generalspeaking

Worlds In Conflict

They seemed hardly to know what they were doing, but were convinced in any event, that whatever they ended up doing would represent their anger and resentment at a society that had given their immigrant parents the opportunity to find another life of opportunity that had been denied them in their country of origin. Migrants of Pakistani origin are hugely represented in a diaspora of people who deemed it advisable for their future and that of their offspring to leave Muslim Pakistan for pastures elsewhere.

And they have settled in Europe, and in North America, finding there aspirational opportunities denied them in their home country. At one time in the history of world migration that re-settlement would have resulted in succeeding generations born to the country that had adopted the migrants as their own, feeling themselves at home there. But that was before the advent of a growing swell of tentatively emerging Islamic entitlement. Tentative no more. It is in full swell, taking root wherever those who worship Islam feel themselves insufficiently respected. The quiet, background presence has succumbed to an insistence that a new oppression has arisen, one that insults Islam.

Small bands of militant Islamists inspired by an ancient tradition of violent conquest in the original proselytizing zeal of a new world religion, have looked to the past and absorbed its appeal with the result that violent jihad has seen a volatile renaissance. The route of designing violent terrorist assaults on ancient enemies in a new guise served as warning that history's tide had turned to produce another of those episodic social-religious-ideological-political convulsions, and this one presented as a holy war of the east against the west.

The defences of the west against the violence of the jihadists proved immensely useful to those underground cells in persuading new recruits of their sublime duty to Islam, to oppose "Islamophobia"; to defend Islam's values and its place in history. Young Muslim men from Europe and North America responded with the zeal of those who became inspired through their fantasy of victimhood and their dreams of heroism. Pakistan bred devoted jihadists through exposure to the madrassas funded by Saudi Arabia, for funding generosity for such purposes is an integral portion of the design of jihad. Young Muslim men flocked to Pakistan, a country they had never before seen, rife with guerrilla training camps, to become steeped in the art of the mujahadeen, the holy warriors.

Across the Middle East, North Africa and drawn from abroad, the willing and the restless were drawn. Some made of the stern material that violent jihad required, others of lesser fibre, like the current bloc of Pakistani-British young men who stood before a London jury to be convicted in a terror plot that conspired to wreak violence in a country that gave them and their families haven. Their plot never did harden into action, but their conspiratorial plans were satisfyingly broad in their potential to cause pain and suffering to others.

The families, on discovering where their errant sons had decamped, sternly recalled them from Pakistan. But no mention was ever made, no hint given to the authorities to alert them that such an active movement was afoot within the Birmingham Pakistani public. Where, in mosques and social centres, recruiters were prepared to identify, convince and recruit those susceptible to their blandishments on behalf of the Islamist ideology of spreading terror through the commission of bloodshed.

If successful, the group who conspired to consolidate their plans, meant to celebrate the success of launching "another 9/11 or another [July 2007 attack] in the U.K.", said Detective Inspector Adam Gough, the senior investigating officer of this latest case of an al-Qaeda-inspired plot to explode backpack bombs in crowded Birmingham, England. The ringleaders, Ashik Ali, 27, Irfan Khalid, 27, and Irfan Naseer, 31, were brought to justice through the investigative intelligence of police, their own conspiratorial incompetence giving the lead, and just plain bad luck that haunted their blighted plans.

Their inspiration was helped enormously by the charismatic, Islamist-appealing sermons of U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, whose recorded videos were also extensively used in the United States and Canada to fire the ambition of violent jihad in other Muslim men born to immigrant families settled abroad to enable themselves to take advantage of economic opportunities denied them elsewhere. And sometimes confused and resentful, finding themselves in a largely secular or lapsed-Christian social setting, at huge odds with their orthodox views of unrelenting religious duty.  Al-Awlaki and his equally committed-to-jihad son both were martyred through targeted killings to rid the world of one part of the plague that has now suffused parts of Africa.

And there are those complacent enough to believe that the eradication program launched by the West against those dedicated to bring democracies and liberal societies to their knees, while launching universal sharia, is well in hand. The threat of drone attacks on identified ringleaders leads some academics to believe that al-Qaeda and its affiliates are desperately clinging to their goals. But they are resilient, and it is far less desperation and far more calculating determination that speeds them on their journey to the universal Caliphate and conquest that they plan.

Labels: Britain, Conflict, Controversy, Immigration, Islamism, Justice, Pakistan, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 24, 2013