Mick Hartley

The case of MP Mike Freer, forced to resign because of threats from Islamic extremists, received little attention in the news last week and has already passed into forgotten history. Tom Slater at Spiked:

Freer’s resignation has become the latest depressing victory chalked up by Islamists against British democracy. A group calling itself Muslims Against Crusades began the rage against him, menacing him more than a decade ago with posts showing images of Stephen Timms – the Labour MP stabbed in 2010 by an al-Qaeda fangirl in east London – alongside the words, ‘Let Stephen Timms be a warning to you’.

During an event at a North Finchley mosque, members of Muslims Against Crusades reportedly rushed in and denounced Freer as a ‘Jewish homosexual pig defiling the house of Allah’. While not Jewish himself, Freer has long borne the brunt of Islamist anti-Semites, who are now riding high following Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel.

Freer has good reason to fear that the threats on his life might be genuine. On the evening of 16 September 2021, he was due to do a constituency surgery but was summoned to Whitehall at the last minute. It was a change of schedule that could well have saved his life. It left Ali Harbi Ali, an aspiring Islamist terrorist, waiting in vain for Freer outside his constituency office, clutching a knife.

A month later, Ali used that same knife to stab Tory MP David Amess 21 times, killing him in cold blood at his constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea. Ali had drawn up a list of MPs – including Freer, Michael Gove and Keir Starmer – who had voted in favour of bombing ISIS in Syria. He said he wanted to ‘send a message’ to politicians that ‘something like that will always have a response’….

So, over the past 15 years, among all the other carnage they have inflicted on society, Islamist terrorists have stabbed one Labour MP, killed one Tory MP and – with the Westminster Bridge attack of 2017 – launched a car-and-knife attack on the Houses of Parliament, killing five people including policeman Keith Palmer. Now they have terrorised another MP out of public life.

There have been numerous foiled attacks on politicians, too. Just weeks after the Westminster Bridge horror, Khalid Ali, a Taliban bombmaker, was tackled by armed police near Downing Street. He was armed with knives. He also said he was there to send ‘a message’ to those in power. A few months later, ISIS supporter Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman was arrested for plotting to bomb his way into Downing Street and behead Theresa May.

The response to this sustained, years-long assault on our elected representatives? Not silence, exactly. There has been plenty of chatter and commentary. It’s just been about completely unrelated issues. There has been a desperate attempt to change the subject, and to downplay the threat posed by Islamist extremism.

Following the murder of David Amess, Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs all lined up to demand… more kindness on social media. There was even talk of a ‘David’s Law’ to strip social-media trolls of anonymity. They seemed to be under the misapprehension that Amess had succumbed to a particularly nasty Twitter storm, rather than a knife-wielding Islamofascist.

All this stood in stark contrast to the response to the murder of Jo Cox MP by a far-right extremist in 2016. On that awful day – when relatively little was known about Cox’s killer, beyond eyewitness reports he had shouted ‘Britain first’ as he shot and stabbed her – a Guardian editorial denounced the far right’s ‘rhetoric of Western racism and Islamophobia’, warning of a potential ‘slide from civilisation to barbarism’. Two days after Amess’s murder, the Observer – the Guardian’s sister paper – struck a very different tone in its editorial:

‘We know little about the circumstances surrounding the fatal attack on Amess, beyond the fact that the police are treating it as a terrorist incident and are investigating a “potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. There will be those who seek to deploy these scant details in service of their political agendas; to politicise this tragedy in such a way is abhorrent.’

And remember the lecture for civil servants at Kings College, as revealed by Anna Stanley, where the assembled bureaucrats were told that the threat from Islamic extremism was exaggerated, while the real concern was the far right – and Israel, of course.