Melanie Phillips on Mumbai atrocities

Melanie Phillips repeats her Londonistan thesis in the Daily Mail today and writes that the attacks in Mumbai are further evidence of a war being waged against the West and all unbelievers.

‘The Mumbai atrocities show very clearly what too many in Britain obdurately deny  –  that a war is being waged against civilisation.’

Phillips claims that Britons and Americans were not targeted because of the invasion of Iraq by their respective governments. Such logic couldn’t extend to India, where the attacks took place and in which many Indians died. No, for Phillips, ‘those who believe that Islamist terror can be halted by addressing grievances around the world are profoundly mistaken.’

‘It is both global and local. It is not ‘our’ fault; it has nothing to do with Muslim poverty, oppression or discrimination.’

‘The Islamic fundamentalist fanatics use specific grievances  –  Kashmir, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya  –  merely as recruiting sergeants for their worldwide holy war against all ‘unbelievers’.

‘That was why British and American visitors in those two grand hotels were singled out. And that was why Mumbai itself was chosen  –  as the symbol of India’s burgeoning commerce and prosperity and its links with the West.’

Phillips, in her characteristic exaggerated style, sounds the alarm for Britain saying that the government ‘wrongly believing that it can use religious fundamentalists to counter terrorist recruitment and that it must at all costs avoid causing offence, [is] failing to stop extremists spreading their propaganda, handling their demands with kid gloves and undermining genuine moderates among Britain’s Muslims who have been left exposed, vulnerable and abandoned.’

‘The reason for such flawed policies is the false analysis on which they are based.’

‘The Government and security establishment refuse to acknowledge that what we are facing is a religious war.’

‘Instead, they think that Islamist terrorism is driven by grievances which are basically the fault of the West.’

Phillips casually and deliberately conflates Islamists with terrorism.

‘The Mumbai attackers targeted British, American and Indian citizens simply because they wanted to kill as many British, American and Indian ‘unbelievers’ as possible. Where they found Muslims they spared them’, she writes.

Phillips tries hard to portray the terrorists as followers of an all encompassing ideology that views the world through a Manichean lens; us and them, good and evil. And she unfailingly presents Islam as the source of such ideological thinking.

Rather than speak of terrorists as terrorists, individuals or groups whose ideas and methods present a challenge to all innocent people who find themselves the victims of such outrages, she speaks of ‘Islamist terrorism’ and a ‘religious war’. She neglects entirely and deliberately the many, many Muslims who share the horror and disbelief of all at the events in Mumbai and who similarly wonder at what motivates men (and women) to unleash such carnage.