Daily Alert Archives

Within the Gates

(U.S. News) Fouad Ajami - * An opponent of the autocracy of President Hosni Mubarak, Yasser Sirri had initially fled to Yemen, then to Sudan. He found refuge in London, where he runs an "Islamic observation center" and carries on with the "holy struggle" against "ungodly" Arab regimes and their supporters in the West. * The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the terrors of the Arab-Islamic world but brought ruin with them. This new Islamism mocks the borders of nations and the very idea of nationality. "We may carry their nationalities," a Wahhabi preacher decreed recently, "but we belong to our religion." The geography of Islam has altered. A religion of Afro-Asia has migrated westward. * Then the migrants were joined, in the 1980s, by preachers and militant men who had fought and lost cruel, bloody wars against the regimes in Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and other despotic lands. These plotters hated the West but were drawn by its magnetic power. There were liberties in western Europe to be used, and welfare subsidies, and laws against extradition. * London was the most accommodating of cities. It was there that the big Arabic newspapers, denied oxygen by the repressive regimes of Araby, were published. And it was there that men and women from Arab and Islamic lands built new lives, free to live the life of the faith. * The vulnerability of Europe to the furies of this malignant Islamism is a defining feature of its contemporary life. Still, liberty is not a suicide pact. We should be done with the search for "explanations" that dignify the hatreds, that attribute them to Western deeds and policies. We should see the new hatred dressed in religious garb for what it is: a war against the very order of contemporary life.
2005-12-23 00:00:00
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