Another Attempt at Reasoning with Mr Jacubs and the Neo-Cons

What a strange struggle this is, the dope lobby on the one hand, and the neo-cons on the other, driven by their differing dogmas to ignore a hugely significant fact.  And then Mr Jacubs, who is neither of these things,  with his weird accusations against me, suggesting that I am some sort of apologist for Islamist terror.  Can he really think this? I see he has now altered his baseless charge from claiming that I defend ‘every’ horrible crime, varying this to ‘almost every’. I have never, ever  defended any such crime. I can't allow the charge to stand as it is. Mr Jacubs needs either to produce evidence for his claim, or unreservedly apologise for and withdraw this charge, and preferably soon.

 

By the way, running a man down in the street with a car (the actual means used to kill Lee Rigby, and a very secular 21st-century method it was )  is not an ‘Islamic method of execution’. So, does the fact that these two used this method detract from Mr Jacubs’s insistence that this was an act caused by Islamism? If it does not, his argument that Islamism was the motive, because  the subsequent obscene butchery of Mr Rigby was an ‘Islamic method’ also falls.

 

Let me restate and elaborate my simple point. The most powerful influence in the lives of Adebowale and Adebolajo appears to me to be their long-term use (which is indisputable) of a dangerous mind-altering drug.  In both cases, their adoption of the cannabis habit coincided with other events which drew them away from normal, law-abiding and productive lives, and towards the amoral and chaotic fringe world in which they lived, and from which they emerged to kill and butcher Lee Rigby.

 

That drug, cannabis , is an important influence on the lives of many young criminals in this country. Any careful reading of crime reports will find that numbers of extremely violent and irrational acts are committed by young men (it is almost always young men) who have been using cannabis. It is easy to see why dope users and ‘comment warriors’ do not want this known or discussed. But why do the neo-cons attack me in this way? And why does Mr Jacubs do so?

 

Trying to attribute this *action* to Islamist fanaticism is a mistake and a dead end. There are several reasons for this. None of them is a desire on my part to defend or excuse such fanaticism.

 

I have written nothing, ever, to suggest that I seek to defend or excuse such things.

 

Those who claim that I have done so are guilty of straightforward manufactured untruth. Worse, in some cases, they seem airily unaware of what a serious thing it is to make such an accusation. And when, rather than reacting with justified anger, I seek to correct them, they persist with this falsehood and are quite unresponsive to my arguments and repeat the false charge. This is a breach of good manners, and in my view a breach of the rules of this site. 

 

Now, why is explaining the Woolwich murder as the operation of Islamist fanaticism futile and mistaken? I stress here that it is plain, and common ground between me and my critics, that the men’s choice of victim and their later attempts at self-justification obviously have some origins in this belief.  

 

It is their actual ability and willingness to kill and mutilate a fellow-creature that I seek to explain through their drug abuse.

 

There are several reasons for rejecting the one and preferring the other.The first is that it is neo-conservatives, always noisily to the fore in condemning Islamism, whose open-border migration policies have actually ensured that Islam is a strong and growing social, religious and political force in this country. It is absurd for them to complain about an entirely predictable consequence of the free movement of people across the world which they have pursued vigorously in practice, especially since they have no concrete ideas for dealing with the problem (see below).

 

Another reason is that that many people hold fanatical Islamist views and never act upon them. If Islamist fanaticism by itself led to murder, the death of Lee Rigby would not, I think, be the isolated incident that it is. Another is that there is no satisfactory way of defining an Islamist fanatic, or of telling him from an ordinarily pious Muslim,  and no way of telling (through surveillance or examination of opinions or contacts) why one such fanatic will  never do anything more than say wild things, whereas another will take the path of crime.

 

The frenzy about Islamist fanaticism,  if taken seriously, would require the existence of a powerful thought police apparatus of bureaucrats and freelance spies,  directed at Muslims in this country, itself an abomination. And even then it would probably fail to achieve  its objective . By contrast, a serious attempt to discourage the use of cannabis among the young, pursued vigorously and within the laws of a free society, and directed equally at everyone regardless of his religious opinions, would greatly reduce the danger of such dreadful events.

 

The possession of cannabis is itself a crime, clearly defined by Act of Parliament, of the sort that can be prosecuted by the use of material evidence in a proper court of law (unlike thought-crime). It would be a perfectly legitimate reason for the authorities of a free country to arrest and prosecute potentially dangerous persons.  English law rightly deals with actions, not with opinions or thoughts. Had Adebowale and Adebolajo been prosecuted and properly punished, years ago,  for their cannabis possession at the start of their descent into crime and personal chaos,  I doubt that we would ever have heard of them again.

 

 

 

Let me repeat that the absurd thing about the anti-Islam neo-conservatives is that they are invariably supporters of unrestricted migration, the means by which Islam has quite peacefully established itself as a permanent, growing major social, religious and political force in our country. If Sharia law comes to Britain, as Mr Jacubs fears, it will not be because of violent actions such as the Woolwich outrage, which I think we can safely assume were condemned and disowned by most British Muslims.  It will be as the result of the entirely peaceful establishment of a sizeable Muslim population in this country.

 

 

Some years ago, in the higher levels of American conservatism, a battle was fought between those who wanted to restrict immigration into the US on cultural grounds ( Peter Brimelow’s book ‘Alien Nation’ was the text of those who favoured controlled borders) and thsoe who believed in open borders and the free movement of peoples.  A parallel battle was fought among British conservatives, who have now been almost entirely supplanted by economically and social liberal neo-conservatives, though here it was much more about sexual matters than about migration.  The other crucial difference was that the immigration which has now transformed the USA was predominantly Hispanic, and hardly Muslim at all (which is why neo-conservatism has yet to acknowledge this contradiction) . Whereas migration into Britain and now into the EU has for many years included a large number of Muslims.

 

Helped by the newspapers, TV stations and magazines of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the pro-immigration, open borders, greenish and sexually liberationist neo-conservatives triumphed , and would later become the nucleus of the pro-war, liberal interventionist bloc which included everyone from Charles Moore and Anthony Blair to Nick Cohen, and which attracted many ex-Trotskyists in the USA and here. The (in my view nonsensical and vacuous) term, ‘Islamo-Fascism’, was immensely helpful to this group, in making warmongering feel nice and left-wing.  For a lot of the more Leftist members of this alliance, the *religious* nature of Islamic terrorism was a vital part of their dogma. It provided abridge and some camouflage. The neo-conservatives, many of them religious, could accept these atheist and even Marxist allies - provided they directed most of their atheism at Islam, and most of their Marxism at so-called Islamo-fascism (or in calling Saddam Hussein a ‘fascist’, as they did,  an essentially meaningless term of abuse which allowed them to feel good about joining the Blair march to war). 

 

This absolute concentration on religion to the exclusion of all other things  is one of the reasons why so little is said, known or discussed about the *political* and *diplomatic*  background to the September 11th attack,  so interestingly explored in that fine book ‘The Eleventh Day’  by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. This is a book which everyone should read because of what it so very nearly says about the real origins of the atrocity, but cannot quite say, not least because of the blatant suppression of important evidence by parts of the US government. You will have to read the book to see what I mean.

 

I’m not myself sure that we know if (for instance) the September 11th hijackers, or the June 7th bombers, or the killers of Ken Bigley,  had any history of drug use, so it’s useless to speculate on the matter in their cases.  It seems to me to be far from impossible that such people abused drugs, but as we don’t *know*, we can’t say they did. We also can't say they didn't.

 

The thing about the Woolwich killers is that we do know - though I do understand that those who relied only on TV and radio reports might not have known the details which newspaper readers had before them. The fact that Mr Jacubs has seen so many articles and news items attributing the crime to Islamist fanaticism and not even considering the role of drugs is not evidence for his position. It is evidence of the lazy conformity, and lack of curiosity,  of much of the British media.

 

And if you’d never even previously heard about the two men’s very considerable and long-term drug abuse, and its role in changing their lives (which the poor people who rely on TV for their news hadn't heard) , you might find it a bit of a jump to be told that cannabis could have been a decisive factor in their behaviour. Well, that’s why people come here, I hope -to see a different and less conformist analysis. And not to run away squealing, or become pointlessly enraged,  when they meet an unfamiliar idea.

 

I don’t in any way deny the power of fanaticism to motivate men, though it is much greater in homogeneous societies in which a common aim is generally accepted , and in the midst of wars, when emotion is heightened and reason suppressed. On the other hand it is certainly the case that many  armies and navies have given their fighting men large quantities of alcohol just before combat, presumably in the belief that this will lower their inhibitions against killing, and perhaps make them less afraid of being killed or maimed.  But I don’t (for instance)  think Kamikaze pilots were drugged.

 

 

And I think it foolish to be dogmatic, where we have no knowledge,  about whether the other authors of Islamist atrocities were in any way drugged at the time of their actions, or permanently affected by long-term drug abuse. I don’t think anyone asked this question, in most cases, since most who have written on the subject already thought they knew the cause and the explanation.

 

The Arab and Muslim world is not by any means free of drugs, especially cannabis.  Nor, for that matter, is Afghanistan.  The Horn of Africa, especially Somalia, is famous for its production and consumption of the intoxicant khat.  I’d be surprised if the Somali pirates off the coast of that country are often unintoxicated. Cannabis is very widely available in the Maghreb and also in sub-Saharan Africa.    

I am not denying the power of fanaticism, religious or political, when I explain the actions of Adebowale and Adebolajo as the result of drug-induced unreason.

 

I don’t specify particular mental illnesses, believing the specific categories to be unhelpful and startlingly lacking in objective measurements, but my suspicion of *categories* does not, in fact or in logic, mean that I doubt that they were ill, in the sense of *abnormal*.

I mention this because so many of my critics try repeatedly to create this confusion, and claim there is a contradiction where there is none. I believe the teenage schoolboy who wrecks his studies by smoking dope is mentally ill, as is the cannabis smoker who suffers from feelings of persecution, ceases to be able to bear criticism,  suffers from poor memory and concentration, or many of the other features of users of this drug,  sadly well-known to their friends and families. There is no Latin or Greek name for this condition. Even so, it exists and seems to be strongly correlated with use of this drug.  

 

What I am doing is saying that , by looking through a dogmatic lens, we fail to see the decisive factor *in this case*. It is amazing what people think they see and what, in their certainty,  they fail to see. I always remember, during the hunt for the failed July 21st bombers in 2005, that one of the suspects was pictured running through a tunnel wearing a dark T-shirt on which the words ‘NEW YOU’ were clearly inscribed in large white letters . Yet when it was first shown, a commentator claimed that it bore the words ‘New York’, and (perhaps because this in some way suggested a link to September 11), commentators and some newspapers thereafter continued to say (despite the plain evidence to the contrary before their eyes) that it said ‘New York’. It didn't. It still doesn’t.  

 

As Sherlock Holmes used to chide Watson, ‘You see, but you do not observe’. You also see what you expect to see, and worse, you see what you have been told to expect to see. Try looking for yourself, with an open and curious mind.