The Theatre Of Cruelty - A Book Review of 'Blood & Rage: a Cultural History of Terrorism' :: Understanding Islam

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March 2, 2008

The Theatre Of Cruelty - A Book Review of 'Blood & Rage: a Cultural History of Terrorism'

It's good to be reminded now and then that you're not the only one that believes our PC society has gone over the edge of reality by creating a culture that brands as racists and fascists those of us that point out the absurdities, evil, and violence of radical Islam for what it is - absurd, medieval, violent, evil, and more appropriate for the dark ages than the modern world. Such a reminder comes from a book by Michael Burleigh.

In his "must read" review of Michael Burleigh's Blood & Rage: a Cultural History of Terrorism, Nicholas Shakespeare writes of what's obvious to so many of us, and that which is the cause of much frustration. He writes that we live in an age of cultural disorder, where to point a finger at the absurdities of radical Islam is to be branded a racist, a fascist or a bigot, and calls attention to a "stunningly" credulous soft-liberal establishment, composed of "colluding" human rights lawyers and "celebrity useful idiots" such as Tariq Ali, whom Burleigh witheringly chastises for having "progressively marginalised high intellectual endeavour" while at the same time conspiring to convert cosmopolitan London into the Islamic haven of "Londonistan":

... This timely and important book would probably not have been published 10 years ago, but its relevance is bracing.

Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilization" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants", all in the hope of an afterlife featuring 72 virgins and rivers foaming with honey and beer.

... A winner of the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize, Burleigh is no racist, fascist or bigot. He is a clear-eyed historian in the impatient, sceptical mould of Richard Dawkins. He sets his targets in context, like ducks in a row, and then pulverises them with an orderly and ceaseless barrage of facts, even as he acknowledges that "facts do not seem to inhibit emotion and prejudice".

[...] Blood & Rage is in all sorts of ways an outstanding book; it is also fueled by the manic energy and focus of someone accelerating a truckload of intellectual high-explosives into the gates of a "stunningly" credulous soft-liberal establishment, composed of "colluding" human rights lawyers and "celebrity useful idiots" such as Tariq Ali, whom Burleigh witheringly chastises for having "progressively marginalised high intellectual endeavour" while at the same time conspiring to convert cosmopolitan London into the Islamic haven of "Londonistan".

A member of Italy's Red Brigades conceded that ideology was "a murderous drug, worse than heroin". Maybe Burleigh's biggest achievement is persuasively to argue that no ideology is worse than radical Islam - itself motivated by "sheer racial hatred" - which exploits Europe's tradition of freedom of worship (and welfare state) to curtail our freedom of speech. Its leaders are people who know their human rights, but not anyone else's.

Al Qa'eda's chief military spokesman in Europe puts it best: "You love life and we love death." If there are no flies on Burleigh, there are plenty on the moribund dogmas of those he dissects.

Readers will be doing themselves a favor by reading it all ... Readers will also want to catch Nigel Jones' review of Blood and Rage, in which he writes:

Burleigh does not, however, hold out much hope that our rulers, who have let 'Londonistan' become a byword for incubating terror in our own midst, will adopt such sensible (preventative) measures any time soon.

Gloomily, he expects that it will take another atrocity on the scale of or greater than 7/7 to loosen the grip of the Human Rights legal Mafia on Britain's criminally lax judicial system, and maybe not even then.

Taking the long view, though, as a historian must, Burleigh's conclusion can be read optimistically: the poison of terrorism, he says, cannot win in the long term because most people in the world, Muslims included, do not want their lives dictated to by delusional fanatics the plain-speaking Burleigh, surely rightly, calls 'amoral, deracinated scum'.

Related:
Thomas D. Segel's "alarming" - Radical Islam Is Growing in the US: Where's the American Anger?

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Posted by Abdul at March 2, 2008 10:10 PM

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