Fighting Talk
‘LONDON fights back, announces the headline in the Telegraph.
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| How many sunbeds? |
Theres even a picture of Winston Churchill giving his trademark V for victory salute – you know, the one used by everyone from Damascus to Washington to say how they will prevail.
But this is no opinion piece in the Telegraph, no leader about how the Churchillian spirit will see us through our darkest hours, but a full-page advert for a budget airline.
How a commercial flyer thinks its associated with a gang of murdering terrorists and a grieving nation is something that does not stand the investigating.
And neither does the Telegraphs other story about how the mullah at one of the largest Islamic schools in Lahore, Pakistan, says the London terrorists were created by the West, not by such institutions, known as madrassas, where one of the perpetrators of the London carnage, Shehzad Tanweer, studied for a time.
Mullah Riaz Durrani, a madrassa owner and spokesman for the Jamiah Ulema Islam, one of Pakistans Islamic political parties, is sure he knows what creates a suicide bomber.
It is not speeches in madrassas, says he. That job is done by the Americans and the British themselves, by Fox television and CNN, who broadcast the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
So watching CNN makes you a suicide bomber? Interesting… But before we spend too long wondering if watching EastEnders makes you illiterate and how seeing Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen can make your head spin and cause you to spout vomit, we move on.
And begin to realise that terrorism is not a matter of mental instability and perverted thinking but interpretation. No, not how one mans terrorists is another mans loveable rogue, but how the Koran is read.
Jihad is an essential part of Islam, says Maulana Samiul Haq, a cleric at Darul Uloom Haqqania, one of what the Times calls Pakistans leading institutions of Islamic learning, and a place also known as the University of Jihad.
One page on, and, though the paper tells its readers that some Koranic texts advocate cruel punishment for unbelievers, Shiekh Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester, says the texts should be read in context.
He says that the extremists who take passages out of context and preach murder and suicide, are like a person, as the Times puts it, who went out today and attacked Germans in obedience to Churchills wartime injunction to fight them on the beaches, seas, oceans and in the air.
Which is some news if youre on a budget airline Spitfire to Faliraki…’
Posted: 15th, July 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
