Gman condemns the vandalism of Mosques in New Zealand, as a thoughtless and ill conceived link with the London atrocities.

I have been troubled that our response to both the bombing and the NZ vandalism is all too gentle and 'full of hope'. The condemnation while deserved does bear deeper thinking.

We seem devoid in New Zealand, outside the blogosphere, of lucent, cogent discussion on the rapidly changing theographic shape of the western world. Charles Moore in today's Daily Telegraph has identified the disfunction between dealing with the immediacy and recovery of the incident and the lethargy and disbelief of the both the authorities and the general public to deal with the surge of Islam in countries where it has been until a generation ago, foreign.
He writes:

...there seems to me to be a radical disjunction between our heroic capacity to deal with the immediate effects of terrorism and our collective refusal to confront what lies behind it. The effects of this disjunction are, literally, fatal.

He notes the terrible lethargy of what we are up against:

We flap around, looking for moderates and giving them knighthoods, making placatory noises, putting bits of Islam on to the multi-faith menu in schools, banishing Bibles from hospital beds, trying to criminalise the expression of "religious hatred", blaming George Bush and Tony Blair.

In New Zealand we are seeing the same responses and the lack of either decent analysis of the issues or a realisation of what it is we confront and what the possible solutions might be. Have we learned nothing from the 265 year squabble about the Treaty?

This is the danger - Moore again:

...if we do not know the way the faith in question works, its history, its quarrels, its laws and demands, we will not have the faintest chance of distinguishing the true moderate from the fellow-traveller or of bearing down on the fanaticism.

The faith Mohammed taught does not just hope that the world will become Muslim. It wants all human society and politics to be governed by religious law: it draws no distinction between the secular and religious sphere (except to condemn the secular).

Do we have in New Zealand, as Moore finds in Britain?...,

So we have in our midst a religious minority in a state of ferment, and somewhere inside it a number of people (though a tiny proportion of the whole) who want to kill the rest of us.

We should condemn the Mosque desecration in the strongest possible terms - we should also ensure that there is no chance of the sort of 'goings on' the British now find within their midst. Not all Muslims are terrorists but this time around all terrorists are Muslim.

It doesn't need much reminding to recall the zoo that has surrounded Ahmed Zaoui since his unauthorised arrival in New Zealand. This man convicted of crimes against his state turns up in New Zealand without any documentation at all. The security services quickly establish his identity and declare him to be a significant 'security risk'. That should have been the end of the matter - he should have been on the first flight out. He is not a New Zealander and has no prior connection with New Zealand.

Those same security services are the 'thin blue line' we expect is protecting New Zealand against a London atrocity. How can we feel safe if the first time they find a 'live one' the attack goes on to the security apparatus, not the what, the why and the how of how Zaoui got here.

Worrying really.