Bad Company Dispatch #3 - Connie Fournier on Principled Conservative Opposition to Bill C-51

Islam's Quiet Revolution: How to Be an Ally to Muslim Reformers

Today, leaders from around the world met in France and marched in solidarity to support the freedoms of western civilization.

And even while this is happening -- less than a week after radical Muslim terrorists stormed the office of Charlie Hebdo magazine and murdered 12 people -- a quiet revolution is bubbling in the Muslim world.

No, this doesn't mean that countries such as Egypt are ready to accept a culture of liberty lock, stock, and barrel. But a recent speech by Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi indicates that not only is he well aware that the ecclesiastical mania of radical Islam is inciting the world's hostility against Islam. And while more moderate Muslims may not condone the actions of radical Islamists, they do all-too-frequently seem to condone the mania itself.

al-Sisi seems to be recognizing this is a problem. " We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!" he told Muslim clerics. "That thinking — I am not saying 'religion' but 'thinking' — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world."

We cannot expect religious or even political reforms in Egypt overnight. It's important to remember that Egypt remains part of a global bloc of Islamic countries pushing at the UN for the adoption of global anti-blasphemy laws.

But we can at least hope for Islam to take small steps along the road to reform. And we should be supportive -- however tentatively -- of any Muslim sect that is willing to make such reforms. The least we could do is not actively undercut them.

Which is what brings me to the following image:

It's worth remembering -- in fact crucial to remember -- that there are plenty of Muslims who have already made the leap beyond the ecclesiastical nuttery that led to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. If the example of Ahmed Marabet wasn't enough for you, the actions of Lassana Bathily -- who saved as many hostages as he could by hiding them in the basement -- should underscore the point. It can be done, has been done.

So the question we need to ask ourselves is: what can we do to help?

As I previously noted, we could at least start by not undercutting them. There is one thing the religious convictions of the Hebdo killers had in common with the religious convictions of Ahmed Marabet:

They both believed in a concept called "Jihad." The difference being that Marabet's concept of Jihad was a peaceful one. He died practicing it. Bathily's concept of Jihad is also a peaceful one. He risked his life practicing it.

If he'd been caught he likely would have been a victim of the Hebdo shooters, whose concept of Jihad Marabet and Bathily would both denounce as false.

So for us to refer to the Hebdo shooters as "Jihadists" seems like a rather strange way to thank them. So long as any concept of Jihad that is not-violent exists, to use Jihad as a blanket term for Islamic terrorism is literally an attack on the religion itself. That's a bad idea. It's also a great way to shoot the reform efforts being called for by Abdul Fattah al-Sisi in the foot.

After all, if we call the actions of Muslim terrorists "Jihad," we're helping to give them premise to call it that themselves. And that grants them the aggrandizement they desperately crave and actually helps them recruit other Muslims to their cause.

Some people may mistake this for political correctness. It's not about political correctness. It's about tactical correctness. More specifically, correctness in rhetorical tactics. Rhetorical tactics may not seem important on a battlefield in which unarmed westerns are so often having to fight for their lives against armed extremists. Rhetorical tactics don't deflect a bullet or kill a terrorist. This is true.

But effective rhetorical tactics can help sway younger, more impressionable Muslims away from these actions in the first place. An enemy who never takes up arms is an enemy you never have to fight, over here or over there.

If we don't constrict the rhetorical space they have to work within Muslim reformers will win the battle against Islamic terrorism for us. It may take a long time, but it's the only possible way to win that battle. This doesn't mean that we refrain from criticizing Islam when it's necessary -- in fact our criticisms should stand as a beacon of specific reforms they need to pursue -- but it certainly means that we shouldn't wound our allies before they take the field.

Unless we stop doing that we can expect this to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Today We Are All Charlie

If no one has said this yet, I'm just going to come out and say it: Charlie Hebdo was a bit of an asshole.

He went where he wanted, said what he wanted, did what he wanted. And he didn't sit around worrying about what other people thought about that.

I hope he died as he lived: defiantly. Because if the terrorists who slew Charlie today -- just because he drew some cartoons that they didn't like -- have their way, they'll kill a little bit of the defiance in the freedom-loving people who survive him.

Right now, with all the murderers like Charlie's murderers determined to dictate to the rest of us how we'll live our lives, we'll need all the defiance we can muster.

Fuck that noise.

There are many good ways to live and there are many goods ways to die and I, for one, will not sit around waiting for ISIS or any other terrorist organization to choose mine.

So what if Charlie Hebdo was a bit of an asshole? He might mot be the asshole we deserve. But he's the asshole we need right now.

Je suis Charlie.

Unforgiven: Defeatists, Partisans & Peaceniks Need to Put a Sock In It

Today Canada was the victim of a low-grade 9/11-style coordinated terror attack. Shots were fired at four locations in Ottawa, including Parliament Hill and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. One Canadian Forces member is dead. So is his killer, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, reported as Canadian-born and a recent convert to Islam.

Many have taken to social media to insist that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to blame for this: that Canada is under such attack only because we have sent CF-18s to bomb ISIS militants in Iraq.

The logic is flawed, and the greater implications of it are nothing short of alarming.

The attack in which Zehaf-Bribeau participated is only one of two in the past week. Martin Rouleau, also a Canadian-born convert to Islam, attacked Canadian Forces members in what many have described as a Lee Rigby-style attack. (In actuality, Ahmad de Converti -- Rouleau's chosen name -- was far more cowardly than Rigby's murderers, who at least stayed to face the police who arrived to shoot them.)

Not long ago I wrote a blogpost noting that we're fighting ISIS in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here. Well, as it turns out they're already here, and now we are fighting them here.

While I remain adamant that we must not treat Canada's Muslim populations as if they are all ISIS members or even as if they're potentially ISIS members, we can no longer deny that fighters for the Islamic State are walking amongst us. Perhaps not many, but clearly some. Two attacks within a week, with two victims, speak for themselves.

So suppose that we were to do what the various people who want to pin the attacks on Harper seem to want us to do: withdraw our warplanes from Iraq, abandon our alliance with Israel, and essentially allow them to dictate our foreign policy to us in order to placate these ISIS fighters already hidden in our midst. What would we have just done?

We would have just submitted to living under de facto occupation. Perhaps living under occupation by a force that we may not otherwise be confronted by, but under occupation no less.

We would have handed to ISIS, on a silver platter, Canada as their first conquest in an empire of fear.

I'd be tempted to tell these assorted defeatists (who seem to think we cannot defeat the Islamic State), partisans (who simply point the finger for political gain) and wannabe peaceniks (who seem to miss the detail that there can be no peace with organizations such as ISIS, by their own accord) that they're welcome to live like this.

But if they live like that, so do we all. So they aren't interested in it. And if they aren't content to face the reality of today's events then they just need to put a sock in it.

Fighting Them Over There So We Don't Have to Fight Them Over Here

In regards to fighting terrorism and Islamic extremism, it's the oldest line in the book, so much so that it's at risk of being dismissed as an exhausted old cliche: we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.

There's actually good reason why this line is so frequently discounted as utterly hackneyed: it's been uttered by ever proponent f of the War on Terror who, when challenged on the necessity of the conflict, had no better answer. We're fighting them over there in Afghanistan, in Iraq, so we don't have to fight them over here.

With the United States, Britain, Canada and others set to open a new offensive against ISIS in Iraq, that line will be repeated again. But this time it's more true than ever before.

Let's look back a week: British aid worker Alan Henning -- not a soldier -- was beheaded by ISIS in cold blood. In response, The Independent ran a solid black font page. It read: "On Friday a decent, caring human being was murdered in cold blood. Our thoughts are with his family. He was killed on camera for the sole purpose of propaganda. Here is the news, no the propaganda."

It's a heartbreaking story. And sadly for Britain, it's not the first cold-blooded murder they've experienced at the hands of such extremists.

Let's look back a year: Just a little more than a year, actually. Lee Rigby is murdered in the streets of London, hacked to death by two Muslim extremists. Unlike Henning, Rigby was a soldier. Off duty, unarmed, beset upon by a pair of extremists with machetes in broad daylight. They then stood by Fusilier Drummer Rigby's corpse and professed their extremist beliefs until police arrived and promptly shot them (though unfortunately did not shoot them dead).

It was the most brazen terror attack in British history. Not during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, not even on 7/7 did terrorists so readily stand by their handiwork.

And the Rigby murder was not an isolated incident. They're threatening to do it again, right in the streets of Britain.

Peace-loving Muslims -- the ones who came to Britain to escape the barbarism of these extremists, the ones so frequently overlooked at times like these -- reacted now as they did then: with outrage over these heinous acts. They know as well as anyone what fighting this kind of savagery really means. As with their extremist counterparts we may not necessarily know them to see them, but we will know them by their actions. If they haven't already, they will let us know where we stand. We should be wise enough to embrace them when they do.

Canada would at least seem to have been far more fortunate. Islamic terror plots here have been thwarted. The RCMP and CSIS will likely have to be every bit as vigilant as they have been to date in order to ensure this remains the case. Judging from Britain's example we can't expect to continue to be so fortunate by fate alone.

We know who we're fighting. We've seen their handiwork. And we fight them in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here.

It's not a cliche anymore.