Wednesday, August 16, 2006

This was in the Sunday Buisness Post an english newspaper, it's certainly a minority piece, not something that most papers dare print yet it clearly states the obvious.
 
Failing to confront the enemy within
15 August 2006
LAST summer, Great Britain was shocked to discover that some of its own – four British citizens of Asian descent – hated their native country so much that they were prepared on 7 July to detonate suicide bombs on London buses and the Underground to kill themselves and 52 innocents. This weekend, with over 20 British-born Muslims locked up under suspicion of plotting another despicable terrorist attack – but on a far grander scale – it should be clear to all but the wilfully blind that the size, scope and murderous intent of Britain’s enemy within is the most pressing problem facing the country.

During the relative quiet since the abortive copycat bombings on 21 July last year few wanted to believe that there were more attacks to come, especially not from young people born, educated and raised in the United Kingdom. But it was merely the lull before the real storm: Britain’s home-grown terror threat is greater than ever before because a small but deadly minority of young British Muslims hate the country of their birth and its prevailing non-Muslim culture. This threat from British Muslim nihilism is made all the more dangerous because the default response of a soft-headed British Establishment – including police chiefs more anxious to parade their politically-correct credentials than catch criminals and judges who play into terrorists’ hands by elevating civil liberties above national security even in time of crisis – is to worry more about the growth of so-called Islamophobia in non-Muslim Britain than to do everything it takes to root the Islamist terrorists and would-be terrorists in our midst.

Yet there is now a clear pattern evolving in the process that creates the enemy within: young Muslim men (including some recent converts), usually from honest and hard-working families – more middle-class than under-class – are radicalised after exposure to extreme Islamist elements in Britain and during subsequent and inevitable trips to Pakistan. They are fed a heady brew of Islamic fundamentalism and anti-western propaganda which exploits undoubted Anglo-American foreign policy failures and perceived injustices in Afghanistan, Iraq and what would be Palestine; and they are nurtured by a British-based Jihad apparatus which thrives under the noses of the British police. Their Islamist certainties are then fanned by the fact that they live in a country increasingly hated by its own political, media, legal and cultural elites whose predominant relativist philosophy eschews moral judgments and allows crime, social decay, feckless welfare dependency and widespread educational failure to eat away at society from within, convincing alienated Muslim youth that they really do live in a sick and disgusting society that deserves to be bombed.

When a society allows vulnerable young minds to be poisoned by Islamo-fascism and does next-to-nothing to stand up for its own traditional values of decency, responsibility, self-discipline, hard work, respect for others and the carefully-constructed freedoms of liberal democracy – indeed, far from standing up for them takes a perverse, right-on pleasure in seeing them wither on the vine – then we should not be surprised when the warped and deluded decide to take matters into their own hands; and they do not even need a global terror network to do it.

We are no longer threatened by an organisation which can be smashed or decapitated: al-Qaeda has had most of its operatives captured and been robbed of its Afghanistan base; Osama bin Laden is now a figurehead, reduced to making home videos. But al-Qaeda is still dangerous as a philosophy and a franchise and Great Britain is more vulnerable than most to it because it hosts the perfect environment for extremism to flourish: inept, politically-correct policing; lax laws on the rights of extremists to congregate, plot and spread hatred; a disastrous culture of easy welfare and failing schools; the ghettoisation of immigrants and religious minorities; pathetic border controls; and an Establishment which believes – and teaches in state schools and spreads through the broadcast media – that Britain is essentially an evil country while terrorists are just misunderstood.

Radical and urgent action needs to be taken; but there is little chance of that under a British government which has failed to enact its own agenda, even after last July’s atrocities. In their aftermath, Tony Blair notoriously produced a 12-point plan promising tighter enforcement of asylum and deportation, blacklists of extremist bookshops and bans on hardline Islamist groups. It was concocted in 10 Downing Street with the usual Blairite desire for eye-catching initiatives and the predictable lack of substance. A year later only three targets have been met and the whole exercise has lost momentum. While the Middle East burns and a terrorist plot greater than 9/11 is hatched on British soil, Mr Blair suns himself in Barbados, providing symbolic and visual evidence, if any more were needed, of his lack of resolve, short attention span, irrelevance and essential decadence when it comes to the great challenges of our time.

But it is not just the head that is rotten; so are the arms and legs. Britain’s police chiefs are now so steeped in political correctness that they have become the useful idiots of the Islamist movement. On Thursday, as the terrible scale of the plot unfolded and the terrorists were rounded up, one senior policeman could not resist mouthing platitudes about the arrests not being an attack on the Muslim “community”, even though nobody had suggested they were. Another Scotland Yard commissioner recently said that the words “Islamic terrorist” would never pass his lips, which merely underlined that his ignorance of what we are up against passeth all understanding. Meanwhile the supreme useful idiot, Sir Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan Police, once declared that “there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim, any more than there is anything wrong with being a fundamentalist Christian.” Not on the face of it – except that, last time we looked, fundamentalist Christians in Britain (such as they are) were not blowing themselves up in crowded Tube trains or trying to blow their fellow citizens out of the sky, unlike their Islamist equivalents.

Sir Ian’s homespun drivel is what passes for profundity in today’s Britain. He and the rest of the British Establishment would be better employed figuring out why it is that Britain has spawned this Islamist enemy within while the United States, perceived by Islamists everywhere as the Great Satan and with a huge Muslim community of its own, has not. American Muslims seem far better integrated than their British counterparts, far prouder to be Americans than Britain’s Muslims are to be British, far quicker to disassociate themselves from those who bring disgrace and dishonour to their religion. You do not see American Muslims burning the Stars and Stripes or chanting “Death to Americans”; yet it is now commonplace in British Islamist demonstrations for Britain to be denigrated and its non-Muslim citizens threatened with retribution.

The reasons for the difference are profound. The American Establishment, confident and proud of its country, provides its immigrants with an inspiring American narrative in which all newcomers are invited to share; the British Establishment, which so often appears ashamed of its own country’s past and present, provides no such narrative (indeed, quite the reverse: those who turn on their adopted country will find plenty of supportive allies in the British elite). The American experience emphasises integration as the way forward for all immigration groups, even if it sometimes ends up with more of a mosaic than a melting pot. The bien pensant British way is to swamp any thought of an inclusive British culture with an emphasis on multi-culturalism, which has produced a de facto apartheid of ghettos and sub-cultures where extremism now breeds.

To the failure of the British elite we must add the failure of the British Muslim community to confront the enemy within its midst. Indeed many British Muslims seem to be in denial, regarding any arrests of suspected terrorists as further evidence of Islamophobia. There is really no such thing as the “Muslim community” but a series of distinct Muslim communities, none of which has produced leaders of wisdom, moderation or distinction.

Attempts by the government to elevate moderate “Muslim leaders” – the type which John Prescott, the preposterous Deputy Prime Minister, was consoling and consulting on Friday – have ended in failure. Most of those wheeled out over the past few days have prefaced their condemnations of terrorism by explaining how they understand the so-called “frustrations” of young British Asians (as if frustration was cause enough to become a suicide bomber) and ludicrous criticism of the police for arresting only Muslims (maybe they should have rounded up a few Baptists as well, just to be even-handed).

Nor is the mantra of the politically-correct – “the moderate Muslim majority” – quite as comforting as its repetition would suggest. Too many British Muslims subscribe to the central Jihadist lie – that the attempt to liberate Iraq from its dictator and the purging of Afghanistan of a great evil were primarily anti-Muslim military campaigns; on the other hand, it is hard to blame them too much for believing such nonsense since a large chunk of the liberal-left British elite believes it too. The real problem for Muslim communities is that within them reside substantial minorities which despise the country in which they live: a recent Populus poll found that 13% of British Muslims – equivalent to at least 125,000 adults – believe the 7 July bombers should be regarded as “martyrs”; 7% think suicide attacks on civilians justified, 16% see them as fine for military targets; 2% even said they would be proud if a family member joined al-Qaeda. Minorities, to be sure. But big enough minorities to provide a steady stream of home-grown fanatics for the foreseeable future.

Sadly, there is no stomach for a fundamental reappraisal of the underlying factors which have produced Britain’s new enemy within, on either the Left or the Right. So, for now, all that can usefully be done is to pursue the successful prosecution of those who were plotting to blow us up. This is by no means a foregone conclusion: British prosecutors have a lamentable track record in securing the conviction and jailing of Islamist terrorists. If all (or most of) the suspects arrested last week have eventually to be released, it would be the final humiliation of Britain’s security forces (the folks that brought us WMD in Iraq, the killing of an innocent Brazilian after 7 July and, most recently, Forest Gate). It would also leave what remains of the Blair government’s authority in irreparable shreds.

We do not rule it out. Nor do we exclude some Blairite histrionics as a substitute for proper action. It is just possible that Mr Blair will return from Barbados, full to overflowing with the resolve which he whips up for such events, and recall Parliament from its summer slumbers. Expect another 12-point plan and a promise that this time he really will get tough with the judiciary. Then, inevitably, his enthusiasm will cool as resistance is mounted by the leftist media and his proposals are blocked by the institutional political correctness of the police and legal system, leaving the terrorists of Londonistan free to plot further atrocities – one of which will one day succeed on a horrendous scale

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