Who Lost Britain? 14 Culprits By Robert Spencer ****
http://pjmedia.com/blog/who-lost-britain-14-culprits/?print=1
With 600 [2] Muslims from the United Kingdom now making up over twenty-five percent [3] of the foreign jihadists fighting for the Islamic State, and many vowing to return and wage jihad at home, it is not reckless to predict that Britain’s future is dark. For those 600 are just the tip of the iceberg of an untold number of jihad supporters and sympathizers in the country now. Indeed, there are twice as many [4] British Muslims fighting for the Islamic State as there are in the British armed forces. And with unrestricted immigration policies, more are arriving all the time.
So it must be asked: who lost Britain?
1-3. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron.
In December 2010 [5] there were an estimated 2,869,000 Muslims in Britain – up from 1,647,000 in 2001. That’s an increase of 74 percent. This is the direct result of the immigration policies implemented and pursued by three successive British prime ministers, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
Those immigration policies were fueled in part by the naïve and roseate view of Islam that Blair energetically proffered, saying in 2007 [6] that “to me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is,” and in 2008 [7]: “I regularly read the Koran, practically every day,” and the Islamic prophet Muhammad had been “an enormously civilizing force.” The immigrants were considered to be bringing that “enormously civilizing force” to Britain, and consequently no attempt was made to determine whether any of them held jihadist sentiments or believed that Islamic law should supplant British law.
Only now that a significant number of those immigrants and their children are waging jihad for the Islamic State is Cameron is swinging into action. (It is, of course, far too late: in December 2010, when a poll revealed [8] that 40% of Muslims in Britain wanted Sharia and 33% supported killing for Islam, the government did nothing.) Last week he proposed, according to the BBC [9], that legislation be “drawn up to give the police statutory powers to confiscate the passports of suspect terrorists at UK borders.” But apparently aware that there was hardly any chance that British jihadis would not be allowed back into the country, at the same time he proposed that returning jihad terrorists be “required to undergo de-radicalisation programmes.” Such programs have failed spectacularly [10] to turn jihadis away from jihad in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, but maybe the British have a magic key that will make them succeed.
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4-5. Theresa May and the UK Home Office.
But they probably don’t. After all, in recent years the British government has not shown itself to be particularly discerning when it comes to jihadists and Islamic supremacists. British government officials worked with Islamic supremacists that they deluded themselves into thinking were “moderates,” [12] allowing them to gain immense influence over the government and media. The British government funded Tell MAMA, a group of liars who exaggerated claims of Muslim victimhood, [13] allowing them to propagate throughout the country the false charge that Muslims were under siege in Britain from a veritable army of violent “Islamophobic” louts.
In legitimizing the unsavory group Tell MAMA, the British government gave its validation to the Leftist/Islamic-supremacist narrative that opposing jihad terror amounted to “racism” and “bigotry.” It completely internalized that narrative, ignoring for years an Islamic supremacist takeover of public schools [14] and the victimization of thousands of British girls by Muslim rape gangs, [15] so as to avoid accusations of “racism.”
The UK Home Office, particularly under the dubious leadership of Home Secretary Theresa May, grew so myopic regarding jihad terrorism that in 2013 – after a smear campaign spearheaded by far-Left and Islamic supremacist groups, including Tell MAMA — it banned Pamela Geller and me from the country for daring to suggest that Islam has a doctrine of violence against unbelievers [16], as well as because of our support for Israel [17].
Just days before we were banned, May’s Home Office admitted [18] Saudi Sheikh Mohammed al-Arefe. Al-Arefe has said [19]: “Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.” More recently, the Home Office admitted Libya’s grand mufti, Sheikh Sadiq Al-Ghariani, who, according to the Telegraph [20], has been accused of “using the UK as a base from which to help orchestrate the takeover of his home country by extremist militias with ideological links to the brutal Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq.”
6-8: The British Left: Nick Lowles and Matthew Collins of Hope Not Hate, and Fiyaz Mughal of Tell MAMA and Faith Matters.
To have opposed the entry of al-Arefe (who has finally been banned, after I repeatedly excoriated the Home Office for its pro-jihad leanings) and al-Ghariani would have been “racist” – and there is nothing worse that anyone can be in Britain today. It was revealed last week that 1,400 British non-Muslim children were gang-raped [15] and brutalized by Muslims in one city alone, and “several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”
The Muslim rape gangs went unreported, unprosecuted, and in general unstopped because of far-Left organizations like Hope not Hate, Faith Matters, and Tell MAMA, which waged relentless war against anyone and everyone who spoke out about these issues. They demonized as “Islamophobic,” “hateful” and “bigoted” anyone who said that there were Muslim rape gangs at all, and that they had to be stopped. (Incidentally, when these groups led the campaign to ban Pamela Geller and me from entering Britain, one of the events we had discussed going to was a rally against the rape gangs. And despite smearing us as hatemongering equivalents of British jihadist Anjem Choudary, Hope not Hate’s Nick Lowles, when challenged on the BBC [21], could not come up with a single “hateful” statement I have ever made in 13 books, hundreds of articles, and over 40,000 blog posts.)
Meanwhile, search for “grooming [22]” (these gangs are usually called “grooming gangs” in the British media) at Hope not Hate’s site, and you will see that a significant percentage of the articles mentioning this practice are attacking those who are calling attention to it and protesting against it.
Who, then, is responsible for the Islam-based mass gang-rape of British girls? The British Left — in particular the “anti-hate” crusaders Lowles and Matthew Collins of Hope not Hate, Fiyaz Mughal of Faith Matters and Tell MAMA, and their friends, supporters, and allies.
The lives of 1,400 girls are ruined today because of these men. If Britain were even close to being a sane society today, these people would be being subjected to scorching criticism, and there would be a thorough public reevaluation of how much the Left’s alliance with Islamic supremacism and smear campaign against foes of jihad terror has harmed the nation and its people.
But Britain is not a sane society today, and these sinister individuals — Lowles, Collins, Mughal, and the rest of them — will continue to wield their considerable power and influence there.
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9-10. The British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL).
Lowles, Collins, Mughal and their ilk would never have been able to gain as much traction as they did had it not been for opponents of jihad terror in Britain giving them material to fuel their slanders of the entire counter-jihad movement. The British National Party (BNP), which I opposed from the beginning, for years was singular in British politics for speaking out against jihad terror – and, with disastrous stupidity and a moral myopia of a proportion approaching Theresa May’s. It was also singular for having a race-based philosophy and membership policy. This fueled the common Leftist charge that opposition to jihad terror was just “racism” in disguise, and prevented many Britons from joining a movement they would have otherwise supported.
Likewise the EDL. From the moment of its founding, the English Defence League sounded all the right notes, including a firm rejection of racism and support for Israel as the state on the front lines of the global jihad. Its innumerable Leftist and mainstream media (redundant, I know) detractors charged that all that was just a ruse, a smokescreen, and that the group was really just a gang of neo-Nazi thugs. Unfortunately, elements of the EDL (including Leftist infiltrators) fueled these impressions all too often, until finally the group’s leadership dissociated themselves from it, saying they were unable to control these elements.
For years, both Pamela Geller and I stood publicly [24] against the EDL’s unsavory elements – a fact ignored by enablers of jihad terror in Britain who claimed repeatedly that our support for the group revealed that we were secretly neo-fascists ourselves — while supporting the EDL as a promising response to the increasingly assertive and aggressive Islamic supremacism in Britain. When the British establishment succeeded in destroying the EDL, there was essentially no one left to stand in the breach.
And in propagating the smears against the EDL and counter-jihadis in general, the British Left had allies even among declared opponents of jihad terror in Britain – a fact that had unfortunate implications far beyond us personally.
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11-14. British foes of jihad terror: Maryam Namazie, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation, and Sarah Brown of Harry’s Place.
Britain is so far gone that there are few open opponents of jihad and Islamic supremacism there – and many of those who are there busy themselves with savaging those who have been far more effective than they in calling attention to jihad terror activity and Islamic supremacism, and aiding opposition to it.
Maryam Namazie of One Law for All is a Marxist antisemite who says she is an ex-Muslim and foe of jihad terror, but nonetheless has attacked Israel and spread Palestinian jihad propaganda [26] on numerous occasions. One Law for All issued a frankly and unapologetically libelous “report” [27] about me, Geller, and other foes of terror. Similarly, Maajid Nawaz of the moderate Muslim Quilliam Foundation is another ex-Muslim who is, paradoxically, as energetic a purveyor of the “Islamophobia” myth as any jihad enabler. Nawaz and other Quilliam officials, like the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, have vociferously denounced counter-jihadists as “Islamophobes” – an odd word for a genuine foe of jihad and Islamic supremacism to use, as “Islamophobia” is a smear word employed chiefly by Muslim Brotherhood entities in order to intimidate people into thinking that there is something wrong with resisting jihad terror.
Similarly, at the time of Quilliam’s founding, its founder Ed Husain went out of his way to launch a gratuitous attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq and me. [28] At that time I had been quite interested to determine whether Quilliam was really the sincere reformist organization it claimed to be — but this unexpected and unwarranted attack made me doubt it immediately. I know Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali ex-Muslim) and Ibn Warraq (a Pakistani ex-Muslim) personally. I know their work quite well. I know that neither is a “racist” or a “bigot,” just as I know that I myself am not one either. I know that they’re deeply concerned about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, as I am, and want to preserve Western pluralistic societies with their freedom of speech and equality of rights for all people, as I do.
All these individuals and groups seem much more interested in anathematizing various foes of terror than in opposing terror itself. One principal engine of this excommunication process is the British blog Harry’s Place (and chiefly, one of its editors, Sarah Brown). Harry’s Place is generally opposed to terror, but takes great pains (in the form of frequent attacks) to ensure that no one thinks it is allied with those foes of terror, who are part of the problem. The core of the credulous Brown’s distaste for counter-jihadists from the wrong side of the tracks is her indefatigable insistence that the genuine Islam is benign and peaceful – it’s just that the poor thing is beset by misunderstanders. This leads her to pass on uncritically to her readers farragoes of half-truth and outright falsehood [29] that purport to show that the real Islam is nothing those 600 British jihadis fighting for the Islamic State imagine it to be, but really as chummy and plummy and British as she herself is.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it impedes the already slim-to-none possibility of genuine and sincere reform in Islam – if one insists that there is no problem to begin with, what needs reforming? It also fosters complacency among non-Muslims in the UK which, combined with the regular Harry’s Place attacks on counter-jihadists who are more honest and realistic about the problem than Brown, leaves them ignorant and unprepared for the coming onslaught.
But it is coming. And when it does, these 14 individuals and groups can stand up and take a bow, and congratulate themselves, amid the beheadings and explosions on London streets, that they were never, even for a nanosecond, “racist.”
*****
image illustration via shutterstock / Alexander Mak [30] / Brendan Howard [31]
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