Mark Steyn: Terrorists too cozy in the United Kingdom -

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | July 31, 2005 | Mark Steyn

[UnklGene]

Terrorists way too cozy in United Kingdom -

July 31, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

On Tuesday, the Times of London contained this intriguing tidbit about one of the thwarted suicide bombers of the July 21 tube attacks -- Yasin Hassan Omar, a Somali ''asylum seeker'':

''Omar, who was last seen vaulting a barrier at Warren Street station, has been the registered occupant of the flat since 1999. Ibrahim, who was last seen in Hackney Road, East London, after his failed attempt to blow up a No. 26 bus, shared it with him for the past two years. Omar, received £88 a week in housing benefit to pay for the council property and also received income support, immigration officials say.''

''Council property'' is Britspeak for public housing. So here's how things stand four years after 9/11: United Kingdom taxpayers are subsidizing the jihad.

There's a cheery thought for any Englishman the next time he's on a bus when some Islamakazi self-detonates: It's on his tax bill; pay as you blow.

This isn't some stunning shocking development, either. In a column on December 29, 2001, I noted the likes of Zac Moussaoui, the French citizen who became an Islamist radical while living on welfare in London, and wrote: "If you're looking for 'root causes' for terrorism, European-sized welfare programs are a good place to start . . . Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.''

I wasn't the first to notice the links between Euro-Canadian welfare and terrorism. Mickey Kaus, the iconoclastic California liberal, was way ahead. But, after 3-1/2 years, one would be entitled to assume that Tony Blair might have spotted it, too -- especially given the ever greater numbers of British jihadi uncovered from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel and America.

That's why a law-enforcement approach to the war on terror -- the John Kerry approach -- can't work, not just because it's mostly reactive -- blow somewhere up, we'll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene -- but also because it involves entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy, and trusting them to improve scrutiny of immigration, entitlement to welfare and other matters within the purview of government. That snippet from the Times makes clear the likelihood of that happening. A ''criminal'' approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, and between British and European -- and, indeed, American -- ''human rights,'' that's quite a bundle. If it's a war, you can take wartime measures. But, if you fight this thing as a law enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens will use all the above to their full extent. So today imams living off welfare checks openly promote the murder of Tony Blair, British troops, etc., with impunity.

Madrid and London -- along with other events such as the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh -- are, in essence, the opening shots of a European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists' most oft-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate living under sharia that extends to Europe, and there's a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behavior is consistent with that.

Furthermore, there's a lot more of the world that lives under sharia than there was, say, 30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Fifty years ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of Islamic law. So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: Since the beginning of the year, for example, some 10 percent of southern Thailand's Buddhist population has abandoned their homes -- a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the Western press. And whatever one's opinion of the various local conflicts around the world -- Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Jews in the Holy Land, Muslims vs. Russians in Chechnya, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa -- the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

If the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world's grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency -- not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahhabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalizing force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Yorkshire to Virginia. Europeans who aren't prepared to roll back Wahhabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it.

Mustering the popular will for that sort of struggle isn't easy. But the longer you leave it the harder it becomes. These days, if an American business traveler lands at Heathrow, the immigration officer plunks down in his passport a big stamp saying ''RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS PROHIBITED.'' What a pathetic example of pointless gesture politics: If you're a fancypants executive in town for 48 hours to splash a ton of hard currency around the West End, British immigration goes through a big hoop-de-do about saying you've no entitlement to welfare. But if you're a Somali and you want to live in public housing at public expense for six years while you fine-tune your plot to blow up Warren Street Tube station, pas de probleme!

That's a classic example of what you get when you opt for a narrowly drawn law enforcement approach entrusted to a complacent bureaucracy: Rather than do anything about immigrant welfare fraud, they'll simply order up a new rubber stamp that gives the vague air of doing something about it. And back in the real world, daily, weekly, remorselessly, the situation will deteriorate. The British have been heroic in Iraq. They need to show they can do it closer to home.

[Pokey78]

Thanks!

Steyn ping!

[Sloth]

[aculeus]

BTTT

[metesky]

Steyn bump!

[maica]

Not the Telegraph, yet a very important read --

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1716156,00.html

August 01, 2005
Fundamentally, we're useful idiots
Anthony Browne
As the rest of Europe acts, extreme Islamists take advantage of British naivety

ELEMENTS WITHIN the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists for the Soviet Union — useful idiots

Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same.


---snip----




Anthony Browne is Europe Correspondent of The Times [hardly a 'right-wing wacko']

[timsbella]

Steyn is brilliant. What he says of the generous UK system of welfare is equally true and possibly even more giving in Canada. Couple that with an idiot like Carolyn Parrish who panders to the Imams to stay in power and curses the US....I have only one question - when can we get this fella to run up here and clean out this sty of a parliament?

[A. Pole]

Living off of welfare under British rule demoralizes Muslims, especially if they are told by their leaders that their true coarse in history is to rule most of Europe under a powerful new Islamic theocracy.

Actually in the past Muslims after conquering the new fresh country did live off the welfare as the conquered dhimmis had to pay taxes. Only when the conquered population shrunk too much this arrangement collapsed.

[CollegeRepublicanNU]

Steyn is a genious another great article.. Keep them coming.

[vaudine]

Mark Steyn should be required reading in all HS and college civics, govt., history,journalism classes. He hits it right on the head. I really would like to know the statistics of how many Americans and British know about the historical spread and empire questing of radical Islam. If all they read and hear is the western media, then, of course, it is new and all George Bush's fault.

vaudine

[alwaysconservative]

Great stuff! Thanks for the ping, Pokey!

[Paradox]

Here the Government talks about deporting extremist imams, but does nothing. In contrast, France has deported ten radical imams in the past two years, with another one deported to Algeria last week, and ten more are under police surveillance. In France, no mosque is off limits to the police. While Britain welcomes Sheikh al-Qaradawi, Germany last week deported an imam who simply supported the Muslim Brotherhood. In Bavaria alone, 14 “hate preachers” have been deported since November 2004, and a further 20 have received notifications of deportation.

Ouch! Thats gotta hurt. The article points out that the British are more lenient against the islamofascist than even >gasp< FRANCE! Oh the shame!

[Paradox]

Oops, this was meant as a reply to post #25 and the Times Online article that we mentioned within.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[hattend]

Mark Steyn Rocks BTTT

[expatguy]

bttt

[Joan912]

Steyn is dead-on brilliant. He has the guts to point out what very few dare to think: the goal of Islam/muslims is to spread itself throughout Europe and the West. Muslims have no interest in compromise; they want an Islamic world. Do we now see why the Crusades were so vital? Poor Britain, I seriously doubt the UK can withstand the onslaught...