Chris Ray - August 9th, 2009 in News 5 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

The BBC reports:

The England team has withdrawn from the World Badminton Championships in India because of “a specific terrorist threat” made by extremists.

The eight-strong squad pulled out of the tournament, which starts on Monday in Hyderabad, after reports of threats by Muslim extremists Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lakshar-e-Taiba has shown that, sometimes, terrorism does work.

I cannot fault the English team here for cowardice, and in fact I commend their courage in acknowledging that the safety of their players is more important to them than the interests of whatever groups own and profit from the team. In fact, the failures involved in this event (the failure of Indian society to cultivate and protect a humanist ethos, the failure of the Muslim intelligentsia to combat fundamentalism, the failure of the British and Indian governments to ruthlessly exterminate those who issue such threats, etc.) are too broad to even be meaningful. The real questions here are: what are the short-term effects of L-e-T’s victory in Hyderabad? And what are the long-term effects?

The immediate effects of the withdrawal will probably be, in the long run, small. But in the long run this is another victory for terrorists in their seemingly endless war on modernity. Lashkar-e-Taiba is more of a Kashimiri nationalist organization than a Muslim reactionary militia, and Islam is simply a willing, almost eager puppet-ideology for these people to exploit in their political agenda. The association in the minds of L-e-T is the same tiresome trope that drives nationalist idiocy all over southeast Asia: modernity (read: the “West,” whatever that is) is the enemy. To them, intellectual progress stopped in the mid-7th century when an Arabian bandit cribbed a nationalist ideology of his own from Judaism, Christianity, and local pagan myths. This ideology they will defend to the end.

So, even if the immediate fallout is minimal (I can find no major American news story reporting on this issue), L-e-T is emboldened, and every victory like this is a recruiting slogan. To Indian nationalists and religious fanatics who agree with the objectives of L-e-T (even those who don’t agree with its methods), the urgency in eliminating this group is diminshed because they see it as merely wrong-headed but good-hearted tendency towards the ultimate goal of purging southeast Asia of Western influence and, more potently, of convincing the next generation of fanatics that triumph over modernity is a worthy, attainable goal.

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