The tendency of so many to view the problems of the world in all their complexity as the evil machinations of a "them" in sharp contrast to an eminently virtuous "us" itself explains a great deal of what is now wrong in the world today. For the Nazis it was the Aryans vs the Jews; for communists, the Proletariat vs the Bourgeoisies; for David Icke and his eco-fascists (google his name if you're at all curious), humans vs shape-shifting part-human, part-lizard are instead the dichotomy. In the Islamic world of today, a similar tendency has become increasingly evident and in an article I just read today, though it was originally posted back in 2004, Nick Cohen describes this sad situation very well.
EVER SINCE 11 September 2001 reasonable people in liberal democracies have concluded that their enemies must at some level be reasonable, too. Surely such hatred must have been provoked by the west. Surely the solution must be for western governments to stop being provocative. Their rational opponents would then have no reason to commit homicidal attacks, and we would be safe. Unfortunately the belief in a rational motive is an illusion. To sustain the rationalist fallacy, you must ignore vast amounts of evidence. In the Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria, millions have died in Islamist wars and massacres that make Srebrenica and the World Trade Center appear paltry affairs. Islamist movements dedicated to persecuting Muslims who believe in the separation of church and state or the emancipation of women are not rational on any terms but their own. This seems a simple point to make. If you pay al-Qaeda and its imitators the compliment of reading what their leaders say, you find a cosmic dream of an Islamic empire dominating the world.
But the point is rarely taken, in part because Afghanistan and the Sudan are faraway countries of which we know little. How many people, for instance, have heard of the slaughter of the “heretical” Shia Muslims in central Afghanistan by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, let alone asked themselves what foul ideology drove them to do it? Yet there is a link closer to home which ties Islamism to the mass irrationalist movements of the west. You can hear it like a faint drumbeat, a background noise behind the bombings and the propaganda that alerts the listener to Europe’s baleful history. On 9 March, to take the most recent example, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a restaurant in Istanbul. If their victims had been British, American or Jewish, right-thinking people would have said that the overthrow of the Taliban or the invasion of Iraq or the humiliation of the Palestinians was the “root cause” of the murders. As it was, the dead were members of a party of diners from a Masonic lodge, and the story died as quickly as they did.
In November 2003, 32 people were killed and more than 400 injured when the British consulate in Istanbul and the (British) HSBC bank were attacked. Every right-thinking person agreed that the suicidal assaults were a punishment for the war on Iraq, and no one dwelt on the oddity of the statement given by the caller who claimed responsibility on behalf of a Turkish Islamist group and al-Qaeda. “We will continue to attack Masonic targets,” he said. “The Muslims are not alone.”
Type “Masons” and “Islam” into Google and you get about 14,000 hits. The Masons, you learn, hide subliminal messages in The Simpsons as well as the music of the Eagles, Michael Jackson and Madonna, the better to brainwash the world. (Should you be inclined to play “Hotel California” backwards, you will hear “yeah Satan”, apparently.) Abu Hamza, who extolled the glories of martyrdom from the Finsbury Park mosque in London, told the Independent: “I am not saying every American government figure knew about [11 September 2001]. But there are a few people [in the US government] who want to trigger a third world war. They are sponsored by the business lobby. Most of them are Freemasons, and they have loyalty to the Zionists.”
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To British eyes this is all howling mad. Every now and again, journalists receive unprovable accusations that the Masons have tied up a plum job or fixed a planning decision, but on the whole British Freemasonry has become a Pythonesque joke - “the mafia of the mediocre”, as a character in Our Friends in the North exclaimed. Men who roll up their trouser legs and exchange silly handshakes are many things, but a conspiracy for world domination they are not. That tyrants and religious fanatics see them as such is revealing. It shows that the paranoias of fascist Europe have spread to many of the third world’s reactionary movements.
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The rest can be found at http://www.nickcohen.net/?p=71
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