Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [307]
Universities are allowed to use free-speech arguments to defend sinister Islamist organisations active on campuses, rather than challenged about their greed for high overseas fees. What are already highly politicised universities are allowed to receive dubious foreign funding for regional-studies or Islamic-studies programmes which are biased against Western interests, at a time when they routinely reject Western government funding if it emanates from the military.
Since Islamist terrorism is a deviant outgrowth of a religion, much attention needs to be paid to the terms on which that religion is permitted to function in non-Muslim societies. For a start, it should be directly related to how Muslim societies treat adherents of other faiths, or people who espouse none. The British government should flatly prohibit current plans to build a vast mosque in east London, until such time as Churches are allowed to operate in all Muslim countries without fear of persecution. Proselytism should also be based on a similar absolute quid pro quo. Allowing Wahhabism to grow in our societies just because of lucrative aircraft contracts is an outrage. Given the potential danger they constitute, Muslim clerics require careful supervision and training. The Dutch authorities have introduced an imam-licensing programme, based at such universities as Leiden, whose object is to create a responsible clergy who realise that integration is no barrier to practising their religion.117 The French have shown how close surveillance of what is preached in mosques can drastically lessen the likelihood of attack. The French, of course, are just as much signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights as any other member of the EU. The French internal security service, the Renseignements Généraux or RG, have had a section called Violent Fundamentalist Environment which not only watches mosques, but gets its hands on copies of each Friday’s prayers, which are collated and analysed. Using such indicators as encouragement to jihad, the RG asks the criminal police to summon the imam concerned, who (provided he is not a French national) can be threatened with expulsion under laws passed in the mid-1990s. The local city council will also warn the imam that all local funding for the mosque will cease. In 2005, eleven out of the thirty imams who received these warnings were expelled, with the remainder heeding this ultimate sanction. It might help, too, if mosques and imams ceased to be the primary Muslim role models, by encouraging alternatives drawn from business, charity, the arts and sports.118
In the wider world, Muslim governments should be held responsible for what is said by clerics on the state’s payroll, for it is obvious that they can control these clerics when it suits their domestic interests, and can turn them on or off like a pressure valve. Commercial contracts and aid should be contingent on unconditional co-operation with Western security interests. Western private and public pension funds have enormous power to discourage companies which use our money regardless of its wider political or strategic impact. Ethical investment is not confined to airlines, cigarettes or sweat shops, as the comptroller of New York City’s pension fund showed when he persuaded several giant corporations from Conoco to Halliburton to disinvest in Iran.119 Western advocacy of democratisation should follow, rather than precede, support for a secular civil society developed enough to challenge the Islamists who have often usurped that function in one-party dictatorships. If democracy merely leads to the election of parties which believe in ‘one man, one vote, one time’, then it is perhaps not worth encouraging at all. That also means investment in liberal, secular alternatives to the infrastructures Islamists have established—notably the madrassas, but also clinics and hospitals—starting with primary education,