Mick Hartley

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, interviewed in the Telegraph. ‘Islamists want to dominate, not integrate’:

More than 20 years have passed since Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker with whom she made the short film Submission about the subjugation of many Muslim women, was murdered on an Amsterdam street. After shooting and repeatedly stabbing him, the Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri pinned a note to his body vowing that Hirsi Ali would be next. During his trial, Bouyeri turned to van Gogh’s mother, Anneke, and declared: “I don’t have any sympathy for you… I think you’re a non-believer.”

The day after the murder, Dutch security officials gave Hirsi Ali three hours to pack before escorting her to a military airbase. She was flown to the United States under armed protection, landing in Maine. Even now, she remains on al-Qaeda’s hit list.

What troubles her today, however, is not the personal threat. It’s the slow unravelling of the civilisation that offered her refuge in the early 1990s….

When she arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, policymakers assumed that time would smooth cultural differences. “They felt they were in control of immigration. They thought they had time to assimilate these young people. They thought they would appreciate what we have and integrate.” Instead, many immigrants find existing religious infrastructures waiting for them. “You have Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood building an infrastructure here in Britain. It starts with applying for a mosque, then a Muslim centre, then a school. People coming from elsewhere have this ready-made life to slip into. And they’re being told by pastoral leaders not to assimilate.”

She makes the distinction between Islam and Islamism:

The former is about practising a religion. The latter is the pursuit of a political project. “Islamism is the idea you cannot possibly be a good Muslim unless you are pushing Sharia on non-believers.” Can Islamists be successfully integrated into liberal democracies, I ask. “No,” she responds without hesitation. “And you must never, ever think they can. Islamists do not want to integrate. They do not want to compromise. They want to dominate, to take over, to replace. And they have a plan – which is being aided by vote-hungry politicians here in the Green Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats.”

I think the Islam-Islamist distinction is useful, but the question still remains: to what extent do “ordinary” Muslims – followers of Islam – want to integrate? Would they ever disavow the Islamists?

Fiyaz Mughal – again in the Telegraph – has doubts:

Last week I spoke at the Nova Exhibition in London, and it left me emotionally shaken. It tells the story of the young Israelis who travelled to the Nova music festival seeking nothing more than a night of music, friendship and freedom – only to find themselves caught in one of the most barbaric terrorist atrocities of modern times….

I have consistently argued that British Muslims have a moral responsibility to condemn Hamas, without hesitation, while also acknowledging the immense suffering endured by Palestinian civilians during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. 

These positions are not contradictory. They are simply the minimum standard of moral consistency. Every innocent life has equal value. Israeli and Palestinian lives deserve equal dignity, equal compassion and equal protection. One might imagine this to be an uncontroversial position. Increasingly, it appears not to be.

At the Nova Exhibition, I was the only British Muslim speaker. Earlier this year, at the national demonstration against anti-Semitism outside Downing Street on May 10, I was again the only Muslim speaker.

Think about that for a moment. In a country with around four million Muslims, only one Muslim was prepared publicly to stand alongside Britain’s Jewish community in remembrance of October 7. This points to a deeply troubling reality about integration.

Too many self-appointed Muslim “community representatives” appear willing to speak passionately about injustice almost everywhere except when Jewish victims are involved. Their moral language becomes strangely selective. Their outrage has geographical and political boundaries. 

It does not extend to the young people murdered at Nova. It does not extend to families slaughtered in the kibbutzim. It does not extend to the Israeli women who were kidnapped and raped. Nor does it extend to confronting Hamas’s grotesque manipulation of Islam.

As I entered the Nova Exhibition, one of the first recordings I heard was Hamas terrorists repeatedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” as terrified Jewish civilians were abducted into Gaza. Those words, among the most sacred in Islam, were being used to sanctify murder and kidnapping. These words and scenes were all over national news sources after October 7.

So where were the articles from Britain’s Muslim leadership denouncing this abuse of our faith? Where were the public statements explaining that invoking God’s name, while committing atrocities, is a profound desecration of Islam itself? Their silence was deafening then, and it remains deafening today.