White Lies

                                                              Cameron needs to brush up on his Sun Tzu

Let’s imagine for a moment that David Cameron was not lying when he said about the Woolwich atrocity that:

“There is nothing in Islam that justifies this dreadful act”.

But if that is the case, what then did “justify” it?

And it has to be said that on this point Cameron is not entirely without an explanation. In his statesmanlike yet engagingly human speech at the door of number 10, the prime minister identified “Violent Extremism” as the culprit.

Now not having read any literature on this group, I decided to fall back on some rather amateur textual analysis of what the murderers themselves said.

And. Wow. It looks as if Cameron was on to something.  One of the murderers, Michael Adebolajo, used both the words “extreme” and “extremist” in his post-murder speech of justification. The only problem, though, for supporters of the Cameron thesis is that he used them to accuse the rest of us of being extreme and to accuse us of wrongly labeling his group as extremists.

So what was his group?

Without wishing to prejudge their motives, further analysis of Adebolajo’s one minute tirade indicates the use of “Muslim” twice, “Koran” twice and “Allah” four times. This in conjunction with the murderers’ shouts of “Allahu Akbar” over the bloody corpse of their victim do seem to provide a prima facie case against the Religion of Peace.

But that isn’t quite that for the prime minister’s theory, because even Cameron might admit after a few vigorous water boarding sessions that the perpetrators were, in fact, Muslim, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say so in his brilliantly crafted speech.

His revised theory would probably go something like this:

 “Yes they clearly think of themselves as Muslims, but in fact they are a tiny, deluded minority ignorant of the essentially peaceful nature of their own religion.”

Unfortunately, a couple of days after Cameron had calmed everyone’s silly fears about Islamist Muslims, a loose cannon in the form of a former head of MI5 blew everything apart.

Dame Stella Rimington speaking in support of the government’s call for people to keep an eye out for violent extremists next door. The problem was that Cameron had given us all the distinct impression that on the one hand we had 3 million peace-loving Muslim brain surgeons busily making Britain a much better place. And on the other a very few “sickening individuals” who would be easy to spot on account of their foaming at the mouth and anyhow were doomed to fail because of our resolute unity.

Then batty old Dame Rimington invoked the spirit of the Blitz calling for a wartime vigilance. The people needed to be the government’s “eyes and ears” because “the enemy is everywhere”.

So which is it? A tiny minority of lone wolf losers or greens under the bed.

Unfortunately, the billions Britain spends on monitoring its Muslim population points to the latter.

Dame Rimington was probably  thinking of reports from MI5 back in 2007 that up to 4000 British Muslims had attended Al Qaeda terror training camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Or she may have been thinking of the many surveys which have indicated  25% sympathy or support among British Muslims for terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Britain. A level of support that is almost certainly an underestimate given that those expressing their backing for murder to the pollsters’ must have known how offensive their answers were.

To be fair to David Cameron his mendacity on the subject is very likely a white lie.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali probably has it right when she commented on Cameron’s reaction to the Woolwich murder in the Wall Street Journal that:

I don't blame Western leaders. They are doing their best to keep the lid on what could become a meltdown of trust between majority populations and Muslim minority communities.

But it doesn’t matter if it’s a white lie or black one, the effect is the same.

As Sun Tzu pointed out in his treatise The Art of War  thousands of years ago:

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles … if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

If Cameron’s words are a white lie then he wants to make sure that the British people don’t know who the enemy is. And his talk about the existence of some united British community, that the progressives destroyed long ago, means that he has no idea who we are either.

And wacky old Rimington was also wide of the mark with her view of 1940’s Britain at war. The enemy weren’t everywhere. The couple of dozen Nazi agents were all turned or executed and Hitler was almost blind in his intelligence appreciations.

In the 1940s the enemy was over there, over the Channel.

Now the enemy is indeed everywhere, and the unified community needed to fight them is nowhere.

On second thoughts, I’m beginning to see the point of Cameron’s white lies.