What exactly is a moderate jihadist? Is it someone who tweets photographs of severed heads but fights shy of getting his hands bloody? Someone who inclines towards enslaving captured women and children rather than burying them alive? One who only executes Yazidis but not Christians? Whatever, we can probably agree that UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond made a serious error when applying that unfortunate phrase on BBC Radio 4s Today programme this morning to members of the organisation - Islamic State - which had just murdered, in cold blood, an American journalist. Yes it was probably a misspeak. But its not the kind of mistake you can ever imagine being made by a more competent, higher-calibre, more quick-witted MP, like, say, the man who would have made an infinitely superior Foreign Secretary but who is currently languishing as Chief Whip - Michael Gove. How did it happen? Well Im guessing that David Camerons MPs have had it drummed into them till their ears bleed that they are always and forever and at every possible opportunity to stress the vast gulf that exists between moderate Islam and extremist Islam. Moderate Islam, as we know, having been repeatedly told so by the likes of the Prince of Wales, the BBC, the Guardian and most MPs, is an adorable heartwarming thing with the most marvellous tradition of hospitality, and a very real sense of the numinous, and an admirable dedication to charity, exquisitely woven carpets, sweet hot tea poured with great dexterity from a high-up tea pot into a tiny glass, and a religion of peace which has always afforded great hospitality to Christians and Jews, why just look at Granada, and you do realise that it was those splendid Muslim scholars, dont you, who kept the intellectual traditions of classicism alive through the Dark Ages, etc. Extremist Islam, meanwhile, is horrid, just horrid. But its all right because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Religion of Peace (TM) in its pure and original Koranic form, and all true Muslims shun and revile it because they recognise it as a perversion of their kindly, gentle faith. Thatll be why, whenever a new atrocity is committed in the name of the Religion of Peace, the moderate Muslim communities of Bradford, Luton, and Birmingham always rise as one to condemn it in the strongest possible terms. No, wait... An optimistic analysis of current events in Northern Iraq would be that the horror of what the (not actually moderate) jihadists of the Islamic State are doing will finally be enough to concentrate the minds of our complacent political class and force them to confront both the enemy without and the enemy within.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 12:26:22 +0000
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