Oh, Those Sassy Terrorists!

These kids today, with their rock'n'roll, long hair, beatnik poetry, and suicide bombings!

In one of the more morally cowardly and just plain despicable editorials I have yet to see, Dilpazier Aslam characterizes the London terror attacks as 'rocking the boat' by young Muslims tired of the 'silence' of their authority figures, and gives this attitude his explicit endorsement:

Some 2749 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. To discover the cost of "liberating" Iraqis you need to multiply that figure by eight, and still you will fall short of the estimated minimum of 22,787 civilian Iraqi casualties to date.

It's not cool to say this, now that London's skyline has also plumed grey. But second and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not. Which is why the young get angry with that breed of Muslim "community leader" who remains silent while anger is seething on the streets.

Earlier this year I attended a mosque in Leeds for Friday prayers. It was in the month of Ramadan, when Islamic fervour is at its most impassioned, yet in the sermon, to a crowd of hundreds - many of whom were from Iraq - Fallujah was not referred to once not even in the cupped-hands prayers after the sermon was over. This was deliberate silence, in case the boat rocked.

What's wrong with the above? Much easier to say what isn't...but to begin, any consideration of Iraqi casualties that doesn't take into account that it is Muslim extremists killing the Iraqi civilians, and not our soldiers, is by necessity wrong-headed. Also absurd is the raising of Fallujah as some sort of modern equivalent of Dresden; almost all Iraqi civilians who weren't implicit supporters of the 'insurgency' had fled Fallajuh before we attacked, an attack that was meant to protect Iraqi civilians from terrorists being harbored there.

The 'sassier' comment is the kicker, though; this ain't your daddy's Islamist extremism! How incredibly flip. The attitude is more understandable, though, when one learns of the background of Mr. Aslam:

Apparently, Mr. Aslam is, or was until very recently, a member of Hizb Ut Tahrir - an organisation which, according to the BBC, "promotes racism and anti-Semitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs, and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people."

The more you learn about the current attitudes of Muslim extremists, the more you realize there is a cancer eating away at the Arab world, one that is even more primal than hatred of the United States; its name is anti-Semitism, and like all ideologies based on hate, it will destroy the hater sooner than the hated.