Say what you will about newly minted London mayor Sadiq Khan, but the man has chutzpah. When likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that he would make an exception to his hypothetical Muslim travel ban and welcome Khan to the United States, Khan demurred. “Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam,” the Muslim mayor said. “London has proved him wrong.”
Khan’s assurances about “mainstream” Islam in Britain are undermined by thefindings of an extensive recent survey of British Muslims. The study, conducted in connection with an April 2016 documentary, “What British Muslims Really Think,” shows that hundreds of thousands of Khan’s countrymen hold viewsutterly incompatible with those of free societies on matters of jihadism, politics, and culture. Consider that, of the 1,081 individuals surveyed to represent the views of Britain’s more than 3 million Muslims:
Only 74 percent completely condemn “suicide bombing to fight injustice”;
Only 66 percent completely condemn stoning those who commit adultery;
Only 53 percent completely condemn violence against those who mock Muhammad;
Only 34 percent would contact police if they believed someone close to them was involved with jihadism;
23 percent believe Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations;
52 percent believe homosexuality should be illegal;
31 percent believe polygamy should be legal;
39 percent believe women should always obey their husbands;
35 percent believe Jews have too much power in the UK.
These indicators only confirm how seeds of Islamist supremacism have spread throughout British society; chilling episodes over the last decade have made the dangers clear. Britons remember, of course, the 7/7 jihadist attacks in London in 2005, but much more recently, at least 1,500 British Muslims have emigrated to join ISIS, and outspoken Islamist cleric Anjem Choudary has been charged with supporting the group. In 2014, the Rotherham Borough Council released a report detailing a sexual-abuse scandal in which at least 1,400 children from 1997 to 2013 were “raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated.” Reportedly, those who knew of the crimes remained silent for fear of being called racists, as the perpetrators were Muslim immigrants.
Also in 2014, a government investigation uncovered Operation Trojan Horse, an organized effort to Islamize Birmingham schools. Such episodes would not have come as a surprise to anyone who read British journalist Melanie Phillips’s 2007 book, Londonistan.
As Daniel Johnson writes of Sadiq Khan’s hometown:
Here in London, which is home to about a third of British Muslims (including thousands of migrants who live below the radar of the authorities), we have already seen the assertion of power by political Islam. The takeover of Tower Hamlets by a corrupt Islamist politician, Lutfur Rahman, may be a harbinger of things to come. Last year he was removed from office by special commissioners, but for five years Rahman and his cronies ran a borough of nearly 300,000 people, distributing a budget of more than £1 billion. . . . The Muslim “block vote” is such a formidable electoral force that for Islamists to dominate a city it does not need to have a Muslim majority.