Juliet Samuel, in the Times, calls it out:
The most obvious thing that must be said — and I wonder if the Jewish leadership in Downing Street this week said it — is that our situation is a direct result of the mass migration embraced by successive governments for at least a generation. Specifically, it is a result of Muslim mass migration. Under the pressure of this change, established aspects of the British civic settlement are unravelling.
First, a caveat, and then some facts. Islam is a deep and varied religion, whose two billion followers include every kind of person and believer. Islamic culture and empires are replete with wonder and beauty as well as violence and subjugation. But it is of little relevance here to engage in academic argument about the beauty of Sufi architecture, Arabic translations of Aristotle or the sublime invention of algebra. It is equally pointless to argue that Muslims and liberal democracy cannot thrive together. They must. We must.
What concerns us is the disproportionate number of Muslims in this country who hate Jews and Judaism, and the now-unmanageably large number of those susceptible to the idea that it is good and dutiful to attack, harass and kill us. Polling bears out the theory that there are much, much higher levels of anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims than others.…
The rhetoric is not subtle. “Globalise the intifada” is a metaphor only for those conditioned to see beliefs as toys. Believers chanting it know it is a call to import a foreign method of violence. Rising attacks on Jews result directly from prejudice being given permission to move from the dinner table to the street, permission granted by lies and propaganda, lax policing, political weakness and cynicism. What was a latent resentment is now a totalising world view and, for many, a call to arms.
In case any doubt it, there are plenty of imams willing to clarify. Just six weeks after October 7, TalkTV published videos of preachers in mosques around the country discussing the Jews. Here are samples from three sermons: “Curse the Jews and the children of Israel … disperse them, tear apart their communities”; “The stones will speak and say O Muslim, behind me there is a Yehudi, come and kill him”; “Heal our hearts regarding the usurping Jews and in every enemy of you and the Muslims, O God, limit their number, kill them indiscriminately and do not leave any of them alive”. The videos show dozens, if not hundreds, of believers listening respectfully.
What do they believe? I’ve had it explained to me personally in unpleasant circumstances, but there’s plenty online. The Jews in the sermons are the spreaders of evil and sickness. They are the purveyors of perversion, avarice, cruelty, bloodlust, bloodlessness, corruption, cunning, cruelty and the seducer to sin. The foundational belief is that the Jew does not belong, but is akin to a sewage leak in a pond, and eradication is a natural question of hygiene.…
We have to develop a new way of policing ideology in our country, one that is more sophisticated and interventionist, which roots out, and where possible, deports, promoters of strife and the networks that enable them, yet which preserves as many of our liberal norms as possible. As a minimum first step, we should urgently stop importing and naturalising people who harbour ideologies we don’t want.
Because it is these people and their violent beliefs who are the foreign body, not Britain’s Jews. We were here before them and we have woven Britishness into our culture and our culture into Britain. And this is also the path chosen by many, many peaceable Muslims. But if the domineering throngs of others think that because of the hand-wringing and cowardice of our political leaders we, the British, are going to submit to their intimidation and conquest, then they have badly misunderstood the situation.
As she points out, many Muslim countries – Morocco, the UAE and Jordan, for example – already have ways of cutting back the extremism, including banning the Muslim Brotherhood. Somehow we can’t quite manage that here. Indeed the UAE no longer funds students coming to Britain because of the risk of campus radicalisation.
The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Nazi antecedents is better understood in moderate Muslim countries than in Europe. Its founder, Hassan Al Bana, and later ally, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al- Husseini took direct inspiration from the Nazis, with Al Husseini a regular companion and confidant of Hitler and other Nazis. Isis and Hamas can trace their ideological heritage directly to the Nazis. The MB has gained increasing influence in many British mosques over recent decades.. They have openly radicalised increasing numbers of young Muslims. Why isn’t the Muslim Brotherhood proscribed in the UK, as it is in many Muslim countries?
The issue that no one appears to want to confront is that the words calling on Muslims to kill Jews are not plucked out of the air by preachers, they are quoted from the Quran which every Muslim is expected to believe is the eternal literal word of Allah. The Bible calls for Witches to be killed along with disrespectful children but I have never heard a Christian preacher, at least not in my lifetime, or from a mainstream Church, include those injunctions in a sermon. We simply can no longer extend toleration to those who refuse to be tolerant. We must now rigorously apply laws against incitement to murder. Perhaps if that had been done when Iran’s first Ayatollah incited the murder of Salman Rushdie and many UK Muslims did likewise, we would not be in the state we are in today.
Mick Hartley 