All hail the great, infinitely admirable Mr. Nuance

This is from a Guardian article by Max Hastings entitled "Bush's belief in a worldwide Islamist conspiracy is foolish and dangerous." Be prepared for the last sentence in this excerpt. It is going to make you very angry:

Whatever the truth about last week's frustrated aircraft bomb plot, we cannot doubt that Britain faces a serious and ongoing threat from violent fanatics undeserving of the smallest sympathy. Yet we shall defeat them only when our Muslim community at large perceives that its interests are identified with Britain's polity.

This objective will remain elusive as long as the British government supports the United States in pursuing policies that many Muslims perceive as directed against their entire culture. You and I know that this is not so. We are as dismayed as they are by Bush and Blair's follies.

Yet, however eloquently we explain this, many Muslims respond by pointing to the spectacle of American, Israeli and British troops daily executing operations that the president declares to be in furtherance of his global jihad. It avails little that we know our boys in Afghanistan are pursuing infinitely more admirable purposes than the Israelis in Lebanon, when Bush is telling the world that the two conflicts are mere different fronts in a common struggle.

Our infinitely admirable friend sees himself in a very interesting role. The Muslims of the Great Britain somehow have not figured out what their best interests are and he is being thwarted in his attempts to enlighten them. If only America would refuse to support those infinitely less admirable Israelis. If only Bush had the powers of nuance to discern the vast difference between Al Qaeda and Hamas (even though the two are collaborating at the moment). Then we would have the kind of inter-Fidel tranquility that prevails in all other places in the world where Muslims and non-Muslims live together. Then the world would be one giant France!

Tags: England, Muslims, terror, nuance, infinite admirability