Terrorists Have Feelings Too

The American Spectator

Terrorists Have Feelings Too
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Published 7/14/2005 12:08:07 AM

LONDON -- Well, in less than a week it appears the British authorities got them! But what are they? The BBC last week edited out the word 'terrorist' in its coverage of July 7th's subway and bus bombings in favor of the word 'bombers.' The BBC believed that the word would be less offensive to certain aggrieved British groups. Yes, terrorists have feelings too. Now that the men who committed these grisly crimes appear to be Islamicists with terrorist sympathies and suicidal intent, can we call them terrorists? Can we call them Muslim terrorists? Can we call them Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists?

London was stalwart and inspiring last week. In the aftermath of the, dare I say, terrorist attacks, the Londoners went about their business, vowing to apprehend the criminals and otherwise carrying on just as they had during the War whose victory they celebrated on the weekend -- German sensibilities be damned. But the longer I am in London, the more I discover that there are unsettling undercurrents within the government and among elites. One is the application of politically correct rules to coverage of the news. Another is to outlaw free speech as it relates to the treatment of Islamofascism and the bloody consequences of Islamofascism.

They have been very effective. As Mark Steyn pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, "In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual 'hate crime' [last week's bombings] by scaremongering about a non-existent one." Yet apparently this has been going on for some time, and now Prime Minister Tony Blair is hustling through Parliament a so-called Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. If passed it would send a person to jail for seven years if he is accused and convicted of authoring words found offensive by aggrieved religious and racial groups, for instance, I suppose, aggrieved terrorists. Opponents argue that would protect Satanists and other unusual believers.

How would it affect another journalist writing recently in a British paper, Charles Moore, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and London's Spectator? Recently he quoted from a Saudi imam welcomed to Britain by Mohammed Abdul Bari of the East London Mosque. The Rev. imam a couple of years back in Mecca described Jews as "scum of the earth," "rats of the world," "monkeys and pigs who should be annihilated." When the imam is criticized by the likes of Moore, Abdul Bari furiously defends him. Moore went on to quote the local Muslim Weekly's Sheikh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi writing that parliamentary democracy in Britain must be replaced by "a new civilization based on the worship of Allah," and he described the leader of the Tory party as "an illegal Jewish immigrant from Romania." He also referred to the "near-demented Judaic banking elite.

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