Last Thursday's London massacre of almost three score innocent people who
were  simply smashed to bleeding fragments on their way to work, has thrown
a harsh light on the British Left. Normal people learned something from
the horror — the shocking inhumanity of the attackers, perhaps.

Not so the Left.

Within twenty—four hours, the Guardian of London was pumping out its daily propaganda line: Don't blame the killers. Blame Bush and Blair for knocking over Saddam Hussein. Which makes me wonder whether the editors' own  parents blamed Winston Churchill for the Nazi bombings of  London.

The Brit Left continues to mix up "the fire and the fire brigade," in Churchill's phrase. That is not by accident. In the upside—down prism of the Left there are no criminals, only police brutality. There are no hard—working achievers, only exploiters of the poor. And there is no jihadist menace, only "Crusader—Zionist" invaders of the House of Islam, as al Qaeda likes to put it. 

The hard Left is a secular religion that is utterly immune to evidence or reason. No facts will change its rock—hard faith. That is why the Guardian doesn't need to think about last Thursday's horrors. It just turned the crank on its daily clich machine.

A decisive answer has now come from an authoritative source, a certain Dr. Hani Al—Siba' i, who runs an Islamic studies center right in London.  This gentleman explained the bombers' religious basis in no uncertain terms:

"The term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic religious law. ... There is no such term as 'civilians' in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al—Harb or not ..." [Dar Al—Harb is the House of War, where Islam is not dominant and infidels may be slaughtered — ed.].

You and I, gentle reader, are living in the House of War, in Dr. Al—Siba'.i's eyes. We are what the US military in Vietnam used to call a "free fire zone," perfectly legal victims of murder in the eyes of God, if some jihadi fanatic takes it in his head to do us in. Our only chance is to submit to Islam, and live as they do.

Islamic law on the killing of civilians is utterly foreign to our tradition. Christianity, Judaism, the Roman law of war according to Cicero, and the Western judicial philosophy of "just war" all protect civilians. Islam does not. Infidels are only protected if they pay Muslims for protection and agree to live as dhimmis, second—class citizens bearing public signs of their disgrace. The London subway travelers were therefore fair game. More
than that, butchering them was a great victory for God and his faithful, according to Dr. Al—Siba' i.

"If Al—Qa'ida indeed carried out this act, it is a great victory for it. It rubbed the noses of the world's eight most powerful countries in the mud."

Al—Siba' i is an extremist, obviously, and does not necessarily speak for millions of other Muslims. His Islamic center is presumably paid for by the Saudis, who are themselves Wahhabi radicals, barely one generation from desert blood feuds just like those carried out by Mohammed himself. Indeed, the tribe of Al—Saud made great slaughter of its Muslim tribal enemies while coming to power. Many Muslims still hate them for it.

We would be fooling ourselves, however, if we ignored the fact that Al—Siba' i can quote chapter and verse from the Hadith, second in authority only  to the Koran itself:

"[The Mujahideen] tell (that) the Prophet drove nails into and gouged out the eyes of people from the 'Urayna Tribe. They were merely a group of thieves who stole from sheep herders, and the Prophet drove nails into them and threw them into the Al—Hrara area, and left them there to die. He blinded them and cut off their opposite legs and arms. This is what the Prophet did on a trifling matter, let alone in war."

According to a recent scholarly book, the Prophet Mohammed waged an average of nine desert wars each year he was in power. His example is enshrined in the Hadith.

Hitler laid out his goals in Mein Kampf. Marx and Lenin made it pretty clear what Communist regimes were going to do. Those two totalitarian ideologies accounted for some 150 million victims in the 20th century. We would be fools indeed if we did not pay attention to the words of radical Islamists.

But not the Guardian, not the BBC, and not the Left, here or abroad.  Oddly enough, the hard Left agrees that civilians have no special status. That is why the BBC finds it so hard to figure out the difference between "terrorists" and "freedom fighters." The Geneva Conventions have no problem with that, just as you and I don't. 

Terrorists target innocent civilians,  that's all there's to it.

Civilized combatants do everything in their power to avoid hurting civilians, often risking their own lives to spare the innocent. The civilized military of America and Britain have defended us against ruthless murderers for a century. That is why they are heroes, while terrorists are dirt.

An Israeli cartoon tells the difference. On the left side of the picture is a soldier of Israel, aiming his gun while shielding a baby carriage with his body. On the right side is a soldier of Palestine, aiming his gun while his body is shielded by a baby carriage. The difference is obvious to a child of ten, but not to the sophisticated minds of the Left.

Just to drive this point home, in September 2002 al—Qa'ida spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith said:

"We have the right to kill four million Americans — two million of them children — and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. It is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons."

There is, in fact, an astonishing similarity between jihadis and the Left. Both peddle tales of endless victimhood. Both excuse the deliberate slaughter of civilians. Both blame civilized nations for defending themselves against primitive savagery from the tribal badlands of the 7th century. And both follow totalitarian creeds.

Which raises the question of who is more to blame for the London massacre: the fanatics who did the deed, or those who have spent decades justifying terrorism, peddling their perversity through the BBC and the Guardian of London?

James Lewis is a frequent contributor.