Posted on 08/15/2006 8:11:25 AM PDT by A. Pole
The Islamic terrorist plot to blow up ten airliners en route from Great Britain to the United States is surprising only in one respect: It makes no sense for the Muslim diaspora in Europe to carry out terrorist acts since they can have Europe—the whole of Western Europe, anyway—if they play their hand right in the next 20-30 years. Blowing up airliners, or London Underground trains, is bad for the cause. It is not directed from “Islam Central”; it is literally “home-grown.”
Only a non-Chronicles reader will be puzzled by the fact that “mainstream” media all over the Western world have been reluctant to state three key facts about the British plot:
1. The 24 plotters arrested thus far are all Muslims;
2. 22 of them are UK-born Pakistanis, and two are British converts to Islam;
3. The plotters were motivated by Islam—by Muhammad’s faith as such, and not by some allegedly aberrant variety of the creed.
We’ve seen this same reluctance to name names with the rioting “youths” in France last fall. The ongoing scenario is becoming a tad tedious: (1) a bunch of murderously minded jihadists are arrested and accused of terrorist intent; (2) local Muslim “community activists” and selcted non-Muslim neighbors respond with a mix of indignation and denial, with the assurances of the suspects’ impeccable character, and accusations of anti-Muslim bias; (3) non-Muslim politicos go out of their way to reassure the Muslim community that it is loved and appreciated, and not in any way associated with the terrorists. It’s déjà vu all over again.
This boringly predictable scenario is unfolding in England right now. “Stunned residents” of four English towns—Muslims, of course, although the Daily Mirror does not make it clear in its report—were upset: when “their quiet suburban lives were shattered when police swooped on neighbours suspected of being part of a huge terror plot to bomb airlines.” The suspects, we are told, included “two brothers who loved cricket, a university student, a builder, a pizza worker, a businessman and a dad-to-be.” The implication—that one’s love of cricket, or building buildings, or studying, or baking pizzas, or expecting a baby—is in some manner incompatible with Islaimc terrorism, is clearly made but not elaborated. What a million tabloid readers get instead is a nudge in the direction of righteous indignation at the treatment of poor, innocent Muslims:
One of the converts, Don Stewart-Whyte, was dragged from his car after an officer smashed the driver’s window. A neighbour said police had been lying in wait as he arrived home at High Wycombe with his Muslim wife. The 21-year-old switched to Islam six months ago and recently married after turning his back on a life of drugs and booze.
One can only hope that Don will go back to dope and booze, for his own good and that of his British neighbors. As for the other convert held, his name used to be Oliver Savant until he changed it to Ibrahim. His furious brother said “I’m outraged. We’re shocked and angry that we’re being put through this. He’s married, a newly-wed expecting a baby. Our parents are traumatised, as you would expect. There’s nothing that makes me think he’s linked to this and I’m confident the police will realise this has been a huge cock-up.”
By the time the cock-up is cleared circa 2050, when Ibrahim gets out of jail, he’ll be pleased to note that a simple majority of West European under-21s will be Muslim.
A mere four decades ago the suggestion that the working-class town of High Wycombe, or Birmingham—once a staid city of hard-working Midlanders—could become a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, would have sounded insane. Today it raises no eyebrows. The enormous growth and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community in Great Britain, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the English nation, has turned Birmingham and many other Victorian industrial cities into de facto self-governing Muslim ghettos. The formula was devised by Tariq Ramadan a decade ago: Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by “common values” but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society.
Most British Muslims come from the Indian sub-continent. They are technically “British” but functionally, for the most part, Pakistanis or Bengalis. More significantly, their British-born offspring tend to consider themselves de facto autonomous, a community of believers opposed to the broader society of infidels. The result is a mature jihadist infrastructure, centered on a network of mosques and Islamic centers.
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is the villain of the piece. “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists,” he declared after meeting a group of Muslim “community leaders” at 10 Downing Street, in the aftermath of 9-11. “It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple” who must not be honored “with any misguided religious justification,” because they “contravened all the tenets of Islam”:
It is . . . explicitly contrary to Islamic law to kill innocent civilians, to murder women and children and non-combatants… Islam is a peace-loving, tolerant, religion. Many of the world’s religions, indeed including Christianity, draw from the same spiritual heritage. We share the same values, and the same respect for the sanctity of human life . . . [W]e know of no specific threat in relation to this country and it is important that we are not alarmist about it. And I mean frankly some of the reports have been alarmist.
Echoing the Prime Minnister, two weeks after 9-11 former Home Office Minister John Denham pledged to cut out the “cancer of Islamophobia” infecting Britain, and declared that “the real Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and understanding.” In line with the EU instructions he called on the media to avoid promoting “a distorted or caricatured or prejudiced” view of Muslims or the Islamic faith.
Dr. Richard Stone, chairman of the “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia,” criticized the Blair government for not addressing “in a deep way” the anti-Muslim prejudice in Britain: “There is now . . . mounting concern that the already fragile foothold gained by Muslim communities in Britain is threatened by ignorance and intolerance.” He added that the only area where there had been major improvement was “within Muslim communities themselves.” The key finding of his commission was that 9-11 had made life more difficult for Muslims. It castigated British public bodies for failing to address “institutional Islamophobia” and called for changes in the law to better protect Muslim communities (i.e., introduce censorship) and “a major effort” (i.e., affirmative action and specific quotas) to bring more Muslims into public life.
The Director of Public Prosecutions expressed concern that the War on Terror is “alienating whole communities” in Great Britain. Colelctively they have all contributed to the creation of a culture of Muslim victimhood in which “Islamophobia,” defined both as a legal crime and a moral outrage, inhibited all serious debate in Great Britain after 9-11 on the causes of terrorism.
Since then thousands of people have been murdered in jihadist attacks, in Bali, Moscow, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, Sharm-el-Sheik, Nairobi, and dozens of other places. Were it not for the arrests on August 10, several thousand airline travelers would have been added to the tally.
Can the British establishment learn anything, ever? The answer, on current form, is a clear “no.” Just over a year ago, on July 7, 2005, London’s transportation network was hit by four British-born and bred Muslim youths. The suicide bombers were four British citizens, three of them Pakistani by parentage. They attended British state schools, traveled on British passports, and spoke with Yorkshire accents. They also hated England and its people with such intensity that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill as many of them as possible. They were coldly premeditated, practicing their attacks on a dry run on June 28, nine days before their bombs killed 52 people and wounded 200. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the lead suicide bomber, recorded a video in which he declared, “We are at war and I am a soldier.”
The ranks of those potential soldiers are increasing, paradoxically enough, as the British-born young Muslims come of age. “What is striking about most second- and third-generation British Muslims is their intense religiosity. Asked how much of a role Islam played in their everyday lives, 45 percent of the respondents in the student survey said it played a role in everything while 48 percent said it played a role in most things. This is in sharp contrast with a comparable survey of the British public in which 66 percent said religion was not an important factor in their lives.”
According to a detailed survey of the attitudes of British Muslims prepared for the Daily Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, one in four sympathizes with motives of terrorists and six per cent insist that the bombings were “fully justified.” In absolute numbers this means there are over 100,000 Muslims in Great Britain who are either prepared to carry out terrorist acts, or ready to support those who do. And a substantial majority, 56 percent, say that, whether or not they sympathize with the bombers, they can at least understand why they behave in this way. The sheer scale of Muslim alienation from British society that the survey reveals is remarkable: nearly a third of them, 32 percent, believe that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.”
The plot to bring down America-bound planes should not have come as a surprise. It has been known for years that trained al-Qaeda terrorists were present in the United Kingdom and operated in classic small cell structures. In December 2002, only a day after the arrest of seven Muslims suspected of terrorism in London and Edinburgh, British government sources acknowledged the existence of terrorist cells in the country and predicted that the most likely threat would take the form of a “explosives left in a public place” and attacks on transport networks.
Left by whom exactly? The British establishment remains adamant that the perpetrators are by definition apostates from Islam. When asked if the bombings across London on July 7, 2005, were the work of Islamic terrorists, the deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, responded that the culprits “certainly were not Islamic terrorists, because Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together.” He repeated, almost word for word, Tony Blair’s assurances on the subject given four years earlier.
In November 2005, Blair himself traveled to Leeds to meet with young Muslims in an attempt to understand how three “born-and-bred Yorkshire lads” (the fourth bomber, Lindsay, was a naturalized citizen born in Jamaica) could turn on their fellow citizens in such a murderous manner. His reference to the morbid jihadist trio as “lads”—an English term of endearment for the youthful male person, derived from Middle English ladde—is indicative of the fact that, after 7/7, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
Paddick’s boss, the Met’s Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, is out-Blairing his better known namesake. Britain’s most powerful policeman belongs to the same milieu as the Prime Minister: he has an Oxford degree, a Miro on his office wall, and the propensity to ascribe to Al-Qaeda “a late 19th-century nihilism.” He takes pride in his force’s “cultural and community resources unit” that enables police to call in Somalian-born officers to a Somalian case, but admits that “we do have some trouble providing Inuits.” Six months before the London bombs he made the unbelievable statement that “there is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.” When a journalist suggested that the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, could beg to differ on that one, Sir Ian replied,
There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him . . . Look at Jerry Springer. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9 percent of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help.
The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, went one better by blaming Britain’s role in the war in Iraq for the explosions in his city. He also compared an outspoken Muslim scholar who backs suicide bombings, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the late Pope John XXIII, because both believed that their faiths must engage with the world. While giving evidence to a House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the terrorist attacks in London, Livingston said that Sheik Qaradawi is “very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist . . . Of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today he is the most positive force for change.”
Far from being a “moderate,” the sheikh is a mainstream member of the Muslim Brotherhood. His Ikhwani affiliations led to his imprisonment in Egypt in 1949, then in 1954-1956, and again in 1962. For some years Al-Qaradawi has been a media superstar in the Arab world, thanks to his regular program Al-Shariaa wa Al-Haya (Sharia and Life) on Al-Jazeera TV network. He has called on Muslims to fight foreigners in Iraq—troops and civilians—because they are occupiers, and fighting them is a religious duty. And yet in 2004 he came to Britain’s capital and spoke at the “European Council of Fatwa and Research” in London’s City Hall, and warmly welcomed by none other than the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. (“You are truly, truly welcome!”) At a public lecture during his stay, the good, sane sheikh asserted that female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. In his opinion, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”
With Messrs. Livingstone, Blair, Blair, and other such elected and appointed officials in charge, the Muslims can proceed with their shenanigans unobserved and unhindered. It is to be feared that if and when a plot is brought to fruition, possibly on a grander scale than the one thwarted earlier this week, the sleepwalking of those who are supposed to protect Britain will become more determined than ever before. With stern illiberalism that belies their self-professed respect for other cultures and belief systems they will continue to deny respect to the bombers who sacrifice their lives for the sake of their faith by denying them the right to define themselves.
Blairism is all–pervasive in the academia and EU-funded think-tank community that informs the policy-makers. “The bombs that killed more than 50 people in the heart of London in July served only to reinforce the realisation across the EU that more effective action is needed to ensure the integration of migrants, and their children, into our diverse societies,” writes Sarah Spencer of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University, in an European Union-sponsored publication. We need to move beyond security and the fear of radicalization, she asserts, which “set a narrow and potentially divisive context” (i.e., law and order) for an agenda that “has to embrace broader outcomes,” such as greater access by the Muslim community to jobs, housing, health, education, poverty and civic participation. Such measures should be regulated by “an EU-wide approach to the integration of migrants,” Ms. Spencer concludes.
Historian David Starkey agrees. Addressing The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2005 he warned that “Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a new era of religious intolerance after the July 7 bombings” and that the religious intolerance of previous centuries could be repeated unless society reconsiders its attitute. He voiced alarm at the trend towards “thought crimes” encapsulated in anti-terrorism legislation that include expressing any sympathy for suicide bombers. The key to present-day threats, Starkey concludes, is tolerance: “In the same way that a multitude of religious sects were allowed to continue without threat of being burnt at the stake after the Restoration, Britain today should tolerate Islam.”
The thought that British Muslims may be loath to integrate and accept being one among a multitude is inadmissible to the elite mindset. Even in the mundane Britain of commerce and banking, Islam has successfully planted the seeds of its acceptance as a legitimately parallel structure with the non-interest-based, sharia-compliant “Islamic mortgages”, which every self-respecting High Street home loan provider now feels obliged to offer:
It was an unusual sight—hundreds of businessmen listening attentively while a small group of top-notch Islamic scholars instructed them on the intricacies of Muslim ethics. These were bankers, and what they wanted to know was how they could do better business with Muslims. The Islamic Real Estate Finance conference . . . came after The Bank of England’s request for high street banks to create financial solutions for Muslims . . . Islamic scholars were called in to advise on the Sharia-compliance of the new mortgages. On the whole they were happy, but some expressed concern that the banks may be using money in non-permissible activities, like financing breweries or non-halal meat companies.
This is but one manifestation of the ongoing legitimization of the sharia as a legal and moral code with a legitimate role in the public life of Great Britain. It has penetrated culture, high as well as popular. As for the British courts, they are already Sharia-compliant. A key tenet of sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them. A judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, accepts the concept. He may not be familiar with the Islamic law but he observed its commandments when he banned Jews and Hindus—and anyone married to one—from serving on the jury in the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, accused of soliciting the murder of “unbelievers.” The judge reportedly announced, “For obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.” One can only speculate what the reaction would be if equally “obvious reasons” were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from a trial of an alleged Islamophobe.
At the time of this writing Muslims control large areas of dozens of industrial cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire, from which non-Muslims—by no means only the white ones—move out as soon as they can. Both the “moderates” and the “radicals” believe in the goal of an Islamized Britain:
There are two main religious traditions among Pakistani-British Muslims. The Barelwi majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their gains and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well.
The latest terrorist plot is a logical outcome of the Blairite forma mentis, the size of Muslim immigration into the country, and the dynamics of that growing community’s symbiotic interaction with the elite consensus. Even before the Rushdie affair allowed Muslims in Britain to flex their muscles in open opposition to the law of the land, a Declaration issued by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester stated, urbi et orbi, that its goal is to change the existing British society into “an Islamic society based on the Qur’an and the Sunna and make Islam, which is a code for entire life, supreme and dominant, especially in the socio-political spheres.”
A generation later mosques and Islamic centers have multiplied all over Britain and provide the backbone to terrorist support network. The Home Office approved visas to Muslim clerics, primarily from Pakistan, sympathetic to the radicals. Mosques provide venues for the faithful “to hail Osama bin Laden as a hero and to evoke the ‘positive outcomes’ of the attacks in New York and Washington.”
The way in which the war against terrorism is waged in today’s Downing Street resembles the atmosphere at Rastenburg in 1944. With the Blairites in charge T.S. Eliot may yet be proved right in his warning that the West would end, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Some decades earlier, in 1899, 26 year old Winston Churchill expressed hope “that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”
Even Churchill’s precience could not have envisaged the possibility that “the invader” would have his friends and allies at No. 10, Downing Street, and London’s County Hall. The reality is absurd and the principals involved are abnormal. Only when Blair, Livingstone & Co. are permanently ousted will it become possible for Britain to defend herself, and to be herself once again.
EUrabia bump
Columna quinta delenda est
They're not just in the UK, they're everywhere and they're supported by the left and the Media everywhere.
Or at least all the media and so called government "leaders" are afraid of them and don't speak up except to plea for "tolerance" and "diversity", etc., bla bla bla.
Since it is so common for 'Christians' to have surrendered their souls to material gain, it is apparently incomprehensible to them that any human being could resist their golden idol.
The Muslims seem quite honest and open about what they intend to do and yet myriads do not believe they are telling the truth.
The one thing that might save this planet is that muslims always play their cards too soon.
And they haven't already?
Problem is that the British government still seems to have their head in "Happily-ever-after, White Bunny Land" where everything works out well in the end if only "they walk in the Muslims' shoes"!
I was watching this Bill Maher comedy routine where he described British Muslims portraying themselves as "a poor, peaceful, misunderstood and defamed minority" -- in short, "as Jews"! And that is precisely it -- the EU and American authorities are treating Muslims as though they were actually "Jews". But "Jews", who have been in the US since before the American Revolution, didn't blow up the WTC or bomb British buses and Madrid trains. "Jews" didn't demand a seperate set of laws in Western Europe or America for themselves and everyone else. "Jews" didn't demand home-grow and multiply at an alarming rate, a generation of terrorrists detrmined to bring down Western civilization! The Muslims are not "Jews" -- they are "fascists" who wish to overthrow the governments of their home countries and overthrow Western civilization!
For those of us who have been following the Balkan wars since the beginning, we see the handwriting on the wall -- the methods that have been used over and over by Muslims in the ME, the Balkans, the EU and the US, to portrays themselves "as persecuted Jews" every time someone stands up to them. They even have the guts to used this PR image "as Jews" against Israel -- and the idiot mainstream media goes along with it, because it sells papers!
I am not Joe McCarthy, looking for "a fascist" under "the chador" or bed of every Muslim. But I think that it is truly time to realize that Islam is not compatible with Western civilization -- and to stop allowing immigration from Islamic countries. Moslems have been the one group, of all the religious groups that we have accepted and absorbed over the years into the US and Western mainstream, that are simply "indigestible" and even "poisonous" to our culture. I am not completely sure how to deal with those who are already here, but the first step is to close the doors and keep any more from coming in. Then, and only then can we begin to deal with the issues of those already here -- and eventually with those who are homegrown.
It may be too late for Europe, because their learning curve is to slow, but I don't believe that it is too late for us -- yet -- I hope.
I fear that our chance for a firmer resolve is far from over. These islamic animals are sure to strike again.
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