Stevens Speaks

John Stevens, a former police commissioner of London, has published a relatively strong editorial which includes a few good passages:

Equally important, those British politicians who have seemed obsessed with pandering to, and even encouraging, this state of denial, must throw off their politically-correct blinkers and recognise the same truth—that Muslim terrorism in Britain is the direct responsibility of British Muslims.

[...]

In all my years at the front line of fighting terrorism, one truth was always clear — communities beat terrorists, not governments or security forces. But communities can't beat terrorism unless they have the will to do so. My heart sank this week as I saw and read the knee-jerk reaction of friends and neighbours of those arrested in this latest incident, insisting it was all a mistake and the anti-terrorist squad had the wrong people.

I would say that the second passage is the more important of the two, but should be stated much more broadly as "proper ideas are required to beat evil, for ideas ultimately shape not just individual communities, but the culture as a whole." Only by identifying -- and then advocating for -- the proper method of knowledge and the proper view of the good can a person or a community muster the “will” to oppose evil. For example, only when people stop seeing the dogmatism and death-worship of religion as desirable goals will they be able to strongly oppose the religionists. Similarly, only when men place a primary value on their own lives and individual liberty will they have the moral certainty necessary to take the battle to the enemy and defeat him without recourse to all the restrictive and dubious countermeasures Stevens proposes in the latter part of his piece.

Via LGF