Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  The British government is now in danger of falling into the same trap as the French. After the Muslim riots in France in autumn 2005, the French government, unable to regain control, went in desperation to those who had radicalized the community’s youths in the first place and begged them to restore order. The result was a huge increase in political power for the Muslim Brotherhood. Now the British are doing the same thing. Instead of exiling the radicals, they are recruiting them.

  A decision was taken to strengthen the “Engaging with the Islamic World” unit in the Foreign Office. It was given its own support staff and a wider brief to work across all areas of government. And the person put in control of it was none other than Mockbul Ali, the young adviser who had recommended Sheikh Qaradawi as a role model for Britain’s Muslim youth.63

  The Observer revealed that Ali shocked senior officials by arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “reformist” and moderate group. He pushed yet again for Qaradawi to enter the UK, and hinted how he and the Muslim Brotherhood could become increasingly important to the Foreign Office. “Qaradawi would be the first port of call when encouraging statements against terrorism and the killing of Muslim civilians in Iraq.”64

  Four months after he wrote this, Ali’s prediction came true. When the British antiwar campaigner Bruce Kember was taken hostage in Iraq in late 2005, the British authorities turned to the Muslim Brotherhood to try to secure his release. After consultations with the Foreign Office, the Muslim Association of Britain dispatched to Iraq its president, Anas al-Tikriti, to negotiate with the kidnappers. The MAB also persuaded Qaradawi, as well as the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and twenty-three other Muslim organizations, to sign a press release calling for Kember and three other hostages to be freed. Abu Qatada also appealed for their release from his prison cell, as did Moazzam Begg, the British man who had previously been detained at Guantanamo Bay, while Muslims at the Finsbury Park mosque—now run once more by the Brotherhood—said prayers for Kember’s safe return, which were played on televisions across the world.65 Similar initiatives occurred when the Britsh aid worker Kate Burton and her parents were kidnapped by Palestinians in Gaza in December 2005. Before they were released, Ziad Aloul of the MAB was preparing to travel to Gaza as an “envoy” on behalf of British Muslim and Palestinian groups to plead for the family’s release,66 a plea entered also by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who urged the kidnappers to release them as soon as possible.67

  No one saw fit to observe that a group of people who were said to have “nothing to do with terrorists” because they were merely austere religious puritans were suddenly the only people with the credibility to negotiate with those terrorists. And virtually no one wondered what would be demanded in return by Islamists who were thus being courted and built up by the British state they vowed to usurp.

  The British government thinks it is using Islamist radicals in a sophisticated strategy. The reality is that it is being used by an enemy it does not understand.

  CONCLUSION

  Britain is in denial. Having allowed the country to turn into a global hub of the Islamic jihad without apparently giving it a second thought, the British establishment is still failing even now—despite the wake-up calls of both 9/11 and the London bomb attacks of 2005—to acknowledge what it is actually facing and take the appropriate action. Instead, it is deep into a policy of appeasement of the phenomenon that threatens it, throwing sops to both radical Islamism and the Muslim community in a panic-stricken attempt to curry favor and buy off the chances of any further attacks. This disastrous policy ignores the first law of terrorism, which is that it preys on weakness. The only way to defeat it is through strength—the strength of a response based on absolute consistency and moral integrity, which arises in turn from the strength of belief in the values that are being defended. By choosing instead the path of least resistance, Britain is advertising its fundamental weakness and is thus not only greatly enhancing the danger to itself but also enfeebling the alliance in the defense of the West.

  Britain has a long and inglorious history of appeasing terrorism, thus bringing true the aphorism, in which its ruling class so cynically believes, that “terrorism works.” Now, however, this dubious national trait has been cemented even more firmly into the national psyche by the governing doctrine of multiculturalism, which has made it all but impossible even to acknowledge that this is a problem rooted within the religion of a particular minority community. The fervent embrace of “victim culture” means instead that this minority has to be treated on its own assessment as a victim of the majority and its grievances attended to on the grounds that it is these grievances that are the cause of terrorism. At the same time, however, this minority disavows any connection with terrorism and vilifies anyone who dares suggest the contrary. Thus Britain is being forced to act on the basis that if it does not do so it will be attacked—by people who claim that terrorism runs totally counter to the values of their religion, but then demand that the grievances of members of that religion are addressed as the price of averting further attacks. This deeply manipulative and mind-twisting behavior is the equivalent of holding a gun to Britain’s head while denying that this is being done, and threatening to run out of town anyone who points it out.

  The intersection of an aggressive religious fanaticism with the multicultural ideology of victimhood has created a state of paralysis across British institutions. The refusal to admit the religious character of the threat means that Britain not only is failing to take the action it should be taking but, worse still, is providing Islamist ideologues with an even more powerful platform from which to disseminate the anti-Western views that have so inflamed a section of Britain’s Muslims. The refusal to acknowledge that this is principally a war of religious ideology, and that dangerous ideas that can kill are spread across a continuum of religious thought which acts as a recruiting sergeant for violence, is the most egregious failure by the British political and security establishment. The deeply rooted British belief that violence always arises from rational grievances, and the resulting inability to comprehend the cultural dynamics of religious fanaticism, have furthermore created a widespread climate of irrationality and prejudice in which the principal victims of the war against the West, America and Israel, are demonized instead as its cause.

  This mindset and the corresponding terror of being thought “Islamophobic” have prevented the British from acknowledging the eruption of Islamist violence not just in Britain but around the Western world. The British media either ignore it—as with disturbances in Sweden or Belgium—or, when they do report it, insist that Islam has nothing to do with it. When Muslim riots engulfed France in November 2005, the reaction of most of the British (and European) media was that they were caused by the poverty, unemployment and discrimination endured by the alienated youths who torched the country from Normandy to Toulouse. One writer suggested that those who saw Islamism on the march in France were merely exponents of a particularly virulent form of conservative thinking, expressed variously around the world through Russian racism, demagogic Hindu nationalism, Gallic exceptionalism, U.S. Christian fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism, which were all marching shoulder to shoulder in an attempt to stop the clock of history.1

  Yet the vast majority of the French rioters were Muslims; the rioters screamed “Allahu akhbar,”2 talked about jihad3 and expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden;4 and, more pertinently still, the French government asked Muslim imams to calm the unrest, which they did “in the name of Allah” and issued a fatwa telling the rioters that such behavior went against the religion.5 Yet despite all this evidence, British commentators insisted that Islam was irrelevant.

  There was a similar reaction to the riots in Australia involving Lebanese Muslims in December 2005. Trouble flared on Cronulla Beach in New South Wales when thousands of drunken white youths went on the rampage, attacking police and people of Middle Eastern appearance. It spread later with retaliatory attacks by groups of Arab youths who stabbed on
e man and smashed dozens of cars. Almost universally, the media described what happened as white racists attacking Arabs and referred to the disturbances, which went on for several days, as “race riots.”

  But race was not the issue here. It was culture. There had never been any trouble with Lebanese Christians in Australia, who had integrated well and were prospering. Although white racists were certainly involved, the unrest was actually sparked by Lebanese Muslim attacks on two white Australian lifeguards, the tip of an iceberg of aggression by this minority, which had gone all but unreported. It was the Muslim community that for years had been giving rise to a major problem of aggression, which Australia’s rigid multiculturalist mindset had transformed into Muslim grievances and never properly addressed.6

  One of the reasons why people shy away from acknowledging the religious aspect of this problem is, first, the very proper respect that should be afforded to people’s beliefs and, second, the equally proper fear of demonizing an entire community. There is indeed a risk of such a discussion exposing innocent Muslims to attack. But there is a greater risk to the whole community if the roots of the problem are censored and never dealt with.

  The key issue is the inability to grasp that just because a problem has a religious character, this does not mean that all members of that religion suffer from that problem. There is a distinction to be drawn between Muslims and Islamists. Islamism is the politicized interpretation of the religion that aims to Islamize societies. Many Muslims in Britain and elsewhere would not subscribe to this ideology. But it is the dominant strain throughout the Muslim world, and so far there has been no serious challenge to it—not least because those who do speak out against it run the risk of being killed.

  Because it is so dominant, backed by powerful Muslim states and even more crucially by Islamic religious authorities, it constantly spreads its extremist messages of religious fanaticism and political sedition. That is why the development of the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in Britain was so calamitous. It is also why the most bitter criticism of the government’s subsequent appeasement of the Brotherhood has come from liberal British Muslims, who understandably feel betrayed as the ground is cut from under their feet.

  The charge that pointing out the religious nature of this extremism is an act of bigotry against Muslims is deployed to shut down a vital debate that urgently needs to be held, not least within the Muslim community itself. The claim is a form of crude intimidation, and the fact that Britain is so cowed by it in itself shows how far it has already traveled down this dangerous path.

  It also ignores the fact that some Muslims themselves are speaking out in a similar vein. Sheikh Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, the former dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Qatar, wrote in the London-based Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat:Why won’t we take the opportunity of the appearance of the 9/11 Commission’s report to ponder why destructive violence and a culture of destruction have taken root in our society? Why won’t we take this opportunity to reconsider our educational system, our curricula, including the religious, media, and cultural discourse that cause our youth to live in a constant tension with the world?7

  Aisha Siddiqa Qureshi wrote in Muslim World Today that “radical Islam threatens to subjugate the world and murder, enslave or convert all non-Muslims,” that radical Muslims “share Hitler’s goal,” and that liberals were not willing to defend their own institutions against this threat.8

  And Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the Financial Times shortly after the first set of London attacks:It is hypocritical for Muslims living in western societies to demand civil rights enshrined by the state and then excuse their inaction against terrorists hiding among them on grounds of belonging to a borderless Islamic community. It is time to stand up and be counted as model citizens before the terror consumes us all.9

  Such courageous Muslims are being betrayed by Britain’s pusillanimity. The Muslim community has got to come up with a response other than blaming Britain and the West. While no one has the right to tell it how to organize its own religion, it does have a responsibility to address those aspects of its culture that threaten the state. Britain does this community no favors by pandering to its own tendency to self-delusion.

  For Britain to start to address this properly, it would have to take a number of steps that showed unequivocally that it was refusing to compromise not just with terror but with the ideology that fuels it. This would mean showing that, while it had no problem with the practice of Islam as a minority faith that observed the same rules as all other minority faiths, it would not countenance the practice of Islamism, or clerical fascism, and would take measures to stop it.

  Britain would first have to take robust steps to counter the specific threat posed by Islamist terrorism. To do this properly, it needs to recognize that this particular threat really is something new and does not properly correspond either to our definition of terrorism or to our definition of war but sits somewhere between the two. Consequently, it needs to develop new structures and new principles to deal with this new phenomenon. A start would be to construct special courts to deal with particularly sensitive cases in which intelligence could safely be brought forward as evidence, which is not the case at present.

  To enable it to expel foreign radicals, Britain would repeal its Human Rights Act and either derogate or withdraw from both the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees, drafting its own legislation to define refugee status. The claim that abolishing human rights legislation would be a regressive move that would leave Britain a less free society is very wide of the mark. Britain was arguably a freer society before European human rights law eroded the foundation of British liberty, the common law.

  A properly motivated Britain would put a stop to the funding and recruitment for terrorism taking place under the umbrella of charitable work through intensive investigation of such organizations. It would shut down newspapers and television stations spreading incitement to terrorism and war against the West. It would ban extremist organizations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Association of Britain, recognizing that while they may not advocate terrorism, their advocacy of Islamization creates a conveyor belt to violence. It would certainly not grant Sheikh Qaradawi an entry visa. And it would introduce surveillance of subversives on campus through targeted covert work, as suggested by Professor Anthony Glees and Chris Pope.10

  Recognizing that Islamist ideology is a conveyor belt to terror, it would end its strategy of using Islamist radicals. Instead, any materials advocating an Islamic takeover of the West would be treated as subversion, sedition or even treason, and be prosecuted. The curricula used in Muslim schools would be inspected by Arabic speakers, and if they contained similar incitement, they would be similarly dealt with. Imams would be regulated and monitored. Extremist imams would be expelled and extremist mosques closed down.

  The message conveyed by all such moves would be that Britain has no problem with Islam as long as it poses no danger to the state. Since the Muslim community insists that it is moderate and has no truck with extremism, it should have no objection to such measures, which would ensure that this would be the case.

  Next, a properly motivated nation would set about the remoralization and reculturation of Britain by restating the primacy of British culture and citizenship. To do this, it would recognize that British nationhood has been eviscerated by the combination of three things: mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country’s Judeo-Christian values. It would institute tough controls on immigration while Britain assimilates the people it has already got. The principal reason behind the cultural segregation of Britain’s Muslims is their practice of marrying their young people to cousins from the Indian subcontinent. That has got to stop because it is a threat to social cohesion. The usual charges of racism would be faced down by reaffirming two things simultaneously: that Britain values its immigrants who make a great contribution to the country; and that i
n order to integrate them properly into the society, Britain must control their numbers.

  It would abolish the doctrine of multiculturalism by reaffirming the primacy of British values. It would ensure that British political history is once again taught in schools, and that Christianity is restored to school assemblies. It would stop the drift towards the creation of a parallel Islamic jurisdiction under Sharia and would no longer turn a blind eye to the practice of polygamy, following the recommendation of Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui that imams should be allowed to officiate at marriages only upon the production of a civil marriage certificate.11

  It would halt the drift towards social suicide by ending the culture of equal entitlement ushered in by the application of secular human rights doctrine. An agenda that seeks to destroy Western values by abolishing moral norms altogether and replacing them with transgressive behavior has been serviced by human rights law. An end to this victim culture is essential both to restore social order to Britain and to give it back its sense of its own identity. While it is being undermined from within, it is not able adequately to defend itself against the threat from without.