RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lincolnshire is a largely rural, even isolated county at the far eastern end of the British Midlands. It is heavily Conservative and voted “Leave” in last year’s EU referendum by a margin of almost two to one. Its largest city, Lincoln, has a population of 120, 000, roughly equivalent to that of Fargo and less than half that of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Yet even in this quiet corner of the U.K., Islam is a headline story. After Drummer Lee Rigby was butchered by terrorists on a busy London street in May 2013, a Lincolnshire man was arrested and another was given a warning by county police. For aiding or supporting the killers? No. For mentioning online that the killers were Muslims. A summer 2014 entry on the blog of a prominent British Muslim records her presence at an Islamic Society of Britain-sponsored festival, “Living Islam,” at which “Lincolnshire Police had a tent and were face painting kids.” And in 2015, Lincolnshire Police warned the families of British soldiers to “stop sharing their personal details online” after one soldier’s wife received a death threat from a Muslim. Did the police make any effort to track down the source of the threat? If so, I can find no record of it online.

Now the Lincolnshire Police have produced a thirteen-minute video as part of “Hate Crime Awareness week.” It is directed at the county’s children, which presumably means that copies will be, or have been, distributed to schools so that teachers can screen it for their pupils and lead discussions afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, the video – described as the “brainchild” of constable Glenn Palmer – is pure propaganda. At the beginning, we see the following words onscreen: “British Muslims. How are they portrayed? Terrorists? Jihadis? Islamic State? Maybe the following people will give you a different perspective.” We’re then introduced to a series of people who have obviously been selected to represent the very best of the British Muslim community: a soldier, a police officer, a doctor, a Member of Parliament, the head of Bradford’s Muslim Women’s Council, and (not least) one Asim Hafiz, OBE, the first imam to serve as a Muslim chaplain in the British Armed Forces.

It’s the usual drill: terrorists, we’re told, “do not represent the views of normal Muslims.” The doctor (a woman in hijab) asserts that it was the compassionate principles of Islam that motivated her to be a doctor. And of course somebody reminds us that “we are stronger together.”

The Muslim who probably gets the most screen time is a leader of a Muslim aid organization called Al Imdaad. We hear a great deal from this fellow about how much good his group does. What he doesn’t mention is something Robert Spencer pointed out the other day in response to this video: Al Imdaad, based in South Africa, has Hamas fingerprints all over it. As Samuel Westrop reported three years ago, an Al Imdaad trustee named Qari Ziyaad Patel “has written and sung a nasheed [Islamic song] in praise of the Taliban.” In 2012-13, wrote Westrop, “Al-Imdaad’s British branch raised over £400,000 for the IHH, a Turkish charity widely accused of funding terrorism and that publicly supports Hamas. Al-Imdaad UK has also given over £50,000 (over $80,000) to the Zamzam Foundation, a Somali charity run by the Saudi-funded Somali Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Lincolnshire Police video doesn’t mention any of that, naturally. In its pretty, sanitized portrait of British Islam, there are no terrorists, no friends of terrorists, no supporters of terrorists, nobody who ever so much s met a terrorist. These Muslims are all do-gooders. They would all have us believe that they love Britain with all their hearts and that they thoroughly condemn acts of terror committed in the name of their religion.

And they all have big, warm smiles. As pretty music swells up in the background, communicating to us that all is well, that Islam is good, and that whatever negative things you may hear about it in the press are just plain wrong (as if the British press, just like the mainstream media all over the Western world, weren’t already whitewashing the Religion of Peace as much as it can), these British Muslims beam at the camera like actors in a toothpaste commercial.

It’s pure, shameless, unadulterated taqiyya. Disgracefully, it uses video of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers only to deny, in repulsively soothing voice-over, any connection whatsoever between the evil events of that day and the beautiful Islamic faith.

The good news is that the residents of Lincolnshire are no fools: they gave the video major pushback. Reader comments at the Lincolnite website and on the Facebook page of the Lincolnshire Police showed that when it comes to Islam, it’s too late in the game for the authorities to try to pull wool this thick over the eyes of these no-nonsense Midlanders. One comment after another pierced through the poppycock, spelling out basic facts about Islam that contracted the video’s cheery message. Asked about the public reactions to the video, Deputy Chief Constable Craig Naylor pronounced himself “really disappointed.” He and his colleagues, he insisted, had only been trying to “tackle misconceptions and myths.”

On the contrary: they had decided it was their job not to fight crime – a disproportionate amount of which, in Britain today, is committed by Muslims – but to spend precious taxpayer dollars and on-duty hours producing pro-Islamic hogwash. This in a country where lawlessness has become so rampant and police resources spread so thin that, as the Daily Mail reported on October 16, “[e]very police force in Britain is abandoning inquiries into thousands of ‘hard to solve’ low-level offences…including vandalism, theft, burglary and antisocial behaviour in minutes if there are no clues.”

One wonders: after receiving this public backlash, will the cops quash their plans to use this video to indoctrinate schoolkids? Or will they forge ahead, even though they know that the parents of many (if not most) of those kids find the effort utterly abhorrent?

Whatever the case, the bottom line is clear: in Lincolnshire, as elsewhere in Europe, cops are now less interested in policing Islamic crime than in policing criticism of Islam. But wait: the cops in Lincolnshire have taken the whole business a step further. They’ve made it clear that they’ll also police criticism of their own policing. In his response to criticisms of the “British Muslims” video, Naylor cautioned that members of the public who are worked up about it had better keep their thoughts to themselves: the Lincolnshire Police, he warned, “will look into any online abuse aimed at the police.”

In short: clam up, mate. Big Brother is watching!