Posts Tagged ‘Nick Cohen’

To go on pretending that Britain’s enemies want to destroy “what we hold dear” encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a “war on terror” that Blair has locked us into. Just before the U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden asked: “Why do we not attack Sweden?” Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.

So Robert Wir-sind-an-allem-schuld Fisk nach den Londoner Terroranschlägen vom 7. Juli 2005.

Nick Cohen kommentiert diesen Irrsinn aus aktuellem Anlass folgendermaßen:

It is worth picking apart the assumptions behind that paragraph. The most laughable and condescending is that the proponents of psychotic and ultra-reactionary religious violence do not mean what they say. They may condemn “what we hold dear,” democracy, the emancipation of women and homosexuals, the rule of law, secularism and freedom of speech and of the press, but we should forget about that. They may say that they want to subjugate women and murder Jews, homosexuals and apostates, but we should not take them at their word.

Rather we should see radical Islamism in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere not as an autonomous movement with a totalitarian ideology of its own but as a rational response to our provocations. Western foreign policy is the “root cause” of our enemies’ rage, not our Western liberalism. The security measures western governments take to protect populations from radical Islam are equally culpable because they “encourage racism” by targeting Muslims.

If like “lucky Sweden,” we followed a neutralist foreign policy, then we would not be targets, and thus have no need to institute “racist” policing policies. We would be safe.

Nick Cohen: Lucky Sweden?

Nick Cohen über den neuen Angriff auf die Meinungsfreiheit durch den UN-Menschenrechtsrat:

Interesting leader in this week’s Economist on the decision by the satirically named UN Human Rights Council to damn “defamation of religions” as a “serious affront to human dignity”. The Economist picks apart the sinister implications.

Und über die unheilige Allianz, die für die Resolution zur weltweiten Bekämpfung der Beleidigung von Religionen verantwortlich ist:

But the paper notes only in passing that the attack on freedom of thought was led by “the unholy trio of Pakistan, Belarus and Venezuela”. I would have spent a little more time on that trio. Pakistan is a Muslim country, obviously. But Belarus is a decayed Brezhnevian relic, ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’. Venezuela is led by a charismatic populist who wants to be president for life. Neither is a Muslim country or anything like one. Indeed the ruling doctrine of the old Belarus communists was militant atheism while Chavez claims to be a socialist. Nevertheless they support a universal blasphemy law pushed by the Islamic states. What we are seeing is an alliance of anti-democratic forces in a common front against democracy and liberalism. Never mind that theocratic measures are against everything that Venezuela and Belarus’s rulers once believed in. They are anti-Western and that is enough.

Nick Cohen: The red and the green.

We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.

(Hassan Nasrallah, Generalsekretär der Hisbollah)

Gefunden in dem lesenswerten Essay Why Does the Left Support the Far Right? von Nick Cohen.