We have imported hatreds and lost our common identity. Policy will have to be more muscular as a result
Source - Daily Telegraph 29/10/23
The most despicable thing about the rolling anti-Israel protests in London is that they first began not in response to Israeli military action, but to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7.
For three consecutive weekends now, around 100,000 people have lined the streets of London to show their opposition to Israel. In the words of Lord Austin, who witnessed Saturday’s march, there were “lots of signs calling for Israel to be eradicated. [But I] didn’t see any calling for peace, a two-state solution, Gaza to be freed from Hamas or hostages to be released.”
For this is about hatred, not peace. Many of those attending the protests are unembarrassed about supporting the rape and murder of Israeli civilians. Some were content to cry “Allahu akbar!” and chant for “jihad”, a term that the police are eager to explain might sometimes mean a peaceful inner struggle. Some shouted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, a genocidal demand to destroy the state of Israel and cleanse the territory of its Jews.
Others were more precise. Some called for a new intifada, like the last one which killed more than a thousand civilians in terror attacks on buses, nightclubs and restaurants. Some chanted, “Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud jaish al Mohammed Sa’ar Yaud”, citing a famous massacre and warning Jews that “the army of Mohammed is coming”. Some protesters carried fake dead babies soaked in blood.
The desire to play things down, to convince ourselves that this is all about a quarrel in a far away country, might be understandable, but it is profoundly wrong. The people chanting this hatred are almost certainly mostly British nationals. They are doing so in such huge numbers that the police have opted not to enforce the law for fear of wider public disorder. And while the hatred for now is targeted at Jews, it is also meant for the rest of us. One man yelled, “white trash!” at those who lined up to protect the Cenotaph from protesters. One speaker promised an intifada “from London to Gaza”.
And this is just what we can see on our streets. We now know the truth about the systematic sexual abuse of vulnerable white girls by gangs of mainly Muslim men, inculcated with a belief that these dehumanised “kuffar” were worthless. We know about the Batley school teacher who, two and a half years on, remains in hiding with his family after he showed pupils a depiction of the Prophet Mohammed. We know about the show trial, held in a mosque with the police participating, when a Wakefield schoolboy was accused of desecrating a Koran. In all these cases, state organisations themselves were complicit in criminality, threats and violence.
In the past few weeks, video footage from Liverpool, Bradford, Birmingham, Blackburn, Nottingham, Greenwich, London, Leeds and Cheadle show imams saying prayers for the “mujahideen” and victory for the “heroes” of Hamas. They called Jews “the guardians of Satan”. They have asked Allah to: “wipe out the unbelievers”; “destroy [Jews’] houses and homes”; “purify and protect al-Aqsa from the usurper Jews”; and “get rid of the unjust Jews. Count them in numbers, and kill them entirely. Don’t spare one of them.”
There are many other such examples, including praise for martyrdom as a “win-win” and a sermon, at Lewisham Islamic Centre, from the resident imam Shakeel Begg, who in 2016 failed in a libel case against the BBC, which had labelled him an extremist. Most of the venues for these sermons are charities, and many, such as East London Mosque and Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, receive millions of pounds in taxpayer funding, supposedly for providing community services.
Once, when terrorism struck here in the UK, we had anguished debates about these problems. More recently, however, we have become inured. Everything quickly moves on. When Sir David Amess was killed by an Islamist, MPs chose to discuss abuse on social media rather than the ideology that might have driven his murderer. When attacks occur, we are always told to wait until a conviction to debate the motive. Predictably, the debate never comes.
Meanwhile Islamist radicals, and organisations often set up and supported by foreign governments, have learned to exploit the absurdities of our modern politics. They operate the mechanics of our identity corporatism and competitive victimhood with skill. The Crown Prosecution Service, which helped to decide not to prosecute those chanting “jihad” last week, is advised on hate crime by the chair of Finsbury Park Mosque, who has praised Hamas as “martyrs of the resistance”. From the military to the prison service, the public sector is full of such examples.
This extremism, and the radical diversity of our society, with its ethnic tensions and imported hatreds, means the assumptions that informed traditional British policy – pragmatic, informal, light-touch – no longer hold. The diminished commitment to shared norms and our weaker common identity means there is less social trust to sustain our freedoms in the conventional way. The sooner we realise this, the less painful will be the changes we face.
We need a more muscular approach to end this culture of domestic separatism: in immigration, law enforcement, and public policy across the board. The police and CPS must be made to uphold the law, but the law should be tightened to clamp down on incitement, hate speech and extremism. There should be a register of imams and mosques, with unacceptable behaviour leading to preaching bans and closures.
TV channels that broadcast hatred must be shut. Charities that espouse extremist beliefs should be closed down. Foreigners who spread Islamist ideology should be deported. The burqa should be banned in public places, and the hijab banned for school children. Islamic supplementary schools should be regulated properly. The dual jurisdiction of our national law and sharia law must end, with sharia marriages criminalised. Public funding for mosques and Islamic centres must cease.
Some will say this amounts to picking on the Islamic faith, but the problem we face emanates from the Islamic world. Nothing will change until we tell ourselves the truth – and start to act accordingly.
Comments
Post a Comment