More thoughts on London

Instapundit pretty well sums up my view of the matter, but the whole business has led a few things to come to mind:

One thing absent from most analysis of the current world situation is the far reach of the community aspect (Ummah I believe) of Islam:

It is correctly used to mean the nation of the believers (Ummah Al-Muhmini) in Islam, thus the whole Muslim world.

In practical terms it takes the form of a meta-loyalty that competes with national loyalties (probably the reason the wretched term “Muslim-American” is used instead of “American Muslim”). I suppose the nearest comparison is the affinity of many American Jews for Israel, as well as the clamor for leniency for Jonathan Pollard. It also explains the attention given to Israeli treatment of Palestinians compared to the relatively scant attention given to all of the problems in Kyrgistan, Egypt, Sudan et al (in-team vs out-team)

For the most part though there is simply no matching comparison for Americans. Islam gives many Muslims a competing loyalty which Westerners have problems understanding but seems very natural to Muslims. This “team” aspect to the religion (a horizontal and not vertical faith, I’ll elaborate on that later) gives overlap to loyalties and goes far to explain the wholly inadequate Muslim response to terrorism.

In looking over this I see I shouldn’t post at 4:00 in the morning if I want to impress people with clarity.