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July 10, 2005London Attacked - Local Cleric Seeks Victim StatusEven as the British authorities try to find the perpetrators of the attack, and even as speculation grows that the terrorists were - surprise! - home-grown rather than imported, the local Denver Imam is making sure to cover himself. After all, the real victims of the attacks aren't the dead and maimed. No, the real victims are the Muslims, who will be made to worry that someone might blame them for failing to help out the police ahead of time, rather than after the fact. He added that when people stereotype any group, such as linking all Muslims to a terrorist incident, "people react with irrational behavior." No doubt this also includes asking local religious leaders why exactly they're sharing afternoon tea with their bretheren who say one thing in Arabic on Friday and something rather different in English the rest of the week. One shouldn't, of course, look at a Muslim and assume he harbors any sympathy for murder. But these harder, community and institutional questions are simply called out of bounds, when in fact, they offer the only excuse for not lumping all Muslims together. The two men - who have been working together on the church's Abrahamic Initiative, a project designed to build relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims, for nearly a year - condemned the attacks and cautioned anyone against linking those responsible to any particular group. Funny, though, that no rabbis were interviewed in the writing of this article. I wouldn't expect them to say anything different, but still, it would have been nice. I have an email in to Ms. House asking about that. In fact, though, it's the linking of the bombing to a general group, not a particular one, that poses the greatest threat to truth. Just as we wouldn't want to assume that any given religious Muslim is hosting light-rail bombing planning sessions in his apartment, it's most important for Muslims to identify - and tip off the police - other Muslims who are spending the weekends testing out blasting caps and poertable timers. Then again, perhaps the second paragraph insists on a little too much specificity. We may not yet have the names and addresses of the bombers, and the locale of the mosque whose imam gave them his blessing, but I think it's pretty clear who in a philosophical and political sense was behind this. While Eaton said he was as "surprised and shocked as anybody," Kazerooni said the war in Iraq may have been a motivation for the attackers. Britain and the United States don't appear to be seeking a resolution, Kazerooni said. Ah yes, maybe 9/11 was just a pre-emptive attack in case Iraq was invaded, then. Well, if they're teaching that sort of prophecy down at the mosque, I'd imagine you'd see some pretty hot action down at the sportsbook window at Caesar's. Left unsaid is that Kazrooni, while a Shiite refugee from Saddam's Peaceable Kingdom himself, opposed the invasion from the beginning, and that London has looked like a pretty jiucy target since well before April 2003. Sure, they may be trying to pry Britain loose from the coalition, but that's tactics, not strategy. My guess is that this has more to do with the 10th anniversary of Srbenica than with any brothers-in-arms in Fallujah who've gone on to Eternal Disappointment. Both men said reports that British Muslims were encouraged to remain at home were disturbing. What they didn't say was that the people doing the encouraging were something called the "Islamic Human Rights Commission," whose main contribution to Islamic Human Rights was the unconditional support of Palestinian terror, and whose best friends seem to be the Noturei Karta, a group of a couple hundred Orthodox Jews who think Israel was a grand cosmological mistake. It's no trick as to why they'd be peddling this line. A group whose whole means of support comes from a siege mentality is going to do their best to put their own people under seige, even if they have to bring in the battering rams themselves. We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Until we demand that the Muslim community begins taking collective responsibility as eagerly as it files for collective greivances, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Posted by joshuasharf at July 10, 2005 11:40 PM | TrackBack |