The West is a sitting duck while Muslims are in our midst

Robert Henderson

The latest Muslim terrorist massacre has been particularly savage. A Tunisian with French citizenship Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel  deliberately drove a heavy articulated lorry along a crowded road full of people for more than a mile deliberately  killing 84 people  including ten children and injuring dozens more. The injuries to many of the dead were so severe that they  could not  be identified because their faces had been crushed as they went under the wheels of the lorry. The terrorist organisation ISIS  has claimed that the attack was in response to their urging of Muslims in the West to attack non-Muslims with any means they could find including motor vehicles.

What can be done to stop such outrages? The brutal truth is that while large numbers of Muslims are in the West nothing much can be done to stop this form of subcontracted terrorism which is of a  very different nature from  what might be called conventional terrorism. In a conventional terrorist war in a society with a substantial minority (or even an oppressed majority ) from which terrorists are drawn support for terrorism is pyramidal. The troubles in Northern Ireland  are a first rate  example of such a war. At the top are the planners and executive players. Below them are the bomb makers and armourers. Alongside them are the active terrorists carrying out bombings, shootings etc.   Below them come  those willing to provide safe houses for people and weapons. Below them come those who can be relied on to  demonstrate with a degree of violence at the drop of a hat. Below them come the mass of the minority many of whom say “I don’t approve of their methods but I agree with their ends”.  Members of this slyly complicit majority of the minority  are also most unlikely to give information to the police about terrorist activity, not least because they will fear  violent repercussions.  Their passivity and ambivalence provides in Mao’s words “The sea in which the terrorists swim”.

All this interlinking activity provides plenty of opportunity for the security services dealing with such an insurgency to gather intelligence which thwarts planned terrorist acts. Often the intelligence comes into their hands because of the inability of terrorists to keep their plans to themselves, either because they allow themselves to be infiltrated by agents of the state or simply out of vanity. ( Ask any police detective about identifying criminals and they will  tell you a large proportion of criminal convictions come from the inability of criminals to resist the temptation to boast about what they are up to). The need to source weapons and munitions is another weakness because that  brings in people from outside the terrorist organisation and the number of arms suppliers will be limited and more likely to be identified by security services.

Muslim terrorism in the West is something different. To begin with its practitioners are only too willing to commit suicide.  This is rare behaviour amongst conventional terrorists. Members of the Provisional IRA had no such appetite.  It is also a very effective form of terrorism and long recognised as such.  George IIII said  that anyone who was willing to lose their life in an attempt on his life would probably succeed because it was simply impossible to guard against such a determined assassin who would only have to get close enough to stab or shoot him.  The suicide attacker also deprives the attacked of any chance of punishing him or her, a substantial psychological benefit.

It is true that some  of  the circumstances of the conventional terrorist war exists in the war that is now being waged by  Islam against the West  (Islam is waging war over the globe but I shall not deal with that here, although the same basic problem exists everywhere ).  The providing of the “sea in which the terrorists swim”, the at best ambivalent  attitude of many Muslims in the West towards Western society and the sense of victimhood which readily excuses any action they take against Western societies are all active,  but because of its diffuse and laissez faire nature most  of the elements of conventional terrorist war is missing. There may be some outside direction and assistance from the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda  but plainly it is possible, as the latest atrocity shows, to cause mayhem if the terrorist is simply an individual who uses  as his weapon  a motor vehicle.   Moreover,  even if a would-be terrorist wants to use a bomb or a gun it is not that difficult to find instructions on the Internet to make the first and in many parts of the West getting a gun and plenty of ammunition is not difficult. As to getting training in using weapons, if we believe the media reports and security warnings, there are thousands of radicalised Muslims who have come back to the West after receiving such training and battle experience  from places such as Syria, Afghanistan and Libya.  Lone wolf terrorists or terrorists working in small groups have a wide range of terrorist acts they can choose from and it is unrealistic to expect Western security forces to make much of a dent in the number of attacks by such people.

But even where a plot is more substantial and/or may include foreign direction and consequently leave more possible openings for the security forces to come across the plotters, things are not simple. Political correctness puts up  barriers to rigorous investigations. The ready formation of immigrant ghettos make infiltration difficult not least  because wannabe terrorists are  often of an ethnicity  alien to the country in which they are living. This  means that if their group is to be infiltrated it can only be by someone sharing their ethnicity and speaking their language. There is not  a huge number of such people willing to spy on their own community and even if such people are recruited there is a strong likelihood that a significant number will have joined to get information about the security services, that is,  to act as a mole for terrorists.

The last difficulty is the sheer numbers of potential terrorists. To take the UK as an example, there are an estimated 3 million Muslims here.  If one in a thousand was a serious terrorist that would be 3,000  serious terrorists; if one in a hundred there would be 30,000. But whatever the numbers of really serious terrorists to do their work meaningfully  the security services  would have to  investigate many more Muslims, perhaps hundreds of thousands, because polls and research often show, for example, alarming numbers of  Muslims in the West supporting suicide bombings.   These are numbers  which are utterly beyond Britain’s security resources (or those of any other country)  to identify and monitor.

Why  were these very  obvious fifth columns allowed to settle in the West? Because of  an  irrational belief in the potency of human rationality at best and a treasonous hatred of their own societies at worst  of the internationalist elites which have dominated in the West during the last 50 years.  These elites  imagine that human beings are interchangeable and  that claims of culture and  race count for nothing, that human beings can simply be “educated” into accepting mulgticulturalism. Some actively hated their own societies and wilfully encouraged  mass immigration to ensure that their societies were in their words “enriched” by becoming less homogeneous.

The madness is  going on with huge numbers of Muslims still being allowed into the West because Western elites cannot break themselves of their addiction to the internationalist fantasy or are terrified of what will happen now such large numbers of Muslims are in the West. In any sane society the permitting of the mass immigration of those who are antagonistic towards the values of the country which is receiving them would be seen for what it is, treason.  Sooner or later that is what it will be called.

You aint no realist bruv

Robert Henderson

The latest Muslim atrocities in the West  (Paris,  USA and London) has been met with the frantic  recitation of the liberal internationalist’s favourite mantra to explain away such terrorism, namely, it is not committed by Muslims.

The attack in the Leytonstone tube station in outer London set the ball rolling in Britain when the   lone black attacker  shouted  “This is for Syria” prompting the response  “You ain’t no  Muslim bruv” from an onlooker,  a black Londoner  judged by his accent and the fact that he addressed the attacker as “bruv”, a term only common amongst blacks in Britain. The context also suggests  that the man is a Muslim.

The hashtag “You ain’t no  Muslim bruv”  was soon alive on twitter  and lavishly lauded by the politically correct as an example of how  to respond to  someone claiming to be a Muslim who had  stabbed  someone  and tried to  behead them.  The British PM  David Cameron aka NuTory Boy embraced the twitter tag using the cry while in the US Thomas Friedman came up with the all too predictable tag of “You ain’t no American bruv” to describe  Donald Trump after Trump had called for a temporary halt (note the temporary)  to Muslims visiting the USA.

To see how absurd it is to insist that that any person  who commits a violent act in the name of Islam is not a Muslim apply a few cases of  X cannot be a Y because X has committed a violent act to  non-Muslims:

– Christianity  from the time it became the official religion of the Roman Empire  was forced on people whether or not they wanted to be Christians. Hence,   none of the enforcers or the coerced  were Christians.

– The crusaders were not  Christians because they engaged in religious war against Muslims.

– The Catholic Church cannot be Christian because (1)  for the vast majority of its existence  it conducted or supported war against pagans and (2)  for the vast majority of its existence it persecuted mon-Catholics , most notably through the Inquisition.

– Protestants of almost all colours (pacifists like the Quakers are an exception) cannot be Christians because they have persecuted and fought against other Christians, both Protestant and Catholic.

Similar judgements could be made against  those who behaved in an immoral  way in the context of  other religions, for example, Buddhists who are  wilfully  violent, and  Confucians who  rebel against rightful authority. In fact there is not a religion or secular system of morality whose practitioners have not in huge numbers breached the beliefs of  their professed religious or ethical position. This is so because the history of human beings is predominantly a history of aggressive (as opposed to defensive) war, everything from the vendetta to formal warfare.

Then there is the question of the historical behaviour of  Muslims.  Islam from its beginnings was often , if not invariably, spread by the sword.  If   Muslims today are not Muslims if they engage in violence  other than in self-defence against non-Muslims, or Muslims of a different stamp whom they consider to be non-Muslims,  logically it must follow  that all those who have called themselves Muslim in the past were not Muslims if they had committed similar offences.

In short,  it is literally absurd to claim someone is not a true believer of any creed, whether  sacred or profane,  because no ideology is without its heresies,  schisms or the complications of a range of permitted belief.

There is also the ticklish problem that religions or secular ideologies often have concepts of what is moral which clash with other religions and ideologies. Those societies with the vendetta will view  revenge killings as a matter of honour and  entirely moral, while those without the vendetta will see such killing as a murder.

The claim that Muslims engaged in terrorist acts are not true Muslims is made doubly absurd by the fact that the Koran gives plenty of support to Muslims to engage in violence against non-Muslims, something which for groups such as ISIS includes huge numbers of Muslims of the “wrong” stamp.

Absurd or not the politically correct  politically correct  will continue to use the “they are not Muslims” because they desperately   wish to avoid  acknowledging  the frightening truth: that there are now tens of millions of Muslims in the West  who are there because of the immigration policies of the politically correct elites over the past 50 or 60 years . There are nearly three million Muslims in the UK , an increase of 45% since the 2001 census.  The figure for the EU including Britain is 44 million.  The USA has 2.75 million.

It would be no comfort if 99.9% of these people would not dream of engaging in terrorist acts for if even a tiny proportion of such populations   is willing to become terrorists that would mean large numbers of terrorists.  If one Muslim in a thousand in Europe is willing to become a terrorist  that would mean  44,000 Jihadis.  That is what the politically correct are hiding from and which increasingly terrifies them.

Islam is simply incompatible with Western society

Robert Henderson

Seventeen people have  been murdered in the two terrorist attacks in Paris  (between  7-9^th January 2015). Ten were journalists, including some of France’s leading cartoonists,   working for the  French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. To them can be added two policemen, one policewomen and four  members of the general  public who happened to be unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The attacks were made on the Charlie Hebdo offices and  the  Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher. The policewoman was shot in a separate incident.

The terrorist acts  were coordinated to produce maximum effect. That on  Charlie Hebdo was by the  brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi , who were of Algerian ancestry.  A third  brother Mourad Hamyd aged 18  was at school at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack and has spoken to but not been detained by the police. The attack on a Jewish supermarket  was undertaken by a Mailian  Amedy Coulibaly.  He also killed a policewoman before his attack on the Jewish supermarket.  Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, who is of Algerian ancestry,  is thought to be another Muslim fanatic with homicidal tendencies. She is believed to have fled to Syria after  the shooting of the policewoman.

Those who died  at the Charlie Hebdo office were slaughtered  by men  shouting Allahu Akbar (God is great), “We have avenged the prophet!”  [for cartoons of making fun of Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo) and just to make sure the message got across “Tell the media that this is al-Qaeda in Yemen” .   Cherif Koachi also said in a telephone  interview with a magazine  after the killings that the plot was financed by  al Q aeda The Jewish supermarket killer  introduced himself to frightened hostages  with the words ‘I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State’.  All three killers  either expressed a wish for martyrdom or  behaved in a way in which was guaranteed to get  them killed.   All three were shot and killed by French security forces.

Unless  you are a particularly stupid and self-deluding  liberal  and have either persuaded yourself  that  this was a black op and the killers were agents of the wicked old West or have fallen back on that old liberal favourite  that the killers  are not true  Muslims  – congratulations to the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley for being so quick off the mark with that piece of shrieking inanity   –  you will think these are Muslim terrorists.  (The next time you encounter someone spinning the “not true Muslims” line ask them whether  the Crusaders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Christians).

Sadly there are many liberals who have not learnt the lesson dealt out by these atrocities. It is true that there has been almost complete condemnation of the killings by the liberal elites around the Western world, but one wonders how unqualified and sincere their regret and anger is.  Apart from the  liberal apologist  mantras  “not true Muslims”, “Just a tiny minority of Muslims” and “Islam is the religion of peace”   being  much in evidence, there has  been a disagreeable media eagerness to portray the killers as sophisticated military beasts. Here is a prime  example from the Telegraph:

“They wear army-style boots and have a military appearance and manner. One of the men wears a sand-coloured ammunition vest apparently stuffed with spare magazines. Some reports suggest that an attacker was also carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“The men attacked the magazine’s headquarters with clinical precision, killing their victims and then shooting two police officers in the street outside.

“Amateur footage shows them using classic infantry tactics. They move along the street outside the office working as a pair: one advances while the other gives cover.

“Instead of spraying automatic gunfire, they fire two aimed shots at each target – a pattern known as “double-tap” firing – thereby conserving their ammunition.”

Shades of white liberals in the 1960s drooling over the Black Panthers in the USA  .

The truth is that the attackers did not behave like highly trained soldiers, and some of the reporting was simply wrong, for example, after the slaughter the killers,  as was widely reported , did not walk calmly back to the stolen  car  they were using but ran.  When they abandoned the car one of the killers left his identity card behind. After the murders at Charlie Hebdo the  two killers drove around  like headless chickens hijacking cars and holding up petrol stations to obtain food and water.  If they had really been cold, calculating beasts they would either have stayed where they were after the Charlie Hebdo killings and died in a firefight with the French police or arranged matters so that they had a hiding  place  to go to and  would  carried things like a little  food and water with them.  The widespread media  depiction of them as quasi-military figures glamourized and sanitised what they were.

The British political mainstream response

But it would be wrong to say nothing changed in Britain after the attacks. The Ukip leader Nigel Farage broke new ground for a mainstream British politician in modern Britain  by speaking of  a fifth column of people who hate us within Britain.

“There is a very strong argument that says that what happened in Paris is a result – and we’ve seen it in London too – is a result I’m afraid of now having a fifth column living within these countries.

“We’ve got people living in these countries, holding our passports, who hate us.

“Luckily their numbers are very, very small but it does make one question the whole really gross attempt at encouraged division within society that we have had in the past few decades in the name of multiculturalism.”

This was predictably  condemned by David Cameron, a  man who incredibly  still believes Turkey within the EU would be of great benefit to all concerned,  despite the anger and dismay in Britain about mass immigration generally making the prospect  of 70 million Turkish Muslims having a right to move freely within the EU certain to be  utterly dismaying to most native Britons. Interestingly, a would-be successor to Cameron as Tory leader, Liam Fox,  edged a long way towards reality in an article for the  Sunday Telegraph:

“All those who do not share their fundamentalist views are sworn enemies, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, Arab or non-Arab. It is the first lesson that we must understand – they hate us all because of who we are, our views, our values and our history. Western liberal apologists who tell us that the violence being directed at us is all of our own making not only fail to understand reality, but put us at increased risk.

“We must understand that there are fanatics who cannot be reconciled to our values and who will attempt to destroy us by any means possible. They are at war with us. They do not lack the intent to kill us, merely the means to do so, and our first response must be to deny them that capability. Sometimes that will require lethal force.”

The fact that Farage also condemned multiculturalism in no uncertain terms  provoked an automated politically correct response from the leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg:

“The Deputy Prime Minister hit out after Mr Farage suggested the attack on the offices of a satirical magazine should lead to questions about the UK’s “gross policy of multiculturalism”.

“I am dismayed that Nigel Farage immediately thinks, on the back of the bloody murders that we saw on the streets of Paris yesterday, his first reflex is to make political points,” Mr Clegg said during his weekly phone-in on LBC radio.

“If this does come down, as it appears to be the case, to two individuals who perverted the cause of Islam to their own bloody ends, let’s remember that the greatest antidote to the perversion of that great world religion are law-abiding British Muslims themselves.

“And to immediately … imply that many, many British Muslims who I know feel fervently British but also are very proud of their Muslim faith are somehow part of the problem rather than part of the solution is firmly grabbing the wrong end of the stick.”

Such  condemnations are of little account because Farage has spoken an obvious truth and the general public will understand that.  The promotion of multiculturalism has been generally pernicious because it wilfully creates serious divisions within a society,  but is unreservedly toxic in the case of Islam because Muslims,  violent and non-violent, believe in the supremacy of their religion.

The change of language by public figures particularly politicians is of the first importance because the general  public need a lead to be given where a matter is contentious. In these politically correct times it is particularly necessary  because the native population of Britain have been thoroughly intimidated by the totalitarian application of political correctness which has resulted in people saying non-pc things  losing their jobs, being arrested and,  in a growing number of cases , being brought before a criminal court to face charges.

Once things  forbidden by political correctness are  said by public figures change could be very fast. More and more people will embrace the forbidden words and ideas and, like a dam bursting, the  flood  of non-pc  voices will  overwhelm the politically correct restraints on speech and writing.

A tiny proportion of  Muslims

The  claim is routinely made by the  politically correct Western elites and “moderate” Muslims  that those committing terrorist atrocities are a tiny proportion of Muslims.  That is pedantically true but unimportant,  because it is to misunderstand the dynamic of terrorism which rests on a pyramid of commitment and support for the cause. At the top are  the leaders. Below them are those willing to carry out terrorist acts.  Supporting them will be those who make the bombs, acquire guns and so on. Below them will come those who are willing to raise funds through criminal behaviour such as extortion and drug dealing and administer  punishment – anything from death to beatings –  to those within the ambit of the group who are deemed to have failed to do what they were told or worse betrayed  the group.  Next will come those willing to provide safe houses for people and weaponry.  Then there are  those willing to provide information and come out on the streets to demonstrate at the drop of a hat.  At the bottom of conscious supporters will come the  “I disagree with  their methods but…”  people.   They say they support the ends of the terrorists but do not support terrorist  acts. This presses the terrorist demands forward because the public will remember their support for the ends and forget the means because it is the ends which engage the emotions . Those who are familiar with the Provisional IRA during the troubles in Northern Ireland will recognise this  character list  with ease. Moreover, even those from a community from which  terrorists  hail who refuse to offer conscious support  will   aid the terrorists’  cause by providing in Mao’s words “the ocean in which terrorists swim”.

There are differences in the detail of how terrorist organisations act, for example,  PIRA operated in a quasi-military structure  with a central command while Muslim terrorism is increasingly subcontracted  to individuals who act on their own. But however a terrorist movement is organised  the  general sociological structure of support described above is the same  whenever there is a terrorist group which is ostensibly promoting the interests of a sizeable minority and that minority has, justified or not, a sense of victimhood which can be nourished by the terrorists . Where the terrorists can offer a cause which promises not merely  the gaining of advantages by the group but of  the completion of some greater plan its potency is greatly enhanced.  Marxism had the communist Utopia and the sense of working towards final end of history; the great religions offer, through the attainment of some beatific afterlife, the favour of God’s will for their society and the completion of God’s plan.  Islam has those qualities in spades.

All this means that  though the active terrorists may be few , the effectiveness of the terrorist machine relies on large numbers who will offer some degree of support.   Consequently, the fact that the number of Muslims committing terrorist acts may be a tiny proportion of the total Muslim population is irrelevant. What matters is the pyramid of support which at its broadest will  include all Muslims because it is the total population which provides “the ocean in which the terrorist  may swim”.

There is also good evidence that large minority of Muslims in Britain support the methods of  Islamic terrorists, for example an NOP Poll in 2006 found that around a quarter of  British Muslims  said the  7/7 bombings in London in July 2005 were justified because of Britain’s involvement in the “War on Terror”.  There is also plenty of British Muslim support for the imposition of Sharia Law on Britain and some  Muslim children are confused as to whether it is Sharia Law or British Law  which is the law of the land. There are also growing numbers of Sharia Courts in Britain which allow disputes between Muslims to be decided outside of the British legal system.

Importantly,   it is not a case of just  the poor and the ignorant only holding  such views. Young educated Muslims are  if anything more enthusiastic than the average British Muslim to have Sharia Law with 40%  in favour and no less than 32% favouring killing  for Islam if the religion is deemed to have been slighted in some way. All of this points to a considerable reservoir of support for the ends of Muslim terrorists if not always the means.  Many Muslims in the West  would not be prepared to engage in violent acts themselves ,  but they would quite happily accept privileges for their religion and themselves won by the sword.

How should the West react to Muslim terrorism?

How should the West react?  In principle it should be simple. There is no need for gratuitous abuse, no need for laboured reasons why Islam is this or that. All that needs to be recognised  is that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy because in its moral choices it is a belief system  which runs directly counter to liberal democracy and has as  its end game the subjugation  of the entire world.

What effective  action can Western governments do to prevent the gradual  erosion of  the values upon which their societies are built? ? There are three general  possibilities. These are:

1. Logically, the ideal for any Western government committed to their country’s national interest would  be to expel all Muslims from their territory as a matter of policy with no legal process allowed.   That is because  (1) there is no way of knowing who will become a terrorist;  (2) a large population of Muslims provides the “ocean in which the terrorist swims “ and (3)  any action disadvantaging Muslims short of expulsion will breed terrorists.
2. A less comprehensive programme would be to block all further Muslim immigration, ban all Muslim religious schools,  cease funding any Muslim organisations, deport any Muslim without British citizenship, remove the British citizenship of any Muslim with dual nationality and deport them back to the country  for which they hold citizenship.  The question of legal aid would not arise because  their would be no appeal allowed as the policy deals in absolutes: you are a Muslim either without British citizenship or with dual nationality and you qualify for deportation . The difficulty with that set of policies is it would  allow a large population to remain within the West and would create resentment amongst that population which could lead to terrorism.
3. The least dynamic government action would be to implement programme 2 but allow any Muslim with British citizenship or long term residency to appeal expulsion through the courts. That would have the disadvantages of programme 2 plus the added opportunity for endless delay as appeals are heard and re-heard. Such a system would also require legal aid to be given if the judicial process was to be sound.

Will anything like this happen? Most improbable at least in the short term.  The West is ruled by elites who worship at the altar of  political correctness.  Theirs in a fantasy world in which human beings are interchangeable and institutions such as the nation state  are seen as  outmoded relics as homo sapiens marches steadily towards the sunlit uplands of a world moulded and controlled  by  the rigid totalitarian dicta of  political correctness .

For such people the mindset of anyone willing to die for an idea is simply alien to them.  Even more remote to these elites  is the belief that there is an afterlife which is much to be preferred to life on Earth. Most damaging of all they cannot conceive of people who have no interest in compromise and consequently will be remorseless in their pursuit of their goal. The liberal  mistakenly believes that simply by contact with the West will  the values the liberal espouses be transferred to the rest of the world. This incredibly arrogant fantasy can be seen at its most potent in their attitude to  China, which is  quietly but efficiently creating a world empire by buying influence, and in the Middle East and North Africa where the attempt to transfer liberal  values by a mixture of force and material aid has been a shrieking failure which mocks the liberal every second of every day.

Because of such ideas Western elites are only too likely to keep fudging the issue and conceding, not necessarily right away, more and more privileges to Muslins within their societies. They will also probably greatly increase funding for “moderate” Muslims to enter Schools and Mosques to teach Western values. This will drive many young Muslims towards extremism not away from it because however the teaching of British or Western values is conducted it will inevitably be seen as a criticism of Islam.  Older Muslims will also be angered at such  teaching of their children.  Anything the liberal is likely  to do will simply be throwing  petrol on the fire.

What is required is the replacement of the present elites either by removing them from power or by them changing their tune utterly.  The first is improbable in Britain because of the structure of the voting system  which hugely protects the status quo and a complicit mainstream media which shares the devotion to political correctness and manipulates access to favour parties and politicians which play the politically correct game.

But the changing of political tune is a real possibility because liberals are starting to get truly frightened as they realise things could get seriously out of control if Muslim terrorism continues to occur. There is also the fact that white liberals  recognise in some part of their minds that what they ostensibly espouse – the joy of diversity – is bogus.  This can be seen by how they so often arrange  their own lives  to ensure that they live in very  white and in England very English circumstances. The  massive white flight away from places such as  inner London and Birmingham bears stark witness to this.  Being capable of the greatest self-delusion they explain their hypocrisy by telling themselves that this is only because the great project of producing a country, nay a world, fit for the politically correct to love in, has tragically not been fully realised yet because  the outmoded non-pc  ideas and emotions still exists  as people have not yet been educated to see the error of their primitive ways such as believing in the nation state and a homogenous society. But in their heart of hearts they know they would dread to live in the conditions to which they have sanguinely consigned the white working class.

Liberals  may also have the beginnings of a terror that their permitting of mass immigration, the promotion of multiculturalism and the suppression of dissent from their own native populations will soon come to be called by its true name, treason. All these fears will act as a motor to drive the liberal elites to become more and more realistic about what  needs to be done.

The question every non-Muslim  in the West needs to answer is this, do you really believe that if Muslims become the majority in a Western country they will not do what Islam has done everywhere else in the world where they are  in the majority and at best place Islam within a greatly privileged position within the state or at worst create a Muslim theocracy?  Even Turkey, the liberals’ favourite example of a Muslim majority secular democracy, is rapidly moving towards a position when it cannot meaningfully be called a democracy or secular as Islamic parties gain more and more leverage and the Prime Minister Erdogan becomes ever more autocratic.

If a person’s answer to the question I posed is no, then they need to answer another question, do I want to live in such a society? If  their answer is no then they must  be willing to fight for their way of life or the “religion of peace” will change their society beyond recognition.

When I hear someone describing Islam as the “religion of peace”  I am irresistibly reminded of the aliens in the film Independence Day emerging from their spaceship yelling “We come in peace” before blasting every human in sight.  The white liberals who peddle into the “religion of peace” propaganda should be constantly called upon to explain why it is that a “religion of peace” can be so unfailingly successful in attracting people who say they subscribe to it yet are unremittingly cruel and violent.

The white liberal fantasy collides head-on with the reality of Islam

Robert  Henderson

NB: The territory taken from Iraq and Syria has gone by various titles: ISIS, ISIL and IS.  I shall use ISIS standing for the  Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

The present mess in the Middle East and North Africa is largely the creation of the prime political absurdity which lies at the heart of the  modern liberal fantasy, namely,  that what they call  liberal democracy  (in truth a politically correct illiberal state)  can be manufactured if only the right circumstances are created.  This woefully wrongheaded  idea  reprises the mistake made during the dissolution of the  British Empire. The British withdrawal strategy was simple: for each ex-colony create the formal structures of a parliamentary democracy – parliaments, written constitutions, electoral systems and so on – and then,  like a climbing plant covering a trellis, democratic behaviour  would grow and wrap itself around the formal structures.  It was at best laughably naïve and at worst a cynical fig leaf  to cover the unseemly haste with which Britain relinquished control of  her colonies.

The  reason why the British post-colonial strategy failed is  beautifully simple: political systems  cannot  be self-consciously created. They are organic growths. When it comes to  representative  government elected on a broad franchise  ( a more honest description of the  reality than  democracy) ,  such growths are remarkably rare. Look around the world and see how many secure representative  political systems  there are. The Britain, the  USA,  Canada, Australia and New Zealand qualify because they have such representative systems and have  not experienced violent revolution either at all or for centuries.  All are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Who else? Switzerland and Iceland. Being generous we can perhaps add  the Scandinavians and Holland.  For the rest, including all the major European states,  there is not one which has not had governments overthrown  since 1900 by outright violence committed by the native population or by unconstitutional means.

To the rarity of stable and lasting representative government growing organically,  can be added the problem of  territories with  immense ethnic and racial variety  routinely producing disputed elections  on the grounds of electoral fraud or falling into  violence afterwards because one particular  ethnic or racial   group believes they are being hard done by.   Indeed, such ethnic and racial variety is probably the  prime reason why stable representative government is so rare.   Such disabling heterogeneity  was the situation with  the colonies Britain freed after 1945 and is the situation with the ethnic, racial and religious kaleidoscope  that is the Middle East and North Africa.

The fruits of recent Western meddling

A complaint is often made that the European colonial powers caused much of the post-colonial difficulty through their drawing of colonial boundaries which produced territories without a natural national  unity. This complaint does not hold water. It is not that the European imperial powers did not draw such boundaries, but rather that it would not have made any general difference where the boundaries were drawn because  the same problem would  have arisen as a consequence of the exceptionally diverse nature of the lands involved. There were no  discrete territories   with populations which were large enough and  homogeneous enough  in race,  religion  and culture to form a  natural nation state.   That was the case with the Middle East and North Africa.

The consequences of Western interference in the Islamic world since the turn of the century  has been  uniformly dismal: it has either  replaced harsh order with growing chaos or replaced one dictatorship with another.  Consider  how the present situation in the Middle East and North Africa  has come about. First, Bush junior and Blair go gallivanting into Afghanistan and reduce that to a battleground for violent Islam and tribal hatreds and jealousies to play out.    From there they decide to meddle in Iraq by invading on the  entirely spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the West because he had weapons of mass destruction.   That the  UN Weapons inspectors reported  they had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction and asked for more time counted for nothing. Neither did  the fact that at the time of the invasion  Saddam was being  restrained in his behaviour  by  sanctions and a Western-enforced no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas.  Having deposed Saddam and his regime Iraq was placed under a military occupation which went the way of all military occupations, gradual dissolution through the exhaustion of the occupying power.

Then came the miserably entitled Arab Spring, whose fruits  have been bitter indeed. Because there are natural  nation states in the area, the “Arab Spring” was doomed to the horrific failure it has been because the states involved were all fissile territories whose diverse populations were only held in check from internecine fighting by harsh dictators, whether republican or monarchical. The facile cheerleading of  Western politicians and liberals generally was adolescent in its self-indulgent idealism and encouraged the populations in the Arab world to rebel when they had absolutely no chance of producing anything other than chaos or another dictatorship.

Libya has been reduced to a state of anarchy with rival militias, tribes, gangs – call them what you will- making hay with the weapons made freely available by the overthrow of Gadhafi, with violent Islam joining in.   With a grim irony Egypt has swapped a  covert  military dictatorship for an overt military dictatorship,  whilst dispensing with an elected  if Islamist president on the way.  Iraq has lurched into an increasing state of disorder  as the US has gradually withdrawn  and is now divided between Iraq, Kurdistan and   ISIS.

Most gruesomely for Western politicians,  the tyrant of Syria, Bashir Assad,   has withstood the attempts, vociferously supported by the West, to destroy him and his regime by the  rag-tag  and politically indeterminate “Free Syrian Army” and is now through the emergence of ISIS  the only  plausible obstacle to ISIS ‘ continued existence and expansion.  If realpolitik ruled the West would be acting in concert with Assad , but because they have labelled him a devil they cannot bring themselves to do the sensible thing and make common cause with him so that he can restore some sort of order to Syria.  Liberals who shudder at this should bear in mind how often they have been in bed with the most insanitary  bedfellows – Stalin, Mao and  the Taliban in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation to mention a few.  Sometimes it is necessary to take the my enemy’s enemy is my friend route to protect the national interest.

What can and should be done now by the West? 

The liberal warmongers  are ever more eagerly saying that  If the West does not intervene militarily  to destroy  aggressive Islam then  parts of the  Middle East  will be breeding grounds and safe havens for terrorists to carry their terror into the West.  That may or may not be true , but  if the West does intervene militarily to successfully snuff out  ISIS,  then the likelihood would be that ISIS members, especially those who come from Western states, would  return to their various countries determined to wage terrorist war there. Moreover, the West would be committed to remaining indefinitely in the territory they have taken from ISIS, their very presence being a standing motive for violent Muslims in the West to attack the countries which harbour them.

Nor would the destruction of  ISIS in Iraq and Syria be an end of violent Islam creating havens to protect, train and send terrorists into to the West.   Afghanistan is ripe to fall to the Taliban once  Western military forces are withdrawn.   Parts of Pakistan are controlled by violent Islam.  Libya  is little more than a geographical expression filled with petty warlords  and ripe for violent Islam to go to if it is not already there.    Deeper into Africa there is  Boko Haram spreading throughout the West.  In the East   Kenya  and Uganda  suffer from Muslim  terrorist attacks,   Ethiopia  and Somalia have serious  Islamist incursions to deal with,  while  in Sudan  violent Islam holds power. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to point to parts of Africa which remain untouched by violent Islam.

The plain truth is that even if the West were willing and able to suppress ISIS  in Syria and Iraq by force, they could never control violent Islam because violent Islam would simply keep on the move from one accommodating territory  to another.

How serious a threat to the West  is ISIS?

The potential of ISIS to create a lasting  aggressive and powerful  Islamic state is grossly  overblown.  It  has taken a great deal of territory very rapidly,  but that is unsurprising in a place like the Middle East where  there is a good deal of desert and  the  formal states whose land  has been captured  were  all  in some governmental disarray , which is  not a recipe for inspiring troops to resolutely  fight a determined  aggressor such as ISIS.   In the case of Iraq the  discriminatory behaviour of the Maliki government had seriously alienated the Sunni minority through his highly discriminatory behaviour in favour of the Shia majority.   This has provided a  reason for Iraqi Sunnis to have some fellow feeling with the Sunni  ISIS and consequently to tolerate or even welcome ISIS violence directed at the non-Sunni parts of the population.    Moreover, even where there are  large numbers of people  willing to  resist  ISIS, as appears to be the case in Kurdistan,   that  is of little avail if they are equipped with much inferior weaponry and training.

But taking territory is one thing, maintaining control of it quite another.  That is particularly the case where the territory conquered has a  population which is  chronically divided by religion  and ethnicity and is spread over several formal states.  ISIS need to  rapidly show they are up to administering the land  they have taken.  Easier said than done, especially as they are likely to be engaging in warfare for quite some time to come, both with elements within the territory they have taken and from outside. Terror tactics only take a conqueror go so far. They are not a sufficient basis for ruling.

There is also considerable scope for ISIS  to fracture because  the land they have captured is ethnically and religiously diverse. Moreover,  the ISIS personnel is very cosmopolitan and may come to be resented by even the native Sunnis in the ISIS territory. In addition,  ISIS will have to fight the remnant of Iraq (with its hostile Shia majority) and Assad’s Syrian Army.  There is also the possibility that Iran may join in to protect the Shia population of the captured territories.

Much has been made of the modern weaponry and auxiliary military equipment  ISIS have taken , but the  equipment will require considerable expertise to maintain and operate it.  Such  skills, especially those  needed to maintain the equipment,  will  probably not be available in the quantities needed. Moreover, ISIS will need to buy more modern weaponry, especially munitions,  as time goes on and it is not clear who will sell it to them in sufficient quantity and quality.

A  ghastly irony for  the West, and most particularly the USA,  is the fact that they have supplied much of the military equipment which ISIS are using , either because the equipment has been captured from Iraqi forces or because the equipment was supplied by the West to the Syrian rebels fighting Assad, significant  numbers of whom share the mentality of ISIS or may even be part of ISIS.     The fact that ISIS have had the success they have  had is unsurprising given the circumstances. Keeping hold of what they have will take up all their energies for the foreseeable future.

The enemy within

The real threat to the West comes not from ISIS but the large Muslim populations in the West , which the treacherous and deluded liberal internationalists have allowed to settle as they pursued their fatuous dream  of a  world without borders or nation states.  The last UK Census in 2011 shows  2.7 million people identifying themselves as Muslims   (4.8 per cent of the population). This is almost certainly substantially less than the real figure because the Census depends on self-reporting and  there is a significant minority of the UK population who never complete the Census form  because they are either here illegally or have a mentality which makes them think that giving any information about themselves to any  government is dangerous.

How does the West protect itself  from homicidal Muslims within its own territory?  It would be a next to  impossible question to find an adequate answer to even in  a country which has meaningful border controls because of the number of Muslims born and bred in the West.    In a country such as Britain which effectively has open borders,   the question becomes  not merely hideously difficult but absurd.

In Britain the Coalition government has floundered around talking about removing passports from people  trying to leave Britain if they are suspected Jihadis, , the banning  from Britain of those  who have been in Iraq and Syria, the reintroduction of control orders  and,  most pathetically, the idea that Muslim coming back from fighting for ISIS can be turned into good British citizens through re-education.   Even if such policies are put in force the idea that this would seriously hinder Muslim terrorists in Britain is laughable because of the numbers of Muslims living here as British citizens. The current official estimate of British Muslims fighting in in Iraq and Syria is 500. That is probably an underestimate, but even if it was only 500 that would be more than enough to create severe problems in this country. As for the British Muslim population in general, there is evidence that a substantial portion of them share the “I don’t agree with their methods but…” mentality of Irish Republicans towards the Provisional IRA.

The Western political response

Any action by Western politicians is problematic because  as a class they have  lost the ability to instinctively  act in the national interests of the people they are supposed to represent. They ignore   the first duty of a politician in a democracy which is to ask what is best for their own people. Instead their  calamitous mentality is that described in Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints” where the response of politicians and the liberal elite generally to the  passive-aggressive  misery of huge numbers of migrants from the Third World  arriving in the West overwhelms the needs of their own people.

But  Western political elites are becoming seriously afraid of both the danger represented by violent Muslims in their countries and the anger of their native populations .   As a consequence there are things being said now by public figures which would have been unthinkable only a few short weeks ago.   The one-time Shadow Home Secretary David Davis pushes for  British Muslims who go to fight with the likes of Isis to be stripped of their British citizenship regardless of whether this leaves them stateless  so that  their  “trip to Syria is no longer a short violent holiday but a life sentence to the lifestyle they claim to espouse, complete with Sharia law and a desert climate”.  The Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage advocates the same thing while the  former  Archbishop of Canterbury  Lord Carey says that “ Multiculturalism has resulted in honour killings, female genital mutilation and rule by Sharia law” and supports the call to remove British citizenship from those who go to join  violent Islam.  The Mayor London Boris Johnson wants Muslims returning from Syria and Iraq to be considered guilty until proven innocent of terrorist activity, a bald reversal of the ancient right under English law to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The journalist Leo McKinstry  places the responsibility for the present danger firmly on successive British governments :

“The fact is that extremism has flourished in a climate formed by the twin strategies of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Open borders have led to a phenomenal expansion in Britain’s Muslim population to almost three million, many of the new arrivals hailing from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Islamic sectarianism is rife.

At the same time the dogma of cultural diversity has become one of the central obsessions of the state. We are constantly told that we must celebrate the vibrant enrichment of our society. But, by its emphasis on cultural differences and its loathing for traditional British values the doctrine of diversity has been a catastrophe for Britain.

In place of integration it has promoted division and separatism. We are a land increasingly without a mutual sense of belonging or shared national identity. It is little wonder that, according to one recent survey, 26 per cent of Muslims here said they feel no loyalty to Britain.”

The problem is that while the public rhetoric is changing  nothing significant  alters on the ground. The words change but the circumstances remain much  the same.  The Western  liberal elites are still  paralysed by both political correctness and the ghastly fact that dangerous fifth columns now exist because of their mass immigration policies and the consequent need to suppress native British  dissent about its effects.  In addition through their policy of multiculturalism the liberal elite has encouraged  ethnic and racial minorities to both live culturally apart from and  behave in a  flagrantly provocative manner towards the native population.  The upshot of all this is that those with power in the West  dare not admit there is a general problem amongst immigrant communities ( which live largely separate lives in their own communities)   because to do so would be to admit that the fault lay with them.

In an attempt to circumvent the danger of being held to account, Western politicians and the mainstream media try to peddle the “violent Muslims are only a tiny percentage of Muslims living amongst us; the vast majority  are well educated, peace loving, hardworking  law abiding citizens”.   This is a dubious proposition  in itself when the crime, educational attainment, benefit  take up  and unemployment statistics throughout the West show Muslims to be  more prone to crime, to have below average educational attainment  and are more likely to be unemployed or on in-work benefits than the population as a whole. But even if none of those things were true the problem of violent Islam in Britain would still be there because many of the Muslims who have been outed as  sharing violent Islam’s ideas are not from the lower reaches of society.

The important thing to understand is that it is never the peaceful minority which counts in these circumstances.  What matters is the terrorist minority. They drive the terror and enlist the non-violent to aid them  in various ways.  The Provisional IRA (PIRA) in Ireland probably never had no more than a thousand  people actively engaged in terrorism: sanctioning and planning terrorist attacks, making bombs, planting bombs, killing or  maiming those thought to untrustworthy or simply disobedient to PIRA’s will.  But there  were very large numbers who were willing to provide PIRA  with safe houses, to  store of weapons, to tell PIRA about  informers and come out  on the streets at the drop of a hat to protest in the PIRA interest.   In addition, the existence of a large population with a very well nourished  sense of victimhood  (the Irish Catholics) allowed in Mao’s words  the PIRA “guerrilla to move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. “

But there are terrorist and terrorists. There are two  radical differences between PIRA and violent Islam.  PIRA were not driven by religious fanaticism (it was a Marxist organisation) and its members were drawn from communities which shared similar moral values to those of the British.  This meant that when the time came to make a peace  of sorts between Britain and Irish Republicans there was a great deal  of cultural similarity between the two parties.   The representatives of violent Islam, even those born and bred here, will have little fellow feeling  with or understanding of  the native British population.

The second and most important difference is that the  nature of  the PIRA and ISIS  end games. For PIRA it was a united Ireland. That was a genuinely possibility because the British government accepted that if Northern Ireland voted for union with the Irish Republic they could have it provided the Republic agreed. Although hardline members of PIRA did not want to make peace,  many PIRA members did , together with  a majority of ordinary republicans . Crucially, the republicans  in favour of peace could see it simply as a stepping stone to the unification of Ireland, not as a defeat for their cause.  In addition, the demographics of Northern Ireland were heading towards a Catholic and therefore largely republican majority by the time peace was formally made.  That also gave republicans hope.

Violent Islam does not have an end game which any Western government could concede either in  whole or in part. Its practitioners want the overthrow of Western society and the imposition of Islam.  There is no conception of compromise. If Britain existed under the control of such people it would be an unforgiving theocracy.  Because violent Islam is implacable,  no concession short of outright victory for violent Islam will end the violence.  If Western governments make concessions such as granting Sharia courts parity with civil courts violent Islam will simply pocket the bribe and march on towards the final end of total dominance.

Where does this leave the West?   It leaves the countries with large Muslim populations at perpetual risk from both terrorism and the likelihood of Western elites diluting their own cultural integrity by  attempting to appease Muslims by granting them more and more privileges. These  risks will  increase because Western Muslims  have higher  birth rates than native Western populations. In addition,  further substantial Muslim immigration  will probably occur because Western governments will try to placate Muslims by relaxing entry requirements and  border controls are always likely to be ineffective.  Black Western converts to Islam could also swell the numbers significantly.

Is there a silver lining or two amongst the Islamic clouds?   Well, at least the realities of the situation the liberal elite have created are becoming impossible to ignore. Most encouragingly, the concept of treason is suddenly back on the political agenda. This is fundamentally important because patriotism is not an optional extra but the glue which sticks a society together.  Yet t the storm cloud which cannot be dispersed is the immoveable fact of millions of Muslims living within Western societies  who harbour substantial numbers of people who are unquestioningly hostile to the countries in  which they  reside.  That is what rule by the politically correct devotees to internationalism have brought us, a huge and potentially very dangerous fifth column in our midst.  It has been an act of the most fundamental treason.

The Old Buffoonian treads on dangerous ground

Robert Henderson

Boris Johnson  has suggested that the radicalisation of Muslim children should be treated as child abuse and children subjected to such an environment should be taken into care:

“At present, there is a reluctance by the social services to intervene, even when they and the police have clear evidence of what is going on, because it is not clear that the “safeguarding law” would support such action. A child may be taken into care if he or she is being exposed to pornography, or is being abused – but not if the child is being habituated to this utterly bleak and nihilistic view of the world that could lead them to become murderers. I have been told of at least one case where the younger siblings of a convicted terrorist are well on the road to radicalisation – and it is simply not clear that the law would support intervention.

“This is absurd. The law should obviously treat radicalisation as a form of child abuse. It is the strong view of many of those involved in counter-terrorism that there should be a clearer legal position, so that those children who are being turned into potential killers or suicide bombers can be removed into care – for their own safety and for the safety of the public. “(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10671841/The-children-taught-at-home-about-murder-and-bombings.html).

Even for the Old Buffoonian this is extraordinary obtuseness. Johnson has failed to recognise three very obvious facts: (1) removing Muslim children from their parents will also certainly radicalise the children;  (2) it will provide potent ammunition for Islamic extremists and (3) you can bet your life that once the principle of “bad” ideas is established as a reason for the social workers to come in, it will be extended to many other “bad” ideas, for example, in these  pc times anything which is non-pc.  Let us have a look in detail at those disturbing implications of Johnson’s proposal.

To begin with at what age would children be removed from the family? If at birth or shortly afterwards,   the child and eventually the adult will feel that their lives have been ruthlessly changed by the state and may well turn to extremism to revenge themselves on the society which has treated them so. If  taken away at an older age the child, especially if they are old enough to have imbibed the radical message, is likely to be not merely confirmed in their radical ideas but  have them substantially amplified.

Of course  it is not only parents who could be a radical influence within the home. What about brothers, sisters, Aunts and Uncles and cousins who were Jihadists? Would they be grounds for removing children? Would they have to be banned from having any contact with the children?

There is also the ticklish question of what constitutes an idea radical enough to sanction removal of the child.  Would it have to be direct exhortations to kill non-Muslims? If less than that, where would the line be drawn? At Muslims telling children non-Muslims are damned to Hell?  At  Muslims simply telling their children that they should not associate with non-Muslims?   

Then there is the question of where the children would be placed after they were removed. Most would probably end up in care because if  the policy was enforced rigorously,  thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Muslim children would have to be removed. This might seem extreme but think of the hundreds of Muslims  who have already been convicted in Britain of terrorist related crimes (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24454596)  Think of the hundreds or even thousands  who are reported to be fighting abroad in places such as Syria and Afghanistan (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25893040). They will often have children or  be uncles,  cousins and aunts to Muslim children.    

Even with much smaller numbers the chances of a Muslim child being left in  care would be strong because Muslim adopters and foster parents are thin on the ground. If they are left in care that would be likely to provide an unhappy childhood which  would engender a strong sense of victimhood, fertile soil in which to plant Jihadist ideas. The child would also be brought up as a Muslim to ensure that he was not denied his “cultural heritage” and would consequently be exposed to other Muslims who might well be Islamic radicals.

Adoption and fostering might provide more palatable lives for the children than care,  but they would have difficulties of their own. The current politically correct adoption and fostering policies  very strongly favour placing a child in families which are racially and culturally akin to those of the child. That would mean most, possibly all, of such children ending up in a Muslim family. That family  might be moderates who treat their religion in the same way that the average C of E worshipper does, as a tepid private observance rather than a fervent matter of public policy. But even in such circumstances, the child would still be regularly be exposed to Muslims with more rigorous Islamic ideas and could easily become radicalised or have  radical ideas obtained before their removal from their birth parents enhanced.

Then there is school. Whether in care, foster homes or an adoptive home, the child is likely to be in a school with a significant number of  Muslims because of the emphasis on providing a racially and ethnically environment which matches the child’s original circumstances. To achieve that the child will almost certainly be  living in a town or city which has a substantial Muslim population. There will also be pressure on those responsible for the child to place them in a school with a healthy Muslim intake. The child might  even be placed in a Muslim  school if  he or she  is adopted and the adoptive parents favour such an education.

Aside from all this, there is the Internet. Any child forbidden to have contact with anything whether it be  radical Islam or pornography is likely to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

The propaganda value of Muslim children being forcibly removed would be immense. Muslim terrorists would use it to justify their violence and, because the issue is such an emotive one, they would gain sympathy  from Muslims generally in the way  IRA bombers enjoyed a sympathy amongst the wider republican movement along the lines of “I don’t agree with their methods but…”  the practice  would undoubtedly resonate throughout the Muslim world and have effects far beyond those willing to engage in violence. In particular, it could seriously affect trade with Britain.

Such a policy  would almost certainly have an antagonising effect on other minorities, both because they would fear that the same might happen to them and because of a sense of solidarity with Muslims, for  they are all  part of what one might call the victimocracy,  the army of  those who harbour a grievance,  justified or otherwise, simply because they are minorities or from some notion that white Western society owes them something.  The policy would also be a fundamental questioning of the policy of multiculturalism which has ruled the British elite roost for over thirty years.

There would also be the danger that in a bid to boost their pc credentials to offset the non-pc draconian removal of children. For example,  concessions could be made to Muslims generally by the British political elite, concessions such as the relaxation of immigration rules for Muslims and allowing sharia law to be expanded in Britain from the supposedly voluntary sharia courts which now exist to Sharia courts which were compulsory for Muslims.

 In short doing what Johnson proposes would make matters considerably worse for all concerned, for Muslims and the general population of the UK. What should be done? We need to start from the fact that there  is no realistic way that Muslim children can be shielded from radical Islam. Nor is there any hard proof that most radical Muslims in Britain were radicalised by their families or became radicalised when they were children. Radicalisation within mosques or through a radical   preacher operating outside the mosque at a fairly advanced stage of childhood or in early adulthood seems far more common. Moreover, Britain’s inability to control her borders whilst within the EU will always allow radical Muslims to come from abroad.   Short of expelling every Muslim in the country (several million)  and  allowing none to visit the country, the danger of Islamic terrorism, home grown or otherwise, will be a constant. Just as Irish republican terrorism had to be managed rather than exterminated, so Islamic terrorism will have to be managed.

All of that is depressing enough, but the really sinister aspect of what Johnson  proposes is the opportunity it would provide for the interference by the state in how parents generally bring up their children.  This could be in part a politically correct desire to create a spurious equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, but it could equally be an ideological  vehicle for the extension of political correctness.

As things stand,  the politically correct  legions in our midst  incessantly chomp at the bit as they try to ensure that  any opinion but their own is at best driven from public debate and at worst made  illegal in any circumstances. An excellent recent example of the  totalitarian mentality of such people is the leader of the Green Party Natalie Bennett’s call for cabinet ministers, senior public officials and political advisers to be sacked unless they unquestioningly backed the idea of man-made global warming (https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/the-british-green-party-expose-their-totalitarian-mentality/).

If it was allowed that Muslim children could be removed from their homes because of the beliefs of their parents (or any other family member), why not permit the removal of children whose parents disapproved of mass immigration, were members of the BNP or the EDL, refused to accept the claims of the man-made global warming believers, thought gay marriage was a nonsense  or simply ridiculed the idea of human equality?

This might seem fanciful at first glance,  but think of the absurdities  the politically correct have forced upon us in the name of racial and sexual equality and multiculturalism  and the use of the law to intimidate and increasing charge with criminal offences those who speak out against the effects of political correctness, for example, http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/courage-is-the-best-defence-against-charges-of-racism. 

Is the English Defence League (EDL) the real deal?

Robert Henderson

The decision by the EDL  leaders Tommy Robinson*  and Kevin  Carroll to leave the movement  has been so abrupt that it raises severe doubts about the nature of the EDL.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10363174/EDL-Leaders-quit-over-concern-about-far-right-extremism.html).

The resignations of Robinson and Carroll are made all the stranger because both men were enthusiastically purveying  the normal EDL  line at a rally in Sheffield on 21 September, only 17 days before their resignations were announced  (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-robinson-in-sheffield/).  Here are a few samples statements made by Robinson at the rally:

“At what point does diversity become takeover?” (enter video at 1 minute 50 seconds)

“English girls in Sheffield are being groomed and raped… by members of the Islamic community”  (3 minutes 21 seconds)

“We don’t want any more mosques in this country”  (4 minutes exactly)

“People will no longer stand by and watch their towns and cities being taken over” (3 minutes 30 seconds).

It is rather difficult to square such comments with Robinson’s claims so soon afterwards that he now thinks the EDL is no longer  the vehicle to combat  Islamicists because it has been, he claims,  taken over by right extremists .

These recent Sheffield comments become  even stranger in the light of his Newsnight resignation interview on the day of his resignation when he says in response to a Paxman question that he decided to leave the  EDL in February 2013 – see http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=744_1381276885  – enter at 4minutes and 4 seconds). Robinson needed an exit strategy but this was just about as clumsy a one as it would be possible to construct. If he had really wanted to go as early as March why wait for six months?

Caroll’s Sheffield speech was primarily about the double standards of the police when treating Muslims and non-Muslims, but it included what looks like in retrospect a piece of howling cynicism   when Caroll boasted to the crowd that “We are getting bigger and stronger everyday”. (Enter the video at 12 minutes and 58 seconds –  http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/kevin-caroll-in-sheffield/)

 The ostensible reasons for the  resignations

During his various media appearances announcing the resignations Robinson said “I have been considering this move for a long time because I recognise that, though street demonstrations have brought us to this point, they are no longer productive.

“I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24442953).

But he also laid  emphasis on the threats to his family and the fact that he was judged by what the more extreme members of the EDL did, viz: “When some moron lifts up his top and he’s got the picture of a mosque saying ‘boom’ and it’s all over the national newspapers, it’s me, it’s when I pick up my kids from school the parents are looking at me, judging me on that.

“And that’s not what I’ve stood for and my decision to do this is to be true to what I stand for. And whilst I want to lead the revolution against Islamist ideology, I don’t want to lead the revolution against Muslims.” (Ibid).

The problem with these reasons is that they have existed throughout the four years of the EDL’s existence.  That does not mean his fears are invalid but we do require an explanation from him as to why they have suddenly become intolerable.

Nonetheless, it is not implausible that Robinson  in particular may have simply tired of the harassment and worse he has experienced.   That the harassment has been considerable we know because  many  publicly reported instances of marches being hamstrung or stopped altogether and the frequent arrests fo EDL members.  But there is also what goes on without getting into mainstream media reporting.  In his  recent Sheffield speech (enter the video at 5 minutes 44 secs)  Robinson  said that as a consequence of being charged with criminal damage valued at a paltry £30 (something he is still waiting to go to court about), the police obtained warrants to search his parents’ house and his house, the officers who arrived at his house he said were armed with machine guns. Robinson also  spent 18 weeks in prison earlier in the year and with three young children he does have reason to fear for their safety.

Is all not as it seems? 

There is a well tried and tested intelligence service  technique of  setting up a front organisation which ostensibly provides a platform for those opposed to government policy or just the way society is organised.   The idea is that the front organisation acts as a light to a moth and attracts dissidents. This allows the security service to both monitor and manipulate those considered politically dangerous to the status quo.   The manipulation may be anything from infiltrating agent provocateurs to persuading  a dissident by one means or another to change their ideological tune.

What are the signs that point to a front organisation? Such things as rapid formation,  a ready supply of money both initially and as the organisation progresses, organisational skill and a failure to make any progress towards attaining  its claimed ends despite making a good deal of public noise.  MigrationWatch UK strikes me as a  classic example  of a front organisation – see https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/is-migrationwatch-uk-a-security-service-front-organisation/.

The other and very obvious  used security ploy is to infiltrate an existing dissident group and attempt to monitor and manipulate it.

Which is most likely in the case of the EDL? Well, it rose quickly and has displayed a certain organisational aptitude. It runs a decent website and can get marches, rallies  and demonstration up and running with sufficient people to raise them above the risible, especially when their performance is put in the context of the considerable harassment they have suffered both from the British authorities and the hard Left.

To those facts you can add the concentration on Muslims and the elements of political correctness in in their repeated claims that the EDL welcomes all creeds and colours and that they are a human rights organisation. A Machiavellian case can be made that it suits the  British political elite to have a “working class” protest group which concentrates on Muslims (because  it diverts attention away from the general question of mass immigration and its consequences) and plays the multiculturalist tune as it marches.  Such a case could also be made  for the political elite finding it useful to have an ostensibly independent grass roots  political movement opposing Islamist groups as a distraction from the insidious and much more damaging gradual imposition of Muslim ways on British society as the British elite generally give way bit by bit to Muslim demands. A  good example is the recent permitting of Muslim pupils to wear a beard, something  which is forbidden to non-Muslim pupils at the school (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10374528/Bearded-Muslim-schoolboys-barred-from-class-allowed-to-return-because-of-human-rights.html).

But on balance  I doubt whether this is a security front organisation because it simply is too uncontrolled.  If it is a front organisation it has not been very successful in channelling dissident behaviour.  Not only that but  most of the possible advantages for the political elite which I  listed above arise just as readily if the EDL is simply what it says it is, a spontaneous grass roots,  mainly working class movement.

How likely is it that the EDL will have been infiltrated by the police or the security services? You can bet  your life that it will have been.  Will the state  have been controlling the EDL leadership? Quite possibly, not necessarily from the first but at some point when they had found a lever to control the leaders.

A strong pointer to what may have  happened is  Robinson and Caroll’s  new association with (but not joined) the Quilliam Foundation, a body  which describes itself as a think-tank tackling extremism in all its forms, although its focus is heavily on Islamicist actors.   When Robinson and Caroll’s resignation were made public they appeared with two of the senior members of Quilliam, the chairman and co-founder Maajid Nawaz (a one time Hizb ut-Tahrir  member)  and Usama Hasan, Quilliam’s senior researcher in Islamic studies. Both Nawaz and Usama come from an extremist Muslim background. The narrative provided by both Quilliam and the two ex-EDL leaders is that it was engagement with Quilliam which led to the resignation of Robinson and Caroll, viz:

Quilliam is proud to announce that Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, the leaders of the anti-Islamist group, the English Defence League (EDL), have decided to leave the group. Having set up the EDL, infamous for its street protests, in 2009, they wish to exit this group, because they feel they can no longer keep extremist elements at bay……

Quilliam has been working with Tommy to achieve this transition, which represents a huge success for community relations in the United Kingdom. We have previously identified the symbiotic relationship between far-right extremism and Islamism and think that this event can dismantle the underpinnings of one phenomenon while removing the need for the other phenomenon. (http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/press-releases/quilliam-facilitates-tommy-robinson-leaving-the-english-defence-league/).

The fact that Quilliam are involved  is decidedly interesting  because they have been seen by some as Home Office stooges as a result of the large amounts of public money pumped into the think-tank after its foundation in 2008. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/12/tommy-robinson-quilliam-foundation-questions-motivation) .  There have also been rumblings about the large salaries drawn by the  senior members of  Quilliam, for example, Nawaz paid himself £77,438 in 2012 (ibid).

Quilliam’s Home Office funding ended in 2011 and its overall income dropped severely putting it into the red (ibid). When the Guardian tried to get an up to date set of accounts  they were ‘told by a press officer: “There is only one print copy and that that has gone missing.”’ (ibid)

The Guardian article suggests that the embracing of Robinson and Caroll by Quilliam may be a ploy to increase funding both through the publicity they are now receiving and because by widening their natural remit to include “right wing extremism”, viz:  “In 2010, when it began to look like Islamist extremism was slightly on the wane and there was an interest in far-right extremism, some people were slightly cynical that the Quilliam Foundation had originally said they were the specialists in Islamism but suddenly started to want to do work on far-right extremism as well. Some people feel that was a cynical land-grab to keep them in the media. But they are a thinktank that has to raise money and has to be visible.” (ibid).  This could well make them flavour of the month again with the Home Office.

What is in it for Robinson and Caroll?  Apart from taking them out of the EDL firing line, assuming they are genuinely worried about that, it could give them, especially Robinson,  an entry into the media and even access to public funds. Imagine a future for them in which they become the “right wing sinner who repenteth”.  Stranger things have happened, think of John Bercow moving from Monday Club enthusiast to his present devout political correctness.  Or it could be that Robinson and Caroll are merely being led to think that they have such  prospects and will be dropped soon, their utility to the politically correct project being judged to be exhausted.

The future of the EDL

The EDL website has a remarkably sanguine official view of the resignations , viz:

“We are grateful to Tommy and Kev for their hard work and dedication in helping to set up such a large and strong organisation as the EDL four years ago. We can easily appreciate the pressures and strain their leadership of the EDL has placed upon Tommy and Kev, not just personally, but also on their families and those dear to them. Not many people could have stood firm in the face of death threats, assaults, police intimidation and state interference. While we regret their decision to leave the EDL, we can understand their reasons and we respect them, as we hope everyone else will.

The EDL was founded for a reason. We had a cause in the beginning and we continue to stand by that cause now. We cannot at this moment say with any confidence what form the EDL will take in the future, but we can say with firm conviction that the EDL will continue to oppose militant and extreme Islam. We will further endeavour to apply our Code of Conduct and reject all Nazis, all extreme right wing organisations, and those who express racism either on our Internet forums, our Facebook pages or on the streets at our protests.

In these times of change, we are determined to fulfil our declared mission and carry on. Our next demonstration in Bradford will therefore go ahead as planned, with a number of guest speakers as well as the regular speakers and including ex-members of our armed forces. The EDL will continue its ideological struggle against Militant Islam and we collectively will not Surrender!” (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-and-kevin-resign-from-the-edl/).

To put it mildly that is not a viewed shared by many EDL members judged by the comment on the various social media.

But the flight of Robinson and Caroll  from the EDL is not the main problem for the movement. The main problem is that EDL has always been ideologically confused. This is because the party tries to fit its aims within a politically correct envelope on anti-racism. Here is an extract from their mission statement:

“The English Defence League (EDL) is a human rights organisation that was founded in the wake of the shocking actions of a small group of Muslim extremists who, at a homecoming parade in Luton, openly mocked the sacrifices of our service personnel without any fear of censure. Although these actions were certainly those of a minority, we believe that they reflect other forms of religiously-inspired intolerance and barbarity that are thriving amongst certain sections of the Muslim population in Britain: including, but not limited to, the denigration and oppression of women, the molestation of young children, the committing of so-called honour killings, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and continued support for those responsible for terrorist atrocities.

Whilst we must always protect against the unjust assumption that all Muslims are complicit in or somehow responsible for these crimes, we must not be afraid to speak freely about these issues. This is why the EDL will continue to work to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.

We also recognise that Muslims themselves are frequently the main victims of some Islamic traditions and practices. The Government should protect the individual human rights of members of British Muslims. It should ensure that they can openly criticise Islamic orthodoxy, challenge Islamic leaders without fear of retribution, receive full equality before the law (including equal rights for Muslim women), and leave Islam if they see fit, without fear of censure. “(http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/mission-statement/)

There are two problems with this stance. The first is what constitutes a moderate Muslim, not merely as things are,  but in a future in which the Muslim population of Britain will almost certainly be considerably larger,  both absolutely and as a proportion of the British population.  For any sincere Muslim there can be no question of moderation as we would understand the term in Britain, no equivalent of faint hearted Anglicanism where to mention God is felt to be decidedly vulgar,  nor a ready acceptance of criticism of religion.

There will be Muslims who eschew violence and Muslims who embrace it, but many of both the violent and non-violent would be comfortable with a state in which Islam was the faith of a majority of the population and in consequence placed in a privileged position. There would not have to be a formal Islamic theocracy, as there is not in Pakistan,  merely Islam as the majority religion with the state turning a blind eye to the oppression of non-Muslims.

The implications of this is that there could never be a movement which is simply opposed to the most extreme Muslim elements, because  potentially all Muslims will support the imposition of Islam as  not merely the dominant religion but the dominant way of life.

The second difficulty is why just Islam?  Islam may be the most aggressive and high profile minority  group at present, but they are far from being the only threat to the British way of life. Mass immigration generally constitutes such a threat, for heavy settlement of particular ethnic and racial groups, aided and abetted by the pernicious embrace of multiculturalism by the British elite, has produced what are in effect colonies in Britain of groups who have no wish or intention of assimilating or even integrating to a substantial degree.  Each of these groups seeks privileges for itself  which it frequently receives from an increasingly frightened political elite who fear any honest public discussion of what has been done through mass immigration will result both in inter-ethnic violence and public anger directed at themselves.

Many who have been drawn to or will be drawn to  the EDL  in the future will be generally hostile to mass immigration and its effects. Thus, it is improbable that the EDL will ever be able to be a single issue– anti-Islamist movement   promoting the multicultural message.

How will the EDL develop? It could simply become an increasingly marginalised group such as the BNP of National Front. However, it differs from  such groups in one potentially very important respect, namely, it is overtly representing England. That could give it greater staying power than the likes of the BNP  because it is filling a very real political void, that of a grass roots movement representing,  however imperfectly,  the resentments and fears of the English.

—————————–

*There is considerable dispute over Tommy Robinsons’s name. It is definitely not his true name, but whether his true name is  Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew McMaster or Paul Harris is a matter of some debate.  Yaxley-Lennon is probably his true name. For the purposes of this essay I shall  call him Tommy Robinson.

Islam knows no compromise

The importance of Terry Jones’ threat to burn Korans is not his crass exhibitionism.  Rather it lies in the fact that Jones’ behaviour is  a symptom of the catastrophic failure of the American elite to accept the reality of Islam, a failure which causes them to represent the creed as simply another religion no different in principle to, say, the Quakers or Methodists, and consequently a matter for private conscience alone.  This blindness is encapsulated in the absurd liberal mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace and love”. As someone who has taken the trouble to read the Koran let me give a flavour of this supposed paragon of non-violence and political correctness: Koranic Quotations ‘Because of their iniquity, we forbade the Jews the good  things  which  were  formerly  allowed  them; because  time after time they debarred others  from the  path of Allah;  because they practice usury  – although they were forbidden it – and cheat  others of their possessions.’ (Chapter entitled ‘Women’). ‘Men  have authority over women because  Allah  has made  the  one superior to the other,  and  because they  spend  their wealth to  maintain  them.  Good women are obedient.  They guard their unseen  parts because Allah guarded them.  As for those from whom you fear disobedience,  admonish them and send then to  beds  apart and beat them.’  (Chapter  entitled ‘Women’). ‘As  for the man or woman who is guilty  of  theft, cut  off  their  hands to  punish  them  for  their crimes.  That is the punishment enjoined by Allah.’ (Chapter entitled ‘The Table’). ‘As  for the unbelievers,  the fire of Hell  awaits them.  Death shall not deliver them,  nor shall its torment be ever lightened for them.  Thus shall the thankless  be  rewarded.’  (Chapter  entitled  ‘The Creator’). ‘Prophet,  make  war  on the  unbelievers  and  the hypocrites and deal vigorously with them.  Hell  is their home.’ (Chapter entitled ‘Repentance’). ‘You shall not wed pagan women, unless they embrace the faith. A believing slave-girl is better than an idolatress…’ (Chapter entitled ‘The Cow’). ‘When the sacred months are over slay the idolators wherever you find them. Arrest them,  besiege them, and  lie in ambush  everywhere for them.’  (Chapter entitled ‘Repentance’). ‘Believers,  retaliation  is  decreed  for  you  in bloodshed: a free man for a free man, a slave for a slave,  and  a  female  for  a  female.’   (Chapter entitled ‘The Cow’). That is a very small selection of the vast number of  Koranic exhortations to Muslims to behave in ways which would chill the blood of the politically correct.

In principle, Muslims can never be loyal subjects or citizens of any nation or discrete political entity because Islam enjoins its adherents to give their allegiance only to Allah. This is a more extreme theological position than that of Catholics whose temporal allegiance is to a man, the Pope, although the doubts raised about Muslims’ loyalty today are similar to those raised by about Catholics in the past when the Papacy had real political power. .

Islam also has profound developmental differences from Christianity. The latter grew organically over three centuries as a persecuted religion before Constantine made it the state religion of Rome. Those three centuries of persecution made Christianity a pacific movement and its conversion into the state religion of Rome ensured that any fanatical proselytising tendencies were kept in check.

Islam on the other hand became a politically dominant religion immediately and from the outset was extremely aggressive. In addition, Islam has a Holy Book which, unlike the Bible, is supposedly the work of a single person relating the direct word of God. This makes anything other than a literalist interpretation next to impossible.

Most importantly for the present day, Islam is a totalitarian creed. There is no distinction between the religion and the rest of life. Islam touches every aspect of life in the most intimate way.  It is politics, the law, economic life, culture and customs.

Most dramatically, the desired end of devout Muslims is that the world should be peopled entirely by Muslims who are bound together in a single human entity. For the Muslim there is no concept of peaceful and equal coexistence between Islam and non-Muslims as a desired end.  Islam accepts that as a matter of practical necessity that coexistence may be necessary where Islam does not have the immediate power to enforce its will, but wherever it has the power the will is enforced and non-Muslims are either driven out of the state through direct state action or the inaction of the state to prevent t laissez faire persecution or pressured to turn to Islam. At best non-Muslims in majority Muslim states can expect an inferior status, both legal and social.

The upshot of this mentality is a resolute refusal to compromise. At its most extreme this results in terrorist acts such as 9/11 and 7/7. But it is naive to say “it is only a tiny proportion of Muslims who are terrorists” because the support of  terrorist acts is pyramidal. At the top are the bombers. Below them the bomb makes. Beneath them the providers of money, safe houses, munitions. Under them those willing to demonstrate. Finally, comes the mass of people who take the IRA complicit line of “I don’t agree with their methods but….”.

The refusal to do anything other than follow the dictates of their faith can be seen in Muslims involved in the proposed 9/11 site mosque. They  have shown no willingness to compromise in any way let alone display any sensitivity to the feelings of non-Muslims. This is par for the course as the normal behaviour of Muslims is to insist upon their will while ignoring the will of non-Muslims.

The majority of Americans may think or at least say in public that Jones’ behaviour is beyond the Pale, but the vast majority of Americans find highly obnoxious the demands Muslims in the USA routinely make, for example the 9/11 mosque and  their constant assaults on free expression whenever any criticism of their religion occurs.  The fact that a fifth of Americans think Obama is a Muslim is indicative of the intense concern Islam is generating in the USA.

The problem with condemning unreservedly Terry Jones is that it drives further a wedge which has already gone deep not only into the USA but Western society generally, namely, that caused by the incessant appeasement of Muslims by Western governments. People such as Jones may be crass in their behavior, but they are expressing a widespread fear and anger which elites are ignoring. At bottom, what is called Islamophobia by Western elites is simply the natural reaction of any people to having their territory, both physical and intellectual, invaded.  Because of that elite failure and betrayal, Jones should be seen as a useful if unwitting catalyst who has  forced a subject hated and feared by liberals –  the mess created by mass immigration and multiculturalism –  into public view.

I will leave you with this thought. The official estimate of Muslims in Britain is two million. That estimate is almost certainly an underestimate because  official estimates of ethnic groups invariably are. There are probably three million.   If one in a thousand turn terrorist that is 3,000 terrorists. That would represent a far greater threat than ever the IRA did simply in numbers. The Muslim threat is amplified by the fact that unlike the IRA, they have no restraint.

Robert Henderson

12 9 2010