Defeating Jihad

Chapter 8: London's Bombs and Sleepwalkers

by Serge Trifkovic

Webmaster note: As of July 2006 I think this is the best book on Islam to date. Every adult should read this book in order to understand the threat of Islam per se, not just "radical Islam" (as opposed to the mythical "peace-loving nature of 'true' Islam"). Dr. Trifkovic, a courageous Serbian Orthodox Christian, is a leading authority on Islam. This is the sequel to his first book on Islam, Sword of the Prophet, also published by Regina Orthodox Press.

Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is a thoroughly modern European politician. “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists,” he declared after meeting a group of Muslim “community leaders” at 10 Downing Street, in the aftermath of 9-11. “It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple” who must not be honored “with any misguided religious justification,” because they “contravened all the tenets of Islam':

It is ... explicitly contrary to Islamic law to kill innocent civilians, to murder women and children and non-combatants. ... Islam is a peace-loving, tolerant, religion. Many of the world’s religions, indeed including Christianity, draw from the same spiritual heritage. We share the same values, and the same respect for the sanctity of human life....

We know of no specific threat in relation to this country and it is important that we are not alarmist about it. And I mean frankly some of the reports have been alarmist.

Echoing the Prime Minister, two weeks after 9-11 former Home Office Minister John Denham pledged to cut out the “cancer of Islamophobia” infecting Britain, and declared that “the real Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and understanding.” [21] In line with the EU instructions he called on the media to avoid promoting “a distorted or caricatured or prejudiced” view of Muslims or the Islamic faith.

Dr. Richard Stone, chairman of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, criticized the Blair government for not addressing “in a deep way” the anti-Muslim prejudice in Britain: “There is now... mounting concern that the already fragile foothold gained by Muslim communities in Britain is threatened by ignorance and intolerance.” [22] He added that the only area where there had been major improvement was “within Muslim communities themselves.”

The key finding of his commission was that 9-11 had made life more difficult for Muslims. It castigated British public bodies for failing to address “institutional Islamophobia” and called for changes in the law to better protect Muslim communities (i.e. introduce censorship) and “a major effort” (i.e. affirmative action) to bring more Muslims into public life. [23]

The Director of Public Prosecutions expressed concern that the war on terror is “alienating whole communities” in Great Britain. [24] Collectively they have all contributed to the creation of a culture of Muslim victimhood in which “Islamophobia,” defined both as a legal crime and a moral outrage, inhibited all serious debate in Great Britain after 9-11 on the causes of terrorism.

Since then thousands of people have been murdered in jihadist attacks, in Bali, Moscow, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, Beslan, Sharm-el-Sheik, Nairobi, and dozens of other places.

On July 7, 2005, London’s turn came. The suicide bombers were four young British citizens, Muslim by religion, three of them Pakistani by parentage. They were born and bred in England, attended British state schools, traveled on British passports, and spoke with Yorkshire accents. [25] They hated England and its people with such intensity that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill as many of them as possible.

They were coldly premeditated, practicing their attacks on a dry run on June 28, nine days before they killed 52 people and wounded 200. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the lead suicide bomber, recorded a video in which he declared, “We are at war and I am a solider.” [26]

The ranks of those potential soldiers are increasing, paradoxically enough, as the British-born young Muslims come of age:

What is striking about most second- and third-generation British Muslims is their intense religiosity. Asked how much of a role Islam played in their everyday lives, 45 percent of the respondents in the student survey said it played a role in everything while 48 percent said it played a role in most things. This is in sharp contrast with a comparable survey of the British public in which 66 percent said religion was not an important factor in their lives. [27]

According to a detailed survey of the attitudes of British Muslims prepared for The Daily Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, one in four sympathizes with motives of terrorists and six per cent insist that the bombings were “fully justified.” [28] In absolute numbers this means there are over 100,000 Muslims in Great Britain who are either prepared to carry out terrorist acts, or ready to support those who do. And a substantial majority, 56 per cent, says that, whether or not they sympathize with the bombers, they can at least understand why they behave in this way. The sheer scale of Muslim alienation from British society that the survey reveals is remarkable: nearly 32 per cent, believe that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end.”

The attacks should not have come as a surprise. It has been known for years that trained al-Qaeda terrorists were present in the United Kingdom and operated in classic small cell structures. In December of 2002, only a day after the arrest of seven Muslims suspected of terrorism in London and Edinburgh, British government sources acknowledged the existence of terrorist cells in the country and predicted that the most likely threat would take the form of “explosives left in a public place” and attacks on transport networks. [ 29]

Left by whom exactly? The British establishment remains adamant that the perpetrators are by definition apostates from Islam. When asked if the bombings across London on July 7 were the work of Islamic terrorists, the deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, responded that the culprits “certainly were not Islamic terrorists, because Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together.” He repeated, almost word for word, Tony Blair’s assurances on the subject given four years earlier.

In November 2005, Blair himself traveled to Leeds to meet with young Muslims in an attempt to understand how three “born-and-bred Yorkshire lads” (the fourth bomber, Lindsay, was a naturalized citizen born in Jamaica) could turn on their fellow citizens in such a murderous manner. His reference to the morbid jihadist trio as “lads”—an English term of endearment for the youthful male person, derived from Middle English ladde—is indicative of the fact that, after 7/7, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

Paddick’s boss, the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, is out-Blairing his better known namesake. Britain’s most powerful policeman belongs to the same milieu as the Prime Minister: He has an Oxford degree, a Miro on his office wall, and the propensity to ascribe to Al-Qaeda “a late 19th-century nihilism.” He takes pride in his force’s “cultural and community resources unit” that enables police to call in Somalian-born officers to a Somalian case, but admits that “we do have some trouble providing Inuits.”

Six months before the London bombs he made the unbelievable statement that “there is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.” When a journalist suggested that the family of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed for questioning Islamic attitudes to women, could beg to differ on that one, Sir Ian replied,

“There were lots of fundamentalist Muslims who didn’t shoot him.” So that’s okay? “Just wait,” he says sharply. “Look at Jerry Springer. Christian fundamentalists objected very strongly but they didn’t shoot the producer. And nor do 99.9 percent of Muslims want the sort of extremism that leads to violence. They know the consequences of terrorists claiming to be Muslim, so our job is to help. Bridges will be built.” [ 30]

The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone went one better by blaming Britain’s role in the war in Iraq for the explosions in his city. He also compared an outspoken Muslim scholar who backs suicide bombings, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to the late Pope John XXIII, because both believed that their faiths must engage with the world.

While giving evidence to a House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the terrorist attacks in London, Livingston said that Sheik Qaradawi is “very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist... Of all the Muslim thinkers in the world today he is the most positive force for change.” [31]

Far from being a “moderate,” the sheikh is a mainstream member of the Muslim Brotherhood. His Ikhwani affiliations led to his imprisonment in Egypt in 1949, then in 1954-1956, and again in 1962. For some years Al-Qaradawi has been a media superstar in the Arab world, thanks to his regular program Al-Shariaa wa Al-Haya (“Sharia and Life”) on Al-Jazeera TV network. He has called on Muslims to fight foreigners in Iraq—troops and civilians—because they are occupiers, and fighting them is a religious duty. And yet in 2004 he came to Britain’s capital and spoke at the “European Council of Fatwa and Research” in London’s City Hall, and was warmly welcomed by none other than the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (“You are truly, truly welcome!”).

At a public lecture during his stay, the good, sane sheikh asserted that female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. In his opinion, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”

With Messrs. Livingstone, Blair, and other such elected and appointed officials in charge, the bombers could do their thing unobserved and unhindered. It is to be feared that if and when “7/7” happens again, possibly on a far grander scale, the sleepwalking of those who are supposed to protect Britain will become more determined than ever before.

Blairism is all-pervasive in the academia that informs the policy-makers. [32] “The bombs that killed more than 50 people in the heart of London in July served only to reinforce the realization across the EU that more effective action is needed to ensure the integration of migrants, and their children, into our diverse societies,” writes Sarah Spencer of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University, in an European Union-sponsored publication. [33]

We need to move beyond security and the fear of radicalization, she asserts, which “set a narrow and potentially divisive context” (i.e. law and order) for an agenda that “has to embrace broader outcomes,” such as greater access by the Muslim community to jobs, housing, health, education, poverty and civic participation. Such measures should be regulated by “an EU-wide approach to the integration of migrants,” Ms. Spencer concludes.

Historian David Starkey agrees. Addressing The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2005 he warned that “Britain is in danger of sleepwalking into a new era of religious intolerance after the July 7 bombings” and that the religious intolerance of previous centuries could be repeated unless society reconsiders its attitude. He voiced alarm at the trend towards “thought crimes” encapsulated in anti-terrorism legislation that include expressing any sympathy for suicide bombers. The key to present-day threats, Starkey concludes, is tolerance: “In the same way that a multitude of religious sects were allowed to continue without threat of being burnt at the stake after the Restoration, Britain today should tolerate Islam.” [34]

The thought that British Muslims may be loath to integrate and accept being one among a multitude is inadmissible to the elite mindset. Even in the mundane Britain of commerce and banking, Islam has successfully planted the seeds of its acceptance as a legitimately parallel structure, with the non-interest-based, Sharia-compliant “Islamic mortgages” which every self-respecting High Street home loan provider now feels obliged to offer:

It was an unusual sight—hundreds of businessmen listening attentively while a small group of top-notch Islamic scholars instructed them on the intricacies of Muslim ethics. These were bankers, and what they wanted to know was how they could do better business with Muslims. The Islamic Real Estate Finance conference ... came after The Bank of England’s request for high street banks to create financial solutions for Muslims.... Islamic scholars were called in to advise on the Sharia-compliance of the new mortgages. On the whole they were happy, but some expressed concern that the banks may be using money in non-permissible activities, like financing breweries or non-halal meat companies. [35]

This is but one manifestation of the ongoing legitimization of the Sharia as a “legal code” with a role in the public life of Great Britain. It has penetrated culture, high as well as popular.

In the fall of 2005 London audiences enjoyed a widely acclaimed production of Tamburlaine the Great, Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century classic. Few noticed, however, that several insufficiently reverential references to Muhammad had been deleted from the production. Worse still, an essential scene in the play in which the Kuran is burned was also censored beyond recognition. In the original, “Tamburlaine” (Tamerlane) asks his servant to bring “the Turkish Alcoran, and all the heaps of superstitious books found in the temples of that Mahomet whom I have thought a god—they shall be burnt.” As they light a fire Tamburlaine dares Mahomet to send a whirlwind that would save the Kuran from burning, or else punish the perpetrator. Nothing happens, and he declares,

Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell; He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine: Seek out another godhead to adore; The God that sits in heaven, if any god, For he is God alone, and none but he.

Director David Farr openly admitted that he edited the scene because did not want to upset Muslims. Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, equally frankly said that if they had not altered the original it “would have unnecessarily raised the hackles of a significant proportion of one of the world’s great religions.” Worse still, the two claimed that the censored version was better than the original: The burning of the Koran was smoothed over, “so that it became just the destruction of ‘a load of books’ relating to any culture or religion. That made it more powerful, they claimed.” [36]

“Empowerment” in this case means that Muslim radicals bomb the Underground (July 2005), which prompts “Englishmen” to censor one of their great playwrights to please the bombers (October 2005)—a bit like letting a rapist date your daughter after the fact.

As for the British courts, they are already Sharia-compliant. A key tenet of Sharia is that non-Muslims cannot try Muslims, or even testify against them. A judge at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, accepts the concept. He may not be familiar with the Islamic law but he observed its commandments when he banned Jews and Hindus—and anyone married to one—from serving on the jury in the trial of Abdullah el-Faisal, accused of soliciting the murder of “unbelievers.” [37]

The judge reportedly announced, “For obvious reasons, members of the jury of the Jewish or Hindu faith should reveal themselves, even if they are married to Jewish or Hindu women, because they are not fit to arbitrate in this case.” One can only speculate what the reaction would be if equally “obvious reasons” were invoked in an attempt to exclude Muslims from a trial of an alleged Islamophobe.

For years Muslims have been getting halal meals in British schools and hospitals. The Commission for Racial Equality has ruled that businesses must provide prayer rooms for Muslims and pay them for their absences on Islam’s holidays. Public funds are used to build state-of-the-art housing in London’s East End reserved for Muslim “elders” from which white English pensioners are excluded.

Sirajul Islam, in charge of social services at the local borough of Tower Hamlets, said that “one size fits all” approach to public services was no longer acceptable in 21st century Britain: “Tower Hamlets is fortunate to have a diverse mix of communities and the council strives to ensure that its services are responsive to the differing and changing needs of its residents.” [38]

Even without formally designated segregated units, Muslims already control and run large areas of dozens of industrial cities in the Midlands and Yorkshire, from which non-Muslims—by no means only white persons—move out as soon as they can. Both the “moderates” and the “radicals” believe in the goal of an Islamized Britain:

There are two main religious traditions among Pakistani-British Muslims. The Barelwis majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their gains and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well. [ 39]

The bombings in London were a logical outcome of the Blairite forma mentis, the size of Muslim immigration into the country, and the dynamics of that growing community’s symbiotic interaction with the elite consensus. Even before the Rushdie affair allowed Muslims in Britain to flex their muscles in open opposition to the law of the land, a Declaration issued by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester stated, urbi et orbi, that its goal is to change the existing British society into “an Islamic society based on the Kuran and the Sunna and make Islam, which is a code for entire life, supreme and dominant, especially in the socio-political spheres.” [40]

A generation later mosques and Islamic centers have multiplied all over Britain and provide the backbone to terrorist support network. The Home Office approved visas to Muslim clerics, primarily from Pakistan, sympathetic to the radicals. [41] Mosques provide venues for the faithful “to hail Osama bin Laden as a hero and to evoke the ‘positive outcomes’ of the attacks in New York and Washington.” [42] But the British cannot complain that they not have been warned:

The Islamists don’t even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say. “We are here as on a darkling plain ...” wrote Matthew Arnold in the famous concluding lines to Dover Beach, “where ignorant armies clash by night.” But we choose in large part to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G8 summit and the world’s leaders twitter about how tragic and ironic it is that this should have happened just as they’re taking steps to deal with the issues, as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. [43]

The British security services, exemplified by Sir Ian Blair, have followed their political masters into a state of denial regarding the Islamist threat. The courts, for their part, routinely interpret the criminal, asylum, and terrorism laws in the manner damaging to the security of the Realm and favorable to the Islamic underground.

There are hundreds of after-hours Islamic schools all over Britain in which Muslim children start formal indoctrination in their parents’ creed. That message, rooted in rock-hard certainties, very effectively over-rides the tepid multiculturalist message of the state curriculum. Maintaining the loyalty of the Muslim diaspora in Britain has been the mullahs’ top priority, and the system has facilitated their task.

As Islam spreads its control over many inner cities in the industrial heartland, the culture of dhimmitude for the remaining non-Muslims (of all racial and ethnic origins), is developing by default.

The British Council, a taxpayer-funded organization that sponsors cross-cultural projects, fired one of its press officers, Harry Cummins, for publishing four articles in London’s Sunday Telegraph critical of Islam. [44] British Muslims took exception to his observation that Muslims had rights to practice their religion in the UK which were not available to Christians in the Islamic world, and this “despite the fact that these Christians are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of almost every Muslim land.” He also wrote that Muslims had displayed a “bullying ingratitude that culminates in a terrorist threat.”

His cardinal sin was to note that “it is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object.” Abdul Bari, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, welcomed Cummins’ firing but expressed “dismay” that the publishing company had not taken action against the editor of the Sunday Telegraph as well.

In 2003 Britain’s Channel 4 TV broadcast a sobering documentary—The Last White Kids—about two English children, Amie Gallagher (9) and her sister Ashlene (12), who live in the Muslim neighborhood of Manningham in Bradford. They attend the local mosque, wrap themselves in Islamic burkas, and learn the revelations of Muhammad by heart. The girls were born to a dysfunctional welfare mother. Islam apparently offered something that is missing from their lives. At the mosque there is authority, certainty, even disciplined education, albeit in Arabic and focused on the Kuran. The girls were not offered any authority, certainty, or discipline by state schools; as for the Christian churches, they have all but disappeared from the lives of the British people. As the Daily Mail commented:

The chapels of Wales are gaunt ruins, the great Roman Catholic churches of the industrial North West are often empty and derelict, the Anglicans scuttle about in their hallowed, lovely buildings like mice amid ancient ruins, rarely even beginning to fill spaces designed for multitudes. The choirs and the bells gradually fall silent, the hymns are no longer sung and one by one the doors are locked and places which in some cases have seen worship for centuries become bare museums of a dead faith. [45]

“If you’re white and you ain’t hard you’re f.....d,” explains the girls’ 11-year-old brother Jake, who does not go to the mosque: “I used to get picked on at school.... They would call me ‘white bastard’ and we would get into a fight.” [46] And what an eleven-year-old learns in an English state school in religious education, backed by the Education Secretary Charles Clarke, will “help overcome barriers to how non-Muslims understand the faith” and “help strengthen a multi-faith, multi-cultural society.” [47] It almost goes without saying that the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) is helping with the curriculum. It is only through understanding thus gained “that this country can move forward as a true multi-faith and multicultural society,” according to Mr. Clarke: “We must ensure children grow up with a better understanding of their friends and neighbors. The Muslim Council of Britain’s initiative, books for schools, brings us much closer towards that goal.”

Submission or resistance: the last non-Muslim children in a grim part of Bradford epitomize Britain’s choice. In Tony Blair’s, Charles Clarke’s and Don Livingstone’s Britain there is no doubt which path should be taken.

Those mosque-attending girls symbolize a “healthy openness” to “cross-cultural fertilization,” while their cocky half-brother is a budding racist thug fit only for sensitivity training and, if it does not work, medication. It could hardly be otherwise in a country whose leader was prompted by 9-11 to declare that “the doctrine and teachings of Islam are those of peace and harmony,” that it “is a whole teaching dedicated to building peace in the world and therefore those people who’ve committed this atrocity, they no more represent the true spirit of Islam than does the Protestant or Catholic on the streets of Northern Ireland that murders someone of the opposite part of the Christian religion, represent the true spirit of Christianity. [48]

The new and supposedly improved Tory Party hardly offers an alternative. Feeling panicky after a string of electoral defeats, and determined that out-Blairing Blair is the only way to regain power, under David Cameron it has joined the multiculturalist bandwagon. He believes in racial, ethnic, and gender-based quotas. Cameron’s colleague, the Conservative Party chairman Francis Maude says that immigration had been “fantastically good” for the United Kingdom.

Such inanities are light years away from another British Prime Minister and a far truer Tory, Winston Churchill, who warned over a century ago that “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world” than Islam: “Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”*

The science is still there but the shelter has been eroded in the realm of the soul. Churchill’s verdict on Islam was as astute as it was on Hitler “that bad man,” he concluded as early as 1933.

Hitler’s defeat in World War II was greatly accelerated by his refusal to accept any news he did not want to hear and his propensity to accuse those trying to present such news of bad faith. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Rommel felt compelled to conclude that the Fuehrer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”). The way in which the war against terrorism is waged in today’s Downing Street resembles the atmosphere at Rastenburg in 1944. With the Blairites in charge T.S. Eliot may yet be proven right in his warning that the West would end, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Some decades before Eliot’s gloomy prediction, in 1899, a 26 year old Winston Churchill expressed hope “that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.”

Even his prescience, however, could not envisage the unpleasant possibility that “the invader” would have his reliable friends and allies at No. 10 and London’s County Hall.

Britain’s tilt toward Islam did not start with the post-Christian English adventurers, Lawrence of Arabia and Sir John Glub (“Pasha Glub”). It harks back to Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the only English literary classic to take up the conflict between the Byzantines and the Muslims:

Gibbon makes no secret of his admiration of the Turks, and he derides both the effeminate Greeks and the crude Franks who went on the First Crusade. Why? The simple answer is that Gibbon was a religious skeptic, and like other skeptics of the 18th century, he was irritated by Christian morality... The sensuality of the Muslim view of life and the afterlife and the cynicism of its politics appeals to the imagination of anti-Christian skeptics of every age. [49]

From Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won - in Spite of Ourselves, by Serge Trifkovic. Posted with the publisher's permission on July 28, 2006.