The case of the former bodyguard to the leader of Hamas who secured asylum and citizenship in Britain before – who could have guessed? – plotting terrorist attacks against Jews in Europe, has once again put a spotlight on our hopelessly naive approach to Islamist terror. Melanie Phillips in today’s Times:
People are asking in horror how Britain could have knowingly harboured such a man. Merely to ask the question is to answer it. Britain did so because it has long been in denial over the threat that predatory Islamism poses to Britain.
Mr X is but the latest in a long line of Islamist extremists who have found Britain to be a most obliging host. Decades ago, it awarded citizenship to a former Hamas commander in the West Bank, Muhammad Sawalha, who was finally outed by the Sunday Times shortly after the October 7 atrocities. Over the years, other dangerous extremists have moved to Britain where they and their families have been given generous welfare benefits….
Having made a religion out of human rights laws, multiculturalism and anti-discrimination, Britain allowed in a steady stream of fanatics such as Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri Muhammad and Abu Hamza, allowing them to preach incitement to violence, raise money and recruit British Muslims for the jihad against the West.
The British authorities flatly refused to acknowledge the nature of the threat. Instead of blaming Islamist ideology and its roots in religious doctrine, Britain adopted key tropes of that ideology — in particular, dislike of America and Israel whose policies it tritely identified as the cause of Muslim rage.
Despite the increasingly desperate alarm being sounded by MI5 about the Islamist threat to Britain, the state remains in denial. It still hasn’t banned Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It still refuses to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of Hamas, which is pursuing the Islamic conquest of the West through mass immigration and democratic entryism. And it is still grossly misreading the threat posed by the influx of asylum seekers.
The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is reopening a refugee resettlement scheme, prioritising Afghan women and girls and Palestinians from Gaza. Once again, the British government is failing to grasp what happened after Angela Merkel accepted thousands of Syrian refugees into Germany in 2015. Along with Afghans, these are eight times as likely as locals to be investigated for violent crime.
The lesson is that people fleeing dire circumstances may nevertheless pose a threat to the country that takes them in. Migrants who have entered Britain illegally on the small boats across the Channel have included Iranian terrorists and Isis sympathisers. This is not so much suicidal empathy as suicidal imbecility.
Why is Britain still in this state of denial? Because to act against this threat would be to tear up some of the core illusions of the western liberal. Such as that everyone in the world is like westerners in merely wanting a good life for themselves and their families. That turning away strangers is cruel, and compassion trumps everything else including national security. And that what needs to be done to reassert the core tenets of western democratic society — jailing or throwing out extremist imams, restricting Muslim immigration and banning sharia as innately subversive of the core principle of one law for all — would be intolerably authoritarian.
The government is also terrified of civil war, just as it was in 2003 when anti-terrorist police discovered a weapons store inside Finsbury Park Mosque. But with the British public increasingly in revolt against Londonistan, the government may be guaranteeing the civil disorder it so fears — if from the other side.
The British frog has been slowly simmering in the pot for years. Now it’s starting to boil.
There is an increase in public concern about all this, there’s no doubt, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pass it off as “far right” agitation. The boats are the spark at the moment, but it’s the long pandering to Islamist extremism that’s the key driver, exemplified by this latest case of this Hamas terrorist happily waved in. With Muslim numbers increasing we’re seeing the election, for instance, of “Gaza MPs” in Muslim majority constituencies with no concern for UK politics but an obsession with Gaza. The Greens are shamelessly playing to the Muslim vote, but, more alarmingly, so is the Labour government.
Can Islam be compatible with a liberal western democracy? The unfortunate answer is that we’re making no effort to find out. We accept Islam as presented by its most extreme propagators, make no effort to ban hard-line preachers, or set limits on the wearing of burqas and the like. Our leading figures, like the hapless Archbishop of Canterbury, grin weakly as they’re confronted by a woman covered in a sack who’s only there because the Muslim cleric doesn’t want to be touched by a female. It’s all so pathetic….
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