ninme

Times Online - Why blame the terrorists? Apparently we can agree that it’s Britain’s fault, by Gerard Baker

RIGHT AFTER September 11, a question widely asked in the American and European media was: Why do they hate us? It was not, to be sure, the first question out of the mouths of most Americans. That question was: “What are their names and addresses and how quickly can we dispatch a B52 to their neighbourhood?” But it was an important question nonetheless, deserving of serious attention by all who sought to end the threat from Islamist terrorism.

Hee.

A week after July 7, I have the same question. Why do they hate us? But the “they” of my question are not the al-Qaeda slaughterers, the jihadis from Leeds and elsewhere and their sympathisers across Europe. I think we know by now why they hate us. The “they” of my question are the massed ranks of so many British opinion-formers…

It has been evident, of course, in the BBC’s now infamous decision to eliminate retroactively the word “terrorism” from its coverage of last week’s bombings in London. The BBC was supposedly the model for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four and I can’t think of a better recent example of pure Orwell than this painstaking effort at rewriting the verbal record to fit in with linguistic orthodoxy.The BBC clearly intends that a heretical thought should, by careful editorial nurturing and rigid enforcement of the “guidelines”, become literally unthinkable.

But lest I be accused by my former colleagues at the BBC and by others of merely indulging my current employer’s commercial interests by attacking the BBC, let me also cite an example from this very newspaper. On Tuesday the paper published a cartoon on this page by its highly distinguished cartoonist, Peter Brookes, which made a point with his usual pellucid clarity. Two figures — one an Islamist terrorist, the other a sinister-looking military officer bearing the flags of Britain and the US, each nursing a large bomb and titled “Spot The Difference”…

The common thought behind them is essentially this: our nation’s military action in Afghanistan and Iraq is morally indistinguishable from the terrorists, so don’t call one terrorism and not the other. Instead, say London and Baghdad have both been “bombed”.

Ugh.

This English self-loathing would be less objectionable if it had not been so prominent in its less virulent form, in so much British policy and public life, for the past 60 years. In its less virulent form, it was the driving force behind the misguided anything-goes multiculturalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the desire to shed vestiges of British or English nationalism within the European Union for 40 years now.

Especially curious is that it is an oddly British, or perhaps Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. The French elites certainly don’t succumb to it, or the Russian, or the Chinese, though all three of them have a fair bit to answer for in their own histories.

And that’s the irony: the most painful irony of all in this English self-loathing is this simple truth. The beauty of human freedom that so many in the world now enjoy, the wonder of so much prosperity, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the very principles of cultural and political tolerance and free inquiry, owe more to Britain, and latterly our Anglo-Saxon allies who have taken on the baton in the past century, than to any other country on Earth.

Perhaps we’ll see a British revival, like we had in the 80s, I guess, and maybe the 40s and 50s, and 20s, perhaps.. At any rate, the degeneration of the culture will turn around and it won’t be gone before I get up the money to go there again. That would be nice.