Paul Kelly: The Crisis at Islam's Heart

Paul Kelly's opinion piece in this weekend's Weekend Australian makes a couple of apposite points.

THE attack in London has penetrated the best intelligence and security net in Europe. If it proves to be the work of Islamic fanatics, it would be evidence that their threat remains potent, that Western cities are highly vulnerable and that further attacks across the globe are inevitable.

It confirms the difficulty faced by the most sophisticated nations in trying to manage the new age of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists have no nation-state, wear no uniforms, recognise no rules of war, enshrine the murder of innocent civilians as a tactic, possess no identifiable sovereign assets and, as a result, are resistant to national defence by deterrence.

The British Government has not confirmed the attacks were perpetrated by Islamists. But the evidence, given the parallel with last year’s attacks in Madrid, along with the lethal public declarations from al-Qa’ida, points overwhelming to the followers of Osama bin Laden in one mutation or another.

This is a terrorist attack, but the conflict is not really a war against terrorism. Its sources lie in religious fundamentalism and an ideological perversion within Islam. The enemy is not a nation but a global movement embedded within religion and this explains its formidable and elusive nature. It is a civil war within Islam that runs from Morocco to Indonesia, with its epicentre in Saudi Arabia. It is not a clash of civilisations but a crisis within one great civilisation.

The geopolitical aims of the jihadists are vast: the overthrow of moderate Muslim governments, the liquidation of Israel, the removal of US influence from the Gulf and the Middle East and the strategic eclipse of the West. Bin Laden declared after September11 that the world was divided “into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels”. He says every Muslim has an obligation to take up arms.

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In March last year, al-Qa’ida released targeting advice, saying: “We have to target Jews and Christians. We have to let anybody that fights God, his prophet or the believers know that we will be killing them. There should be no limits and no geographical borders. We have to turn the land of the infidels into hell as they have done to the lands of the Muslims.” Jews were named as the priority human targets followed by Christians. The Christian order of importance by country was American, British, Spanish, Australian, Canadian and Italian.

As Kelly argues, it is a foolish conceit for leftists (and indeed, the isolationist right) in western countries to assume that the threat from Jihadist terror is somehow the fault of Bush, Blair and Howard, or of the policies of western democratic governments. It is not, unless you number among our faults our tolerance of differing religious beliefs, a refusal to stone to death adulterers and homosexuals, the fact that Australian and British women are allowed to work and drive cars, and the fact that our police are unconcerned with the length of a man's beard.

Kelly concludes that the only response is that blend of dignity and strength on display in London. To that, I would add, renewed and increased vigilance vis-a-vis fundamentalist Islam, and the geo-political worldview that it has spawned, namely Islamism.