Further Reflections on Recent Events

In �Globalia�, Jean-Cristophe Rufin�s dystopian vision of the modern democratic State, he defines our situation thus:

�Each of us is free to act. Now, the natural tendency of human beings is to abuse their liberty, that is to say, to impinge on that of the others. THE GREATEST MENACE TO LIBERTY IS LIBERTY ITSELF. How can you defend liberty against itself? By guaranteeing security to all. Security is liberty. Security is our protection. Protection is surveillance. SURVEILLANCE � THAT IS LIBERTY!�

The official view of the terrorist phenomenon as expressed by the highly inadequate mental processes of a Prime Minister with apparently unbridled power over a servile Government and an obedient Opposition is as follows, and even to state it makes one shiver at its unreality: Terrorism has no political or historical causality but has emerged from a strange secret network of demented and evil people who only wish to destroy society. It is, of course, the term �evil� which gives the lie to this fantasy, since the term is inescapably bound to the religious viewpoint, that is to say, evil people are those who are disobeying God�s orders, while we know that the fundamental doctrine of modern democracy is the rejection of religious authority, and this is as true in Israel as it is in Washington. Anyone who doubts that Blair is not �on message� with his doctrine of evil terrorists emerging from a valueless vacuum has only to go to the cinema as obedient citizens to have the world interpreted for them in the mythic language of the Big Screen. A jewish director with a scientologist star is offering up this version of reality in the remake of the atheist H.G. Wells�s �The War of the Worlds�. Now the ignorant urban masses can be in no doubt � this terror has simply come from outer space.

What in fact we are witnessing is certainly a disaster, and it is that while the society collapses at the very top and plunges into criminality in its under-structures, at the same time a sophisticated and enmeshing set of laws are being passed by a parliament intimidated into a unity which is itself against the very principle of parliamentary governance.

In 1920 the greatest political theorist of the 20^th century, Hilaire Belloc, wrote one of his key works, �The House of Commons and Monarchy�. Because of the radical nature of his political critique, it was dismissed but did not fail to disturb intelligent people. What he foresaw then could not be actively demonstrated as correct until 1945, and from then on to the death of Churchill. His funeral marked the end of a process of rapid disintegration from 1945 to that point. Churchill was born in Blenheim, that Palace which symbolised the reality that Britain was not governed by monarchy but by its aristocratic, land-owning oligarchy. With the House of Commons purged of that oligarchy there only remained the process of obliterating it forever by the abolition of the House of Lords. And there, it was not accidental that the opponent to that abolition by the obedient slave of the new unelected oligarchy, Blair, was none other than Lord Cranborne of the Cecil family which had been part of that ruling class which had so successfully governed Britain since the time of Elizabeth I. Belloc stated the matter in his brilliant and clear English:

��the old organisation of government by a commanding and an accepted class has gone forever� The thing need not be laboured: it is patent to all. The desire of the bulk for Aristocratic government, is as clean gone, for good or ill, as a lost religion. With its passing and the passing at the same time of the Aristocratic class belonging to it, the whole nature of the State has suffered transformation. � The House of Commons is going down into a sort of tomb, wherein survives like a skeleton the ritual alone of what was once living movement, and the names alone of what were once actual things.�

The dysjunction between the structures of elected assembly government and the carrying out of the will of the masses is itself the quotidian demonstration that power has passed with the passive acquiescence of the masses to a new unelected oligarchy without national base, holding in their hands the total real wealth of the world�s commodities as well as controlling the system of pure numbers, devoid of physical collateral, which represents abstract money. It is important that we continue with this issue, but it would be appropriate at this stage first of all to look at the increasingly unconvincing nature of the terrorist phenomenon. What follows must be seen in the light of our clear political position, that is to say, terrorism is an ugly and unproductive phenomenon which is to be abhorred, but it is part of a symptomatology on the surface skin of society which indicates the malignant disease of the life organs of society, the disease which gives us powerless and submissive masses on the one hand, and on the other a new power oligarchy which runs the financial system, owing loyalty to no nation, to no moral values, and to no body of men, not even each other.

Let us now briefly survey the debris of these recent and dreadful events. Around all these events we discover from every quarter among educated people a certain dissatisfaction with what has been reported, with how it has been interpreted, and with what the official reaction has been.

Within the shortest time after the destruction of the Twin Towers, leaving aside the utterly irrelevant practitioners of Conspiracy Theory, a number of serious critiques of the official version emerged. The most disturbing elements of these examinations involve physical factors in the destruction of the Towers which simply did not add up. There was the certain conviction of professional airline pilots that two heavy jets could not be driven into a skyscraper from the cockpits of these planes. This would imply that the highjackers took control of the plane, but that it was guided to its target from the ground, almost certainly in the basement of these buildings. This possibility links with another anomaly. The architects of the buildings insist that they should not have collapsed, although we must bear in mind what to them was the vital issue of insurance. Yet this in turn links to another element. That people at the site reported hearing explosions coming from the base of the building, which, were it to be true, would make more convincing the cause of both buildings� collapse. This has raised speculation that the perpetrators of this terrifying deed may not have known the full nature of their mission. They may have imagined they were on what we could call a classical highjacking mission, unaware that they were to participate in the hideous immolation which took place. Certainly, the established information we have that these men the night before they met their doom were going with prostitutes and drinking vodka sours scarcely suggests Holy Warriors, for such action would surely not assure them their hoped-for place in the Garden. This leaves two possibilities, firstly that they did not know what they were in for, or secondly, that they knew their end and were doing it out of that nihilistic despair of men with nothing more to live for, and this latter possibility means it was not even a misguided attempt at Islamic warfare.

The other aspect of each terrorist event is of even greater political importance. The response of the State and its vocalisation and visualisation in an intense media festival was out of all proportion to the tragedy itself, however regretful that had been. I am not indifferent to the event, for indeed a friend of mine was in one of the planes that went into the Trade Center. Our abhorrence of what happened must not prevent us from casting a cold eye on the disaster. It seems as if contemporary events are constantly shrouded in an ongoing confusion between what has happened and what we are told to think about it. Iraq was invaded because Saddam held Weapons of Mass Destruction. He did not have them. Israel does have them and has a taste for apocalyptic suicide. The only known usage of WMDs was the dropping by the USA of two nuclear devices which obliterated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Once this tactic was exposed, the two leaders of the Coalition unblinkingly informed us that the reason was to get rid of this terrible dictator. Over this time, remember, these two governments had been protecting the genocidal dictator of Chile, General Pinochet, from having to face a Court of Justice. One Iraqi scientist estimated that under Saddam in recent times, there had been around thirty executions a month. In the present situation they have calculated that it is about thirty‑five deaths a week, and sometimes a day. The distinguished medical journal, The Lancet, published a highly researched figure a few months ago that the death toll of Iraqis was in the region of 100,000. What followed the destruction of the World Trade Center was a carefully orchestrated hysteria which had a psychiatric exactness of achieved intention. Firemen were exalted as a profession around repeated images of their mythic sacrifice in downtown New York. Jewish pop singers, of national status, were brought out to stir the masses to a war-like state, ready to take on the invisible enemy. Cellists of international repute gave us anthological recitals of all the great adagios. Within hours of the tragedy, Hollywood was turning out an endless array, which still continues, of anti-terrorist thrillers which without exception made it very clear that the new enemy was Islam itself. While the foreground noise was the pop music of mourning, silently, behind this din, a whole set of sinister laws were being passed. Within the shortest time the liberal society that had been championed from Jefferson to Lionel Trilling, had been abolished.

Just as every religion has its Martyrs and Holy Days, so the new atheist world democracy had soon begun its necessary pseudo-religious iconography. With Christmas and Easter abolished, it was almost with a sense of achievement that the new society created its first Holy Day, with its appropriate name, rather like a bank code � 9/11. If there is any doubt that we are dealing now not with personal mourning but with political doctrine, you cannot fail to observe the implications of what followed. With the London Underground bombings, in the shortest time it had become 7/7. Also with the London bombings we had a disturbing identity of character with the New York event, linking what had happened to what they said it meant. Immediately after the event, a highly coherent, but visibly shaken, eye-witness, who happened to be a barrister, indignantly informed us in great detail of the absence of the police and any security presence. He was outraged that for a significant time there was no visible indication of either security forces or rescue operators. This lengthy and important interview was by order withdrawn to make way for the same litany exalting police and rescue services that we had observed in New York. The horrific assassination of an innocent Brazilian tourist shot repeatedly in the head was just a drop of blood in the blotting paper of media coverage.

Another common factor in the two events was the seriously inadequate performance of the two political leaders. Whereas Bush had gone into a kind of trance now immortalised in Michael Moore�s movie, Blair simply fell to pieces and looked visibly scared. His attempt at Churchillian defiance was hampered not only by the absence of a visible chin, but by his inability to speak English, crippled as he now is with a glottal stop which prevents the pronunciation of the letter �t�.

In Britain, unlike in the USA, there is a highly educated and politically sophisticated Muslim community. The half-million Muslims of Maryland embody everything that is wrong with the Arab peoples in their homelands. Interviewed on television, their spokesman openly said that the Muslims had come to America to get a better life, by which they meant wealth, and they were happy to be American citizens. Any suggestion that one could live in the USA, have utterly no intention of committing a terrorist act, and yet remain in a civically honorable position of wanting to see a radical reform of political society, appeared unthinkable. In Britain the situation of the Muslims is profoundly different. Despite the quite deliberate and disgusting racist doctrine of the Labour Government, which has from its earliest days insisted on defining the Muslims as an ethnic group, in an act of pure racism which categorically rejects the idea that there is something called a British Muslim, the Government has deliberately and continuously refused to recognise that there is a significant population of indigenous Muslims who consider themselves wholeheartedly and completely at one with the greater Muslim community of the United Kingdom. Another parallel between the two events � there is an even stronger case for suggesting that the underground bombers had no idea that they were on a suicide mission, but rather were tricked into going to their deaths along with their victims. Again, their behaviour the day before the event does not suggest men going to their deaths. They inexplicably went to their doom with return tickets in their pockets. Much more seriously, the families of these young men simply refused to believe their sons capable of such a heinous crime, and the witness of these parents must be taken with great seriousness. The other aspect of the London events is that the second botched bomb attempts were the work of men from the underworld, urban detritus with criminal records.

The treatment of the Muslim community of Britain, who, remember, are not immigrants but citizens for the most part born in the country, has to be recorded as the performance of a brutal and clumsy totalitarian State. Whatever arrests and interrogations have taken place as a result of this have been based on a legislation and civic evaluation that represents an exact copy of the legislation and police actions in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1940. It is in this sense that the anti-terrorism scenario from its rhetoric all the way to its social practice is a profoundly more destructive force than what it purports to combat. Much worse than the death of a person by violent means is the transformation of a person into a non-person, inaccessible, tortured and imprisoned, in a non-place, removed from the zone of judicial enquiry into the limbo of the concentration camp.

My final note on the modality of the terrorist event, is perhaps the most intriguing of all. I refer to the terrorist bombing which took place in Bali. In Indonesia, where I have direct personal knowledge of the governing elite of the country in its political, military and security circles, they frankly viewed the matter with a significant scepticism. The Indonesian administration quite simply could not point to even the most ad-hoc grouping that could or did perpetrate the bombing. Despite the judiciary being unable to pin even an inspirational blame on one �alim, and having already acquitted him, they were forced to re-try him on secondary charges at the insistence of the American State Department.

To return briefly to the affair in Britain � a final note. In part of what must now be recognised as religious persecution of a kind unseen since the Reformation in Europe, there came a chorus of accusatory voices from Government and media, calling on the Muslims to denounce terrorism, while at the same time the more the Muslims did so, the more they were told it was not enough. In the best Stalinist tradition, Muslims were told to inform on Muslims, and families to inform on each other. The final ignominy came at the high-point of the hysteria, when the Government insisted on a Fatwa from the Muslim �ulema. Now the Muslim �ulema cannot give a Fatwa without an Amir. I have long called on the Muslims to elect an Amir in order that Islam can be established, which it is not, and therefore from an Islamic legal point does not even represent an entity. There is no clerical class in Islam, only in the Shi�a religion. This means that any statement by �ulema cannot juridically be defined as a Fatwa. Since the order came from a kafir leader, it must follow that any issued statement must of its nature be invalid.

This was followed by an even more impertinent instruction from Prince Charles. Again the responsibility was placed on the innocent Muslim community to right matters, with absolutely no recognition that terrorism was the product of the host society. It would be more appropriate for the Prince of Wales to ask for a Fatwa on himself, his heirs and the survival of the monarchy. Part of the crisis which has ended in terrorism and which we have laid at the door of the collapse of the parliamentary system has in turn a deeper underlying cause, which is that betrayal of the principle of the personal rule of a monarch which dates from the coup d��tat which passed power from the last legitimate ruler of Britain, James II, and handed it to the money oligarchy which united Britain and Holland. Contrary to the official propaganda which named Edward VIII as a 20�s playboy in the thrall of an American adventuress, he had been perceived as having a stunning capacity to be a popular ruler and one who was well able to be the defender and protector of the poor. Despite Churchill�s attempt to rescue him, the House of Windsor has been seen since then to be a used ticket. Given the dire nature of the present situation, we are, however, obliged to stay at the table and play the poor hand that has been dealt to us. As things stand it is not too late for the Prince of Wales, stabilised by his domestic order, to put into motion for the first time his never-tried and never-tested capacities in the service of a) the survival and b) the restoration of monarchic authority. The Royal House has already been defined by the present administration as a puppet force awaiting dismissal immediately following the death of the present Queen. It is impossible to abolish the House of Lords and not by extension abolish the monarchy. This was proved in 1789, that in the financial crisis the aristocracy cross over to the new financial power system, in turn leaving the monarch defenceless. It is difficult to believe that Prince Charles is wholeheartedly submitting to the view that the role of the monarchy should devolve to mere celebrity status. If he is not to be swept away then it is time for Prince Charles to enter the political sphere and work towards the re‑invigoration of the authority of the monarch in preparation for the inescapable coming crisis. In that crisis it is in the interest of the Muslim community to have a christian monarch in preference to an uneducated atheist, but let us hear no more of his being a Defender of Faiths, for that is an open insult to Islam, which by its nature declares an end to the previous religions. It is relevant to the moment to recall that in the Sultan Bahu Centre in Birmingham some years ago, we publicly invited Charles to enter the Deen of Islam. It is the best thing he could do in this world and the Next.

Prince Charles must be aware that the present Prime Minister, apart from being a seriously flawed individual from a psychiatric point of view, has been a remarkably destructive force from a political one. His regime has systematically destructured the whole machine of government that had functioned successfully up until the end of the twentieth century. He has shattered parliament. He has politicised the role of the judiciary, and placed it in the hands of very dubious people, so unfit that the Father of the House referred to those around Blair as a jewish cabal. The instructions he received on the death of Princess Diana resulted in a serious damaging of what might be called the nation�s psyche and what may prove to have been an irreparable damage to the monarchy.

Whatever happens to the monarchy in Britain, one thing is certain, and that is that the young Muslims of Britain represent the hope of Britain's future, and they are those who will rescue it from a descent into anarchy, and that descent is something no police force in the world can prevent. Anarchy is prevented by those who bring their social order from within their personal integrated behaviour. We are the only group in society who has genuinely understood the process that is now taking place, as well as the ones which know wherein lies its cure. The diagnosis of the state of the present society is known to a handful of brilliant intellectuals. Only the Muslims have the cure.

The diagnosis has been defined by Jean-Cristophe Rufin as follows:

�The liberal democracies which present themselves as separate, distinct and rival nations, in reality form a highly integrated system, a space in which the ideas, information, products and men circulate and enter into mutual dependence. We do not consider the democracies separately: the history of each one holds no interest, but the destiny of the civilisation they form all together does. The survival of liberal civilisation has not universally depended on the weakness of its adversities: rather it proceeds from a force proper to it. From this force comes the capacity not only to conquer its enemies, but to prosper through the combat. Liberal civilisation takes its force, one could say its substance, from the hostility it encounters. It is the first civilisation in History which does not solicit voluntary acceptance, which tolerates and encourages the most radical oppositions. It has the singular privilege of nourishing itself from what opposes it, of converting into energy for its self-function all those forces which present themselves to break it, to the point that you will see it sometimes create its own enemies, support them secretly, in order that as a result it will benefit from it.�

Rufin quotes Jean Bordin in the 16th century affirming:

�The best way to conserve a State is to guarantee it rebellions, sedition and civil war. It is to have an enemy on which it may test itself.�

Rufin continues: �The presence of a serious adversary allows a power to muzzle its opposition, to contract the people and the nation, and to make a society of discipline and obedience, in every way in the image of an army. � In one century democratic civilisation has been methodically constructed under the continuous pressure of its enemies. In this paradoxical approach we will see that everything is literally reversed: the more a danger seems serious, the greater is its contribution to the growth of democracy.�

He states that when Robespierre invoked the �Despotism of Liberty�, he only imagined the classical Terror, that is to say, an archaic form of dictatorship. �He would no doubt have been astonished to discover by what means the civilisation born of industrial and democratic revolution was able to install, little by little, a dictatorship of liberty.�

The Roman-Catholic political theorist Giorgio Agamben talks about the great transformation which constitutes the final stage of the State-form as taking place before our very eyes. He says:

�This is a transformation that is driving the kingdoms of the Earth (republics and monarchies, tyrannies and democracies, federations and national states) one after the other toward the state of the integrated spectacle (Guy Debord) and toward �capitalist parliamentarianism� (Alain Badiou). In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as the legal categories of the ancien r�gime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate � and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about. Consensus and public opinion have no more to do with the general will than the �international police� that today fight wars have to do with sovereignty of the jus publicum Europaeum. Contemporary politics is this devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities all through the planet, so as then to rehash and reinstate their definitively nullified form.�

There is the diagnosis. What is the cure? It is worship of Allah, the Creator of the Universe, and obedience to the Last of the Messengers, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. What does that mean? It means worship by the decreed prostrations of the body. It means the fasting of the body in the month of Ramadan, and it means the annual tax of wealth, an obligated taken tax, not a given one, and one which extends to the fruits of the earth and its mineral wealth. It means an annual pilgrimage to the House of Allah and all mankind, which in itself represents the only acceptable globalism, which is that of a global Divine worship. This Zakat, which must be taken in gold and silver, and cannot be taken in paper, of itself opens to the Muslim community the need to finish with the magical system of usury banking which everyone now knows is destroying the world and enslaving the masses. The incremental wealth of a decreasing few means the incremental poverty of an increasing mass. The return of personal rule, which has been the practice of the human race from the beginning of time, re‑instates the existential possibility again of the trustworthy man. It will mean the end of the political dogs, and that in turn will assure the demise of their banking masters.

There is no power but with Allah, the Mighty and the Great. Allah is highly exalted above all that they associate with Him, including this paltry handful of desperate nihilists who may or may not think they are doing it in the name of Islam, about which they strangely seem to know nothing. Allah will certainly judge them, and no doubt with mercy, since they too are victims. Allah will certainly judge the upholders of this world usury system of banking, for on that matter there is no doubt.

Allah the Exalted says in Surat al-Baqara (2:278-279):

You who have iman! have taqwa of Allah
and forgo any remaining riba
if you are muminun.

If you do not, know that it means war from Allah
and His Messenger.
But if you make tawba you may have your capital,
without wronging and without being wronged.

We, the great and mighty Islamic community of the world, have no need of terror, have no need of democracy, and certainly have no need of Constitutions.

Allah is enough for us, and He is the best Guardian.