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Almost 200 killed by a ten bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid. For us in Britain it seems awfully close to home. There’s a real feeling that is a matter of when rather than if we’ll see scenes much like these, only instead of the red and white RENFE commuter trains, the mangled coaches will wear the liveries of Stagecoach, Silverlink or First Great Eastern.

Was it really the Basque terrorists ETA, who still seem to be the prime suspects? Or does the scale of the carnage and co-ordinated attacks indicate the real culprits are Al-Queda? Or is it the nightmare scenario; some form of cooperation between the two. Or, as Ken MacLoed says:

It makes a practical difference, yes, but ETA has become so nihilistic and pointless it might as well be part of Al-Qaeda already.

The viscereal reaction is to wish bloody revenge on the people that did this. ETA, if it is indeed them, must certainly must be destroyed; there’s little evidence that they have any widespread support amongst the Basque people nowadays, it’s been reported that there are probably only about 250 active members. What’s frightening is that the Spanish government believed they’d got ETA on the run.

If it was Al Queda, that’s even more frightening.

There are some evil people on the Blogosphere. Al-Muhajabah has had to disable comments from her Islamic Blog after some fascist moron decided to crapflood her blog with several hundred comments like the example below.

STOP TRYING TO INFLUENCE OUR VOTES, TERRORISTS. RpnIGQkXBH TFfvjYmB UmjGJFELWr CMlfaN oGRIIIPRgkDA ql IUpv KXyycH LK KmUdcUZk xoWo cwEma MbQxLAc QvoYv qSei heEbYcACQp

If anyone actually reads Al-Muhajabah’s blog, you’ll find that she’s consistently posted robust condemnations of terrorist acts.

I believe we’re going to see more of this sort of thing as the US election approaches. There appears to be no shortage of unpleasant thugs that only believe in democracy and freedom of speech when it applies to their side. I wonder how many more liberal (or conservative) blogs will be hit by DOS attacks in the next few months?

I have avoided commenting about the Robert Kilroy-Silk affair, which seems to be dominating the British wing of the Blogosphere.

In my option, far too many rightwing bloggers have been praising the piece of ignorant drivel from Mark Steyn, surely the Robert Fisk of the right, which reads all too much like an attempt to stir up racial hatred within Britain. I point you to the fiskings (or should that be Steynings?) of that article by Harry, and by Bobbie of PolitX.

When Eric Olsen praised the same article, and I claimed in the comments thread that many warbloggers were racist, he exploded. It looks like I hit a raw nerve….

since I have made such efforts to disentangle the threads of religion, politics, culture and, to my bafflement, race, is it possible to criticize Arabs or Muslims on political, cultural or religious grounds without being racist?

By choosing your words very carefully, and making it abundantly clear you’re not demonising all Muslims or all Arabs, and not making blanket generalisations. Just like I have to convince my left-wing brother that not all Americans are a cross between Jerry Falwell and Kenneth Lay.

Note that critics of Israel’s security policies have to take the same amount of care, to avoid accusations of Anti-Semitism.

As for ‘Racist Warblogs’, any blog that repeatedly uses deliberately insulting terms like “Religion of Peace(TM)” or “ROPMA”, and makes it clear they hold all Moslems and all Arabs in complete contempt counts as racist in my book. I suppose you could argue that hating a religion rather than a race isn’t technically racism, but to me that’s just splitting hairs; the rhetoric and the emotions are similar, and the end results are depressingly similar; exhibit A: Northern Ireland. exhibit B, the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Oh, and Tom Paulin is an idiot. Having seen him appearing in the panel of critics on BBC2s “The Late Show”, this sneering elitist twit is the sort that gives critics a bad name; he’s capable of making Germaine Greer sound sensible by comparison. But his nasty Anti-Semitism doesn’t justify other people’s racist outbursts. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

A few words to explain where I’m coming from, and why I feel as strongly about thus subject as I do. As you know, I come from Britain, where we have about a couple of million Muslims out of a population of sixty million, most of them descendants of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the 1970s. I grew up in a town, Slough, where Muslims form perhaps 10% of the population (that’s a guess since I don’t have the actual figures, the actual figure may be higher or lower). In general we haven’t experienced much really large-scale racial tension (especially in Slough), but there have been isolated problems in the past couple of years in a couple of northern towns with very high levels of unemployment; in these towns the white supremacist British National Party have been deliberately stirring things. What I don’t want to see is a rising anti-muslim sentiment among the Anglo-Saxon population, because once the Muslims start to feel under siege it can only increase support for extremists within the Muslim community. I think you would agree that would be a Very Bad Thing.

When I read articles by Mark Steyn and others implying that Britain is somehow halfway to Shaira, it sets alarm bells ringing in my head; it’s the same rubbish I’ve heard from ignorant saloon-bar bigots for years. All that ridiculous scare-mongering of that kind from a mainstream newspaper achieves is to embolden the real hardcore racists. For years, every time there’s been a well-publicised racist outburst by some public figure, there’s been a sharp spike in racially motivated assaults. In these times, such rhetoric could easily get people killed.

If you read any libertoid weblogs, sooner or later you’ll run into references to the totally ficticious political philosophy called “Transnational Progressivism”, sometimes abbreviated to “Tranzi”. Sometimes I wonder if the right wing of the blogosphere believes in an equally ficticious ideology I like to call “Anarcho-Fascism”. While I recognise that Libertarianism and Fascism are totally opposite ideologies, at least in theory, when you boil both down to their basest instincts, they have quite a lot in common: worship of brute power, contempt for the poor and/or weak, fetishisation of violence, and a belief that some sections of society have so little value their lives are expendable.

Every so often, somebody reads Robert Heinlein’s ugly “Starship Troopers” one time too many, and vomits up an anarcho-fascist manfesto. Read the whole thing if you’ve got the stomach for it, but these quotes give you the flavour.

However, while education was generally a for-profit business (some institutions, mostly religious, political, or military in character were charities) no student was denied an education based on their parent’s inability to pay. However, the names of any parent forced to rely upon the public treasury to school their children were published in newspapers and online.

Naturally, many of those known to be living off of the taxpayers were prone to be challenged in duels. Dueling, a practice almost forgotten, was reintroduced in the third decade of the 21st Century, initially in inner-cities.

If you didn’t think that was fascist enough, then:

One could be challenged to a duel for any reason- and could refuse a challenge. However, a general prejudice had developed that any man who refused a duel was a probable homosexual and, therefore, refusals were generally rare and those who refused often fled. As a result people in the 22nd Century had generally learned not to insult hot-headed individuals

One hopes that America doesn’t harbour that many people that hold such beliefs. In the nightmare scenario when such people gain control of the USA, we’d better hope that those Transnational Progressives of France have enough nuclear warheads to take them out in a surprise first strike.

(Link from Atrios)

I’ve always though the Warblogger movement has more that it’s fair share of racist hatemongers and other deeply unpleasant people. Now one blogger in particular has started issuing death threats and publishing the home address of his target, which crosses the line from ugly talk to genuine evil. Read about it here and here.

The consensus is that the individual in question is probably all belligerent talk, and is probably, like most bullies, a coward. But I can’t help thinking that the next Timothy McVeigh will come from the darker corners of Warblogging or Freeperdom.

Michael Jennings, as well as giving us his thoughts on a trip to Antwerp, tells us of the villainy of King Leopold II

The Belgian Congo (initially the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had ironically managed to get control of it in the first place by presenting himself as a great humanitarian) was perhaps the most brutal colonial enterprise of them all. Essentially, at the end of the 19th century the colony was turned into a slave labour rubber plantation by King Leopold and his men. Over a thirty year period the population of the colony was reduced from 20 million to 10 million. The level of brutality is hard to imagine. ….. The practice in the Congo was truly mindblowingly barbaric. One of its more notable practices was to demand that the men enforcing the collection of rubber from Africans bring back a severed human hand for every bullet they were issued with, to demonstrate that the bullet had not been “wasted”

Not for nothing is this man in the same league as Hitler and Stalin, yet he doesn’t loom anything like as large in the public imagination. As Michael notes, his crimes make those of Saddam Hussein pale into insignificance.

Patrick Crozier gives us his thoughts on The Origins of the First World War. It seems Patrick is a fan of Bismarck.

So, in 1887, Germany can look forward to an age of peace and prosperity. And then, in 1888, Kaiser Friedrich III dies to be succeeded by his son, Willhelm II. More or less his first act is sack Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, the man who almost single-handedly, unified Germany and granted her this Golden Vista.

I never really enjoyed history at School; perhaps it was the dry and dull way it was taught. Two and a half decades later, I find it a fascinating subject.

When Good Rock Goes Horribly Wrong, a list of 25 albums the compiler of the list believes should never be recorded.

I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of Deep Purple’s “Stormbringer”

And I quote: “Ride the rainbow/ Crack the sky/ Stormbringer coming/ Time to die.” Yeah. Mmm-hmmm. Thanks for channeling Michael Moorcock. Now, shut up and play “Smoke on the Water.”

This album came out the same year that Gary Gygax started getting our nation’s youth to worship Satan. Coincidence? I think not.

OK, so it wasn’t their best album. But has he heard “House of Blue Light” or “Slaves and Masters”? I think not.

The Michael Moorcock interview it links with is well worth reading too.

(Link from Solonor’s Ink Well)

One Hand Clapping articulates something about Al Queda that I’ve believed for some time. What we’re seeing is not so much a war between radical Islam and the west, as a civil war within the Islamic world. In other words, it resembles the thirty years war in Europe, and the two sides represent the same opposing values, the middle ages vs. the modern world.

But how can Muslims make war on other Muslims when it is prohibited in the Quran? The same way that Christians in Europe killed one another over religion during the religious internecine wars of Europe that occurred regularly from the 16th to 17th centuries. If you see yourself as the defenders of the true faith, then you exclude from the faith the other side.

What the blasts yesterday in Istanbul and the other attacks going back years that killed Muslims show is that al Qaeda excludes most of the world’s Muslims from the umbrella of protection afforded by the Quran. Either al Qaeda considers them apostate or heretical Muslims, thus not truly Muslims, thus permissible to kill, or al Qaeda considers collateral deaths permissible in the furtherance of its aims. Or both, in some way.

Al Qaeda’s war is not only against the West; in fact, I say that they are not even principally fighting against the West. Their primary war is against other Muslims. What is at stake are lives, human freedom and the very definition of Islam itself.

As I pointed out in August 2002, the Muslim world is faced with defining what Islam really is. If al Qaeda is not in fact the keeper of the true faith, then the rest of the Muslims must unite to destroy al Qaeda just to ensure the survival of Islam itself. They need to understand that the present crisis is not primarily that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not toe their line.

If this is really true, then the justification for Bush’s invasion of Iraq is looking weaker and weaker, and all it’s achieved is to increase support for the bad guys.

Al-Muhajabah is sick of people who murder to advance their cause

The Quran says “Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind” (Surah al-Ma’ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed dozens. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God’s wrath upon them. They should remember that any victory they might gain in the world that was not by means that God has allowed will be made void by God on Judgment Day, and that is no victory at all but the ultimate loss. The only way to gain true victory is to obey the limits that God has set.

Not really much more I can add.