Iraq rather than Europe), and Van Gogh had made his anti-Islam film in cooperation with a Muslim woman immigrant from North Africa.

None of these possible motives can explain both murders. Both Van Gogh and Hassan fell victim to a sectarian fundamentalist cult within Islam. As the murder of Hassan shows, that cult is murderously hostile to other Muslims almost as much as it is to the adherents of other religions.

Yet that same cult is destroying the good name of Islam throughout the world. If proof of the first assertion is needed, it is to be found in Fallujah. The torture chambers that have been revealed there as a result of the Iraqi-American victory were used mainly to torment and murder Muslims.

The mutilated bodies left on the streets were those of local residents who had shown insufficient respect to the cult’s brutal enforcers.

The women beaten by them were not westerners with bare arms but Muslim women whose modest dress did not meet the cult’s strict requirement that women should be neither seen nor heard.

If the cult is oppressing and murdering Muslims, however, how is it damaging the reputation of Islam? The answer is disturbing. Not enough Muslims will issue clear and unqualified condemnations of the cult and its murders.

Some of the Arab media use their new-found freedom to glorify the murderers as “freedom fighters”. And many Muslim clerics, both in the Middle East and the west, echo some of the cult’s themes – notably, that Muslims owe no loyalty to “infidel” regimes in the west – even as they cautiously distance themselves from its crimes with a general criticism of ‘violence”.

If these horrors were happening only in Fallujah or Baghdad, most people elsewhere could dismiss them as exotic crimes in a faraway country – the effects of a criminal regime that had taught its citizens hatred and killing and little else. But Van Gogh was murdered in his native Holland. And the cult is spreading everywhere.

An internet publication of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Global Jihad, gives a weekly summary of the crimes that the Al Qaida cult and its fundamentalist subsidiaries commit around the globe: “ … in Wyoming a college student charged with giving material support to an organisation allied to Al Qaida … a Swedish internet provider shut down an Al Qaida website … two terror suspects released in Lebanon arrive in Australia’s Islamic heartland … ”

In short people worldwide are realising that the cult threatens them wherever they are – in Baghdad like Hassan or in a European city like Van Gogh. Like Americans after September 11, Europeans in particular are waking up to the fact that no one is safe.

That makes them concerned about exactly who and what are threatening their lives. And when Muslims seem reluctant to condemn the cult and its murders, their neighbours wonder if Islam is compatible with the freedom and tolerance of a liberal society – and therefore if Muslim immigration should continue unchecked.

In a multicultural society, the government, the politicians and the police are the last people to reach that conclusion. Their natural instinct is to blame the native-born majority – which they fear as racist, sexist and homophobic – for any ethnic or religious conflict.

First reaction

Thus the first reaction of the Dutch police to the murder of Van Gogh was to sandblast a mural near a mosque declaring “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in response to Muslim protests of racism.

Exhibiting the same instincts, the official European body established to counter ethnic prejudice had earlier suppressed a report concluding that young Muslims were the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in Europe because it had conditioned itself to treat Muslims as victims and to assume that anti-Semites must be neo-Nazi whites.

But these sentiments are themselves prejudices – and they are now yielding to reality. If anything, there is some over-reaction.

So mainstream politicians in Holland and other European countries now argue for forced assimilation, a complete end to immigration, and the “repatriation” of those Muslims who sympathise with the cult or who refuse their loyalty to the society in which they live (and in which some of them were born.)

These policies are unlikely to be implemented in such an unqualified form. But the same kind of policies will continue to be pressed until the silent Islamic majority overwhelmingly rejects the sectarian terrorist cult without qualification, hands over its adherents to the police, pledges allegiance to the countries in which Muslims live, and respects western liberty.

A start was made on Sunday in Cologne with a joint Christian-Muslim march of 20,000 people against such violence.

But more needs to be done – in particular, Muslim clerics must combine to condemn Islamist terrorism by name and Middle Eastern news organisations must show the same self-criticism in reporting the crimes of the cult in Fallujah that the western press has shown in reporting the Marine’s shooting of a wounded man.

If these things do not happen, Europe and America will reluctantly conclude that Islam is incompatible with democracy. And they will not necessarily be wrong.

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Margaret Thatcher, is editor of The National Interest and a member of Benador Associates.