Genialer Leitartikel in der heutigen Times (London) von Matthew Parris (einem konservativen MP 1979-1986, dann Journalist bei der Times):
„In this Britain I believe something has been happening this summer, and if you ask me for evidence I must reply “observation, hearsay and personal hunch”. I cannot prove this, but I sense that the tide is turning against Islamist terrorism. We’re winning the battle – dare I utter the appalling cliché? – of hearts and minds.
You may think this a strange remark, considering that the whole country has been on maximum security alert this week, two attempts to cause dreadful loss of life have just been foiled more by luck than judgment, and arrests have been made that suggest a pattern of terrorist threats and some measure of internationally linked coordination. Nor do I doubt there will be more. Nobody knows what terrorist atrocities lie in store, but these attempts will certainly not be the last.
Yet for all that, something is changing in the public mood, and I think it’s this: terrorism is beginning to look a bit stupid. Those pictures of that idiotic and slightly overweight fellow with his clothes burnt off looked pathetic, undignified. It has occurred to even the meanest of intellects that concrete doesn’t burn.
And it isn’t just the technical competence of alleged British terrorists that people are beginning to doubt: it’s the whole jihadist idea. What world are they aiming for? Most British Muslims, just like most British everyone-else, think it’s all pie in the sky: all rather silly.
Yes, silly. Not “evil” as the red tops would have it. Take care, neocon editors, prime-ministerial speechwriters and opposition spokesmen, with that word “evil”. Evil is cool. Evil is wicked. Evil sells DVDs and airport thrillers. Evil is a gang you might want to be in if you were a clever boy in a cultural mess with a chip on your shoulder. We’re not talking anything as clever as Evil here: we’re talking Weird, we’re talking Crackpot, we’re talking Sad. The idea of using a Jeep to make a terminal explode was, in the latest lingo, a bit gay. We’re talking Failure.
Two thoughts, very widely thought, have completely escaped Britain’s headline writers. The first thought is that Islamist plotters, though hugely dangerous as any fool can be dangerous, don’t seem to be anything like as clever as the media keep telling us. The second is that although a lot of opinion formers keep telling them to be, a majority of the British people are not anyway on George W. Bush’s side. Both these thoughts are hurting – not helping – the terrorist cause.
At the heart of the jihadists’ most insistent recruiting pitch lies Iraq. The flaw in this pitch is that a substantial majority in Britain and America don’t support the occupation of Iraq. That realisation has grown this year, and is growing still. Your Muslim newsagent knows that most of his white customers agree with him about the war. He is not part of a marginalised community in an alien land: he is part of a democracy that made a mistake in Iraq, and knows it, and will in due course repent of it publicly as well as privately. Democracy is working for him. Millions of nonMuslims, white, black and Asian, have kept faith from the start with a reasoned opposition to the war, and been prepared to march in that cause. We are not the neocon puppets that Islamists want to portray. And we are winning.“
Ganzer Text hier.