Review: ‘Children of the Great Migration’, Panorama, BBC1

This evening, the BBC decided to launch an attempt to tug at the heartstrings and to win yet more support for unrestricted mass immigration into the EU in general, and the UK in particular. Its advance publicity for the programme read:

They cross six thousand miles of desert and sea to reach Europe, children travelling alone, on the world's most dangerous migration route. Some of them are as young as seven.

The timing of the documentary has been prompted by the upcoming ‘migration season’ in the Mediterranean, ‘in what threatens to be its most deadly year yet, [for] Europe has cut the number of rescue boats.’ This, intoned the presenter, represented ‘an unfolding tragedy of horrific proportions.’ The capsizing of two of four dinghies carrying hundreds of African immigrants this winter was cited, in which at least 400 died, part of a recent phenomenon that illustrates that people smugglers are attempting to find a way to extend their operations into the depth of winter. A new tactic pioneered this winter employed a seemingly abandoned, crewless cargo ship, the Ezadeen, into which 450 Syrian immigrants were packed, yielding the people smugglers at least £2 million in profits.

What is also alarming is the fact that ‘it’s also shaping up as a record year of arrivals too.’ Last year, it was stated that the Italian Navy’s now discontinued operation ‘Mare Nostrum’ save the lives of more than 160,000 such immigrants. Now though, it has been scrapped, with a new EU Frontex operation providing a scaled-back patrol closer to EU maritime borders. The presenter wondered how this would cope with rescuing the prospective record number of immigrants, whilst this viewer wondered why it was not defending the coastline of Europe, and returning these migrants to their ports of origin.

Panorama also examined one of the major sources for much of the human efflux from Africa: Eritrea. The Sudanese authorities appeared to be eager to help the documentary makers publicise this problem, as hundreds of thousands of Eritrean emigrants have taken up residence, at least temporarily, on Sudanese soil close to the border with their country of origin. Vast refugee camps have sprung up, and the people traffickers have engaged in bloody exchanges with the Sudanese police, killing and wounding many of their number. Whether it is that the Sudanese are neither willing nor able to police their border with Eritrea is not clear, but the border – in their direction at least – is highly porous.

Although Eritrea’s population is a relatively modest six million, it was described as a ‘source of refugees on an astonishing scale’, with many of these departing being teenagers fleeing conscription in a ‘Marxist-inspired totalitarian state’, with a ‘crippled economy’, political detentions and torture. Conscripts, apparently, become transformed into forced labour in state agriculture and industry.

The largest of the camps in eastern Sudan houses circa 35,000 Eritreans and is overseen by the UNHCR together with the Sudanese authorities. In all, there are reckoned to be some 110,000 Eritreans temporarily resident in eastern Sudan, the majority of them wishing to head to Europe; many, including a number of interviewees, to the UK.

To get all the way to Europe can cost $5,000, with the first leg of the trip taking emigrants across the Sahara, and then from Libya across the Mediterranean, typically to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Cameron’s gung-ho and geopolitically myopic intervention in Libya, which contributed to the overthrow of Qaddhafi and created a state of lawlessness in which both people-smuggling and Islamism can thrive, means that an ever-increasing number of people are setting off from the shores of Libya and heading for Europe. It is but 180 miles from the Libyan port of Zuwara to Lampedusa. From there, the immigrants head to Sicily, thence onwards to other European countries, often the UK.

The proportion of children is growing, and they are often unaccompanied for word has fed back to Africa that Europe will never turn children away and will look after them. The African cuckoo knows that the European reed warbler will look after its young at the expense of its own.

Yes, those who come seek to escape from poverty, vile and often oppressive living conditions. Yes, many of them are subject to repulsive abuse at the hands of people-traffickers. However, we cannot provide a lifeboat for the entire World. If we continue to accept this ever-increasing human tide, we will sink. We will go under. Our society will be swamped, fracture and eventually collapse. This is unsustainable, and cannot go on. What should be done? How can this human tide be staunched and turned back? 

Richard Dawkins interviewed by Evan Davis

Evan Davis is the sort of man that Islamists believe should be thrown to his death from the top of a tall building. This is not some lurid exaggeration, but a sad statement of fact, but for Davis, as for so many others at the BBC, the concept of the existence of clear, incontrovertible facts is viewed as something unsettling, rather than being something that should be acknowledged. Not so for Richard Dawkins, of course. Dawkins knows not only that Islamists would delight in throwing Davis to his death from a great height, but that this would be fundamentally wrong and barbarous. For Davis though, one almost suspects that he'd view his terminal aerial descent as nothing but another illustration of the vibrant variety of beliefs blossoming in contemporary multicultural Britain; an unanticipated opportunity to celebrate diversity, whilst thrilling to the whoosh of the passing air as he involuntarily attempts base-jumping without a parachute.

The appearance of Dawkins on last night's Newsnight was welcome, but Davis's smug, condescending interview technique was not. Davis evidently does not view Dawkins as his intellectual equal, but as his inferior. This is staggering.

The interview commenced with Davis making reference to the Charlie Hebdo attack, and attempting to equate Dawkins's "militant atheism" with religious dogmatism and fanaticism. A fallacious comparison, of course, but something taken as a matter of 'faith' by Davis and his relativising, multicultural ilk. Evans thus asked if Dawkins was any different to the religious dogmatists whom he criticises, seeking to impose his beliefs on others, to which Dawkins responded that "you should be allowed to believe anything you like, but you shouldn't impose your beliefs on other people." Given this, he said that he was not in favour of a burka ban, although he feels personally offended when he sees someone peering through a slit. Nonetheless, personal offence is no reason to ban something. People should be free to offend.

Dawkins rebutted Davis's suggestion that he did not wish children to receive a religious education, stating that he thought that children should be taught about religion in an appropriate context, rather than being indoctrinated into it. For Dawkins, it is important that schools should teach history, literature and religion as part of a rounded curriculum, but they should not be taught creationism, as "Evolution is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact, as much as the Earth orbits the Sun." At this point, Davis made an expression indicating that he may hold sympathies for the Flat Earth Society.

Davis seemed to be particularly annoyed by the fact that Dawkins had tweeted that more Nobel Prizes had been won by graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge, than by the whole of the Muslim world. Davis adjudged this to be particularly provocative, and wanted to know why Dawkins had said this. Dawkins replied that he had in fact toned down his comment for the sake of Muslim sensibilities, as he had originally wished to ask how it was that Jews accounted for 20% to 25% of all Nobel Prize winners, whereas the Muslim world had produced scarcely any. The Muslim world may have been at the cutting edge of science in the mediaeval period, but had stagnated scientifically ever since. Fact. Nonetheless, Davis described this as an "invidious comparison" more than once. Davis is not as bright as he thinks, and is playing with fire by trying to legitimise Islamic literalism. The likes of Davis, if they are permitted to get their way, will function as the handmaidens of a new dark age. Davis, to borrow an old term from a different context, is not so much an intellectual, as a useful idiot.

George Galloway curries favour with Muslim Electorate through invoking the prophet Motive

It is perhaps somewhat paradoxical that the parliamentary constituency of Bradford West is very much of the East in terms of both its outlook and demographic complexion. Its MP – George Galloway, of the peculiarly named ‘Respect’ Party – knows his electorate well, and is no shrinking violet when it comes to setting out his political stall, the wares of which habitually pertain to something going on far, far away from these shores, almost always in a land with a majority Muslim population. This is, of course, no coincidence, for the lands to which he refers possess a greater emotional resonance for the bulk of his electorate than other parts of the Bradford Metropolitan District, such as Ilkley. You won’t often hear a resident of Manningham singing ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘at’, for the preferred ‘song’ that wafts through the air in the vicinity of the minaret-like mighty chimney of Manningham Mills is the somewhat less lyrical, and rather more solemnly intoned, “Allahu-akbar”! Such a welcoming sound! Then again, perhaps, not.

Galloway is a canny operator, and unlike many of his opponents, is a competent orator who fine-tunes what he says for his audience to provide an appearance of ‘authenticity’. His stance is emotive, and his speeches invested with a degree of physicality, both contrasting with the listless and dull styles of the likes of Miliband, Cameron and Clegg (Miliband’s speeches possess all of the gravitas displayed by a twelve-year old presenting to the class on what he did over the summer holidays). So much for the style, but what about the substance? Alas, little positive can be said regarding the content of Galloway’s speeches upon which his talents are wasted. The latest of these he delivered on the steps of Bradford City Hall on the evening of Sunday 18 January, to a crowd several hundred strong, which had gathered to condemn the principles of freedom speech and expression, or more specifically, Charlie Hebdo.

Gathered in the dark chill of a winter’s night, his fiery oratory revisited familiar territory to fan the glowing embers of his audience’s resentment: ‘double standards’ in which ‘free speech’ was only ‘free’ if you were not a Muslim. He used the case of the recent murders perpetrated by Islamists in Paris as an opportunity to talk of a supposed anti-Muslim ‘backlash’ in this country and elsewhere in Europe, repeatedly invoking the cliché of the Muslim as ‘powerless victim’, forever set upon by an innately ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ (sic.) society. His audience found his rhetoric emotionally sustaining; its tenor may have been predictable, but this is what his listeners yearned for. Of the images published by Charlie Hebdo he intoned:

“These are not cartoons. These are not depictions of the prophet. These are pornographic, obscene insults to the prophet, and by extension 1.7 billion human beings on this Earth.”

If Galloway deems the image below to be ‘pornographic’, all that can be said is that he must possess some pretty ‘specialist’ tastes when it comes to arousal. Admittedly, he did make a fair point when posing the question as to why the Saudis should have had a prominent representative at the front of the Paris ‘Je suis Charlie’ march, for quite obviously there is no free speech in Saudi Arabia, and certainly no leeway for anyone to produce depictions, let alone cartoons of, Muhammed.

Offering a cursory condemnation of the murder of 17 people in Paris, Galloway quickly moved on to the main theme of his speech:

“Charlie Hebdo’s entire purpose, and for years, has been to further marginalise, further alienate, and further endanger exactly those parts of the community who are already alienated, already endangered. It is a racist, Islamophobic, hypocritical rag. Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo! We say that the honour of religious people, their prophets, their beliefs, is not fair game for such people because there are already limits to freedom of speech.”

The crowd, predominantly Muslim, warmed to his words. George Galloway, the MP for a post-English Muslim enclave in the heart of urban Yorkshire, was forwarding himself as the defender of the Islamic faith; the champion of a new de facto blasphemy law in defence of dark age obscurantism. In his peroration, he stated: 

“So, for the sake of social peace, for the sake of unity in our society we have to demand from our Government the protection of the prophet from obscene and pornographic provocation, and in Parliament I intend to fight for that. Asalaam alaykum!”

To this, he might have added “and remember to vote for me at the forthcoming General Election, as I even went so far as to convert to Islam to win this constituency.” Perhaps it is being a little unfair to impute his conversion to tactical political cynicism, but then again, why would anyone with an ounce of intelligence who was not compelled to adopt this religion choose to embrace such a ragbag of incoherent religious twaddle? Furthermore, what sort of prophet and what sort of deity require the protection of the law? If this ‘Allah’ of theirs gets so offended by a few rather crudely drawn cartoons, he’s neither very balanced, nor omnipotent. Why should this be? Clearly because Allah only exists inside the heads of believers, for he is a work of fiction, and bad fiction at that. There really isn’t anything ‘akbar’ about him at all, and to have people demand respect for this nonsense is the greatest obscenity of all, particularly when considering that his beloved ‘prophet’ appears to have possessed anger issues on a level with those of Genghis Khan. This demand for ‘respect’ from Respect’s only MP, is offensive. 

Banned: Anti-Islam Rallies in France and Germany

The banning of today’s Pegida rally and other ‘open-air gatherings’ in Dresden has been well publicised following a ‘concrete threat’ against the group, specifically its most prominent member, Lutz Bachmann. Pegida, on the other hand, has claimed that it took the decision to scrap the rally following an order from Islamic State to assassinate Bachmann. The ban, imposed by Dresden police, will last for 24 hours, but thereafter it is unclear what will happen regarding further protests. Clearly, the safety of leading Pegida members and their supporters is paramount, but it is chilling that these death threats have led to the cancellation of a peaceful and perfectly legitimate demonstration. Nothing could more clearly validate Pegida’s case that Islamisation is a real and growing danger for Germany and other European societies, than this death threat.

Additional evidence that the violent Islamist fifth column is successfully manipulating European politicians to further embed and privilege Islam within our societies comes from France, where another banning order was implemented in Paris yesterday. The ban related to an anti-Islamisation rally – 'Islamists out of France’ – which had been planned well in advance of the Islamist terror attacks in Paris earlier this month. The two organising groups - Riposte Laïque and Résistance Républicaine – have for a number of years been campaigning and warning against the Islamisation of France, but have hitherto not managed to mobilise mass support for their cause in their demonstrations. The latest rally has been banned upon the grounds that it would incited ‘hatred’ and ‘division’. The organisers correctly advised their supporters not to turn up, understanding that the authorities would use this as a pretext for manufacturing potentially violent confrontation and arrests.

 

 

Melanie Dittmer of Pegida, along with anti-Islamisation activists from Belgium (Pierre Flip), Italy (Armando Manocchia) and Switzerland (Jean-Luc Addor), had also been invited to the cancelled Paris rally. In its place, they, together with the organisers, held a press conference which provided an overview of resistance to Islamisation in their various countries. Elsewhere in France, sister rallies took place in Montpellier, Bordeaux and Lyon. It was noted that Pegida had now also established itself in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

 

Anti-Islamisation Protesters in Montpellier 



 

The official reaction to the Islamist attacks in France has possessed a clear agenda: to exonerate Islam, and to reinforce Islam’s place in France in the name of a non-existent ‘unity’. Correspondingly, Minister of Justice Christianne Taubira has announced a strengthening of so-called ‘anti-racist laws’ in connection with the right to criticise immigration and Islam, seeking to criminalise the non-existent phenomenon of ‘Islamophobia’. Riposte Laïque and Résistance Républicaine are correct in drawing the conclusion that the French state is likely to make them illegal, along with other kindred groups in the identitarian movement such as Bloc Identitaire, on the grounds that they incite ‘hatred’ and ‘division’ amongst the French people. If indeed, this does happen, Islam would effectively have been provided with immunity from criticism in France; an Islamic blasphemy law would have been enforced.

Whilst the ‘Islamists out of France’ rally against a growing fifth column was banned, a ‘Muslim-leftist protest’ was permitted to take place in Paris yesterday at the time scheduled for the former. It was accompanied by cries of “Allahu-akbar” (see video below).

We therefore see that despite the recent apparent mass demonstration in favour of freedom of speech and expression in Paris and across France, the Hollande administration does not genuinely believe in the concept of free speech should it involve criticism of Islamisation and other negative impacts of mass immigration on French society. It is also worth noting that although Marine Le Pen has recently been criticised by another leading Front National figure for going soft on Islam, she was excluded from the recent officially-sanctioned ‘Je suis Charlie’ march in Paris. What we are witnessing therefore, is an uncanny parallel to the political scenario outlined in Michel Houellebecq’s most recent novel ‘Soumission’ which was published on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo murders. In this, French political parties of Left and Right make common ground in 2017 to prevent the Front National from winning the presidential election, and thereafter an Islamist becomes leader of the Socialist Party and wins the presidential election of 2022, implementing Shariah in France. Houellebecq himself has admitted that the timescale employed in the novel has been somewhat accelerated, although he has emphasised that its scenario could well play out over the longer term. That said, the anti-Front National coalition in the 2017 elections appears to be a certainty, and the actions of a handful of violent Islamist fanatics has seemingly helped to cement Islam’s official place in France, rather than generating a wave of revulsion against the source of Islamism – Islamic doctrine – amongst the French political class.

 

 

 

How large is the Islamist Fifth Column?

Nigel Farage may have been chastised for employing the term ‘fifth column’ in a recent Channel 4 News interview when referring to what he termed a ‘tiny minority’ of Muslims in the UK, but his usage of this term was correct: there is a fanatical and violent Islamist fifth column in this country. Moreover, it self-evidently exists in many other European countries, wherever in fact, there are significant Muslim populations, i.e. in every western European state (although for the sake of exactitude I ought to make clear for pedantry’s sake that we should probably exclude Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino from consideration. As for the Vatican, well . . .).  

Before proceeding further, this piece rests upon the premise that Islamists actively identify against their European host societies, as the latter are not, and do not wish to become, Islamic states under the rule of Shariah. Islamists wish to establish the rule of Shariah and can be divided into two types: violent and non-violent. The former are willing to employ terror and revolutionary methods, whereas the latter may be content to use democratic mechanisms, relying upon gradual demographic change to gradually take control of the jurisdictions in which they reside. Both are a threat, with the first group demanding the immediate attention of our security services so as to contain and neutralise any imminent and nascent plots, whereas the second group can be dealt with via a combination of long-term surveillance, the choking off of financial support, and political measures that remove the ideological ‘respect’ accorded to Islam as a religion in this country and the other states of Europe.  

Not all Muslims are Islamists of course, but all Islamists believe in Islam. Hence, the higher the resident Muslim population, the greater the potential internal threat. So, how large is the Muslim population? What is the trajectory that it is set upon? 

The 2011 census recorded a total Muslim population of 2,706,066 in England and Wales, although this of course would not have included either those people who live here illegally, or those whose command of English is so limited as to have rendered them incapable of completing the census return. It is probably safe to assume that the actual number is above 3 million.  

The official statistics show that the Muslim population experienced phenomenal growth between the censuses of 2001 and 2011, for in the first of these years only 1.5 million people in England and Wales self-reported as Muslim. When we turn to the demographic composition of the resident Muslim population compared to people identifying themselves as Christian or as possessing no religion, the differences are pronounced, and suggest that the problems with Islamism that we encounter today are likely to grow and intensify in the future. Even if all immigration from Muslim countries were to cease now, the resident Muslim population would continue its rapid growth both in terms of absolute numbers and as a proportion of the overall population.  

Whereas 26% of Christians and 39% of non-believers were aged between 0 and 24 in 2011, 48% of Muslims fell into this age bracket. In the next age bracket of 25-49, the corresponding figures were a little more evenly balanced at 31%, 42% and 40% respectively, but turning to the retired segment of the population aged 65 and above, the respective figures are radically different, being 22%, 6% and 4%. In age terms alone, the potential for Muslim fertility is thus considerably greater than for either of the other two groups. Moreover, Muslims traditionally have larger families than members of the other groups. It is also worth considering that 53% of Muslims in the 2011 census had been born abroad, although that said, many second and third generation Muslims resident in the UK have turned to Jihadism. Islam therefore remains a physically, as well as a culturally, alien presence in England and Wales, and the sense of ‘grievance’ that is so frequently voiced by its adherents, from whichever of its many different varieties, is intrinsically linked to the desire for power, both cultural and political, in a country in which their culture and values, which they believe to be innately ‘superior’, have to take a subordinate position – for now – to those of the host society.

How might a ‘fifth column’ be defined? What should we consider to be its composite elements, and which pose the greatest danger? At the heart of this fifth column lie violent Islamists. Their numbers are difficult to estimate, but as a starting point, one can take the number who have been involved in the conflict in Iraq and Syria on behalf of ISIS or other Islamist organisations such as Al-Nusra. Intelligence estimates place this at somewhere in the region of 600. A certain proportion of these are unlikely to return from the Middle East, but it is reckoned that several hundred have come back to the UK. These individuals, together with other violent Islamists working on their own domestic plots who have not travelled to Iraq or Syria, could therefore number in the high hundreds or low thousands.

The next element of the fifth column are the sympathisers of the violent Islamists who, although not willing to endanger their own lives, may be willing to aid and abet them in their deeds. This group is likely to be considerably larger, numbering at least in the low thousands. This brings us to the third element, the political Islamists, who could be divided into those who are active members of organisations and supporters of campaigns pursuing an Islamist agenda, and their passive supporters. The first group will contain many more individuals than those currently willing to pursue violent means, with the pool of potential passive supporters being massive, numbering at the very least in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

In October 2014, the Times reported that a Populus poll of 2,000 ‘British’ adults revealed that one in seven had “warm feelings” towards ISIS, with support being at its highest level amongst the under 25s. If one were to extrapolate from these figures to the general population, this would imply that circa 9.2 million adults in our country look upon the Islamist regime in question favourably. Quite clearly, one would correctly think that the majority of those who do so are Muslim. The pool of support for Islamism in the UK is therefore several million strong, including, in all likelihood, the majority of the practising doctrinaire Muslim population. This is the size of the potential fifth column.

In France, it would seem that things are even worse, with their fifth column being larger still. A poll carried out in France in August 2014 reported that 16% of the French population were favourably disposed towards ISIS. How can this be? Do French non-Muslims really have a favourable view of ISIS? If this poll is to believe, over 10 million French citizens possess such views, far higher than the generally accepted figure of 4.7 million for the number of Muslims in France.

I can appreciate that many readers will think that I and others who share my concerns regarding this issue will believe me to be unduly ‘alarmist’, even ‘paranoid’, but committed minorities can, and do, bend the societies in which they live to fit their agendas. Depressingly, the tipping point seems to set in once the committed minority reaches 10% of a given population as one piece of recent research would appear to demonstrate:

‘Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.’

In France, the UK and Germany, we are not that far away from such a tipping point with our Muslim populations. This is why the warnings of Pegida need to be heeded, and the Front National must make headway in France before it is too late (although of late Marine Le Pen has been criticised for being too accommodating to Islam. One prominent FN MEP – Aymeric Chauprade – has released a video in which he declares that France is now at war with some Muslims, but “not Muslims in general.” The video and an accompanying article can be found at the Galliwatch blog). What will we do in the UK? Who wants to return to the Middle Ages? Not me.

Europe’s Cuckoos all a-twitter: ‘Je suis Kouachi’

Last night, the Belgian website sudinfo.be ran an article claiming that the top-trending twitter hashtags for Friday 9 January were #JeSuisCoulibaly and #JeSuisKouachi, which, as it notes, presents a rather ‘less positive message’ than the original #JeSuisCharlie that they were modelled upon. That these hashtags proved to be more popular raises the concern that support for their aims, if perhaps not necessarily their methods, amongst large swathes of the Muslim population in Europe is widespread.  

It should be abundantly clear by now, that doctrinaire Islam neither permits nor recognises the principles of freedom of expression and freedom of speech, and that the more people that there are in our countries who hold these views, the less secure our freedoms become. It should now also be equally clear, that this is not some esoteric intellectual debate less relevant to our everyday lives than the economic crisis through which we are living, for it is not only cartoonists, writers and thinkers who are threatened by Islamism, but everyone who does not submit to Islam. All Islamists, irrespective of whether they employ violence or strictly ideological and political methods, desire our submission. It is time that we made clear that we will not submit, and that there should be no place for such people in France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, or anywhere else in Europe. A minority of Europeans are bravely protesting and speaking out against the increasing Islamisation of their countries, in the face of unfounded accusations of racism, and the contempt of the leaderships of those political parties who have long advocated and encouraged large-scale immigration from overseas, irrespective of the values of the incoming population.  

Our message against Islamisation must be heard, taken seriously and acted upon. The Islamic cuckoo is growing restive in its European nest, and these tweets should awaken us to the fact that it must no longer be fed and nurtured with ever more emollient words and concessions, but instead ejected.

 

 

Ils ne sont pas Charlie?

The picture below has been reproduced by a number of media organisations including, notably, The Guardian. Look at the couple in the centre of the picture who are obviously not holding aloft 'Je suis Charlie' posters. Why might this be?

Sadly, as regular readers of this lately dormant blog know, this act of Islamist mass murder against the staff of Charlie Hebdo was perhaps not that unexpected, given the previous attacks upon their office, and the many death threats received. What the political fallout from this atrocity will be is hard to gauge, but one can be certain that there will be much hand-wringing about some putative 'backlash' against 'Muslim communities' in France and Europe more broadly. The advocates of mass immigration and multiculturalism will use, and have already been using, this as an opportunity to attempt to emphasise a non-existent commonality of values between Islam and the European societies that have in recent decades come to act as its accommodating, incubating host. There is no such commonality of values.

Islam, in its dogmatic literalist form, is not compatible with freedom of speech and expression, and contrary to the assertions of its many adherents and apologists, does not stand for 'peace', but for 'submission'. This is the correct translation. Those who submit are, in a very real sense, in a state of mental slavery to an entity name 'Allah', that exists only inside believers' heads. In essence, practising Muslims believe that their 'faith' is the 'truth', and if most may not be willing to use violence to bring about its dominance in our societies, they would welcome the consequences of its violent imposition.

History, alas, contains enough examples of violent, ideologically-motivated vanguard groups willing to sacrifice all for their ideals to realise their vision of the 'perfect' society, for us to posit the following question: could a violent Islamist vanguard, revelling in its use of terror, impose its vision upon its host societies? The Bolsheviks were a tiny minority in Tsarist Russia, but they successfully imposed their ideology and terror upon a population of hundreds of millions, repressing people for the best part of a century. Nazism too, although enjoying a significant degree of electoral support, cemented its grip through violence and terror, and was only defeated through a titanic military struggle.

Michel Houellebecq this week published his novel Soumission, featuring a scenario in which an alliance between French political parties results in the election of an Islamist President in 2022 following their united attempts to defeat Marine Le Pen and her Front National in the presidential elections of 2017. The timescale, as the author himself accepts, is somewhat accelerated, but such a depressing denouement is not beyond the realms of possibility at some future date. However, politics contains choices, and it will be interesting to see what choice the French people make in 2017.

What impact will recent events in Paris have upon Pegida? Deutsche Welle reports that the 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) has recently been holding talks with Pegida, and reached agreement over Germany's need for 'new immigration laws'. Nigel Farage was correct to speak of  the existence of a 'fifth column' in this country in his interview with Channel 4 News earlier this week. This 'fifth column', alas, is well established not only here, but in many other European countries.
 

Cameron pledges the UK to a war without end and without meaning

A comment made by the Prime Minister recently left me feeling poleaxed, and upon reading it I felt like rubbing my eyes and dousing myself in cold water to ensure that I was awake. Surely he could not have uttered the following sentence and believed in the substance of the words that he was enunciating with respect to the recent hostage crisis in Algeria:

What we face is an extremist, Islamist, al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in north Africa.

What does he mean by stating “had to deal with”? By using these words he seems to imply that the problem there has been solved. Has it? What has been achieved in Afghanistan? How has the problem been dealt with in Pakistan? Has the Islamist problem been solved in either country, or even here in the UK? Quite clearly, the answer must be no. Our intervention in Afghanistan may have eliminated al-Qaeda training camps, but what in reality has it achieved? When our forces leave that country after well over a decade of death, mutilation, psychological trauma and the expenditure of billions of pounds, what will we see? A prosperous Afghanistan friendly to the UK advocating freedom of opinion and expression for its citizens, together with respect and equal rights for its women, or a jubilant Taliban-dominated theocracy celebrating victory over the infidel, just as antipathetical to the UK and the West in general as it was in 2001 and imbued with a spirit of vengeance? It would seem that the second scenario would be far closer to what emerges than the former one.

A decade on from invasion and its subsequent occupation Iraq remains a religiously and ethnically cleft violent wreck. The Arab Spring, encouraged by the UK Government, has led to increased instability across North Africa and the Middle East, with Islamists playing a major role in the popular uprisings and in the new administrations that have emerged following the toppling of the old regimes. Cameron and Hague were keen to intervene in Libya, and have been chomping at the bit to do the same in Syria, irrespective of the chaos and geopolitical blowback that such meddling can produce. It has been widely claimed that the post-Qaddhafi instability in Libya has helped to flood parts of North Africa with weaponry, assisting an upsurge in violent Islamist militancy that has manifested itself both in the ongoing attempt to overthrow the Malian government as well as in the recent Algerian hostage crisis.

The Prime Minister’s call for a “global response” to what he dubs the “al-Qaeda” threat is thoroughly wrongheaded. Islamism existed before Bin Laden and it will exist long after his passing. Islamism, in one form or another, is as old as Islam itself, and until that ideology dies we will always have a problem with its violent fanatics wishing to impose their crude, vicious and misanthropic ideology upon everyone else: non-literalist Muslims and non-Muslims alike. What, after all, does Cameron mean when he states that:

It requires a response that is patient and painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve and that is what we will deliver over these coming years.

Perhaps the Prime Minister should steer clear of reference to “iron” to denote resolve, for we all now how brittle his “cast iron” guarantee proved to be with respect to an EU membership referendum. Is he committing us to an endless series of wars in which we fight with our hands tied behind our backs, bereft of either a clear goal or modus operandi? If so, who will die and who will pay for this policy? What benefit will it bring and to whom?

It would appear that the immense corrupting wealth of the Saudis and the other Arab petrodollar states of the Gulf has effectively muzzled politicians such as Cameron. The fountainhead of Islamism today, in both its violent and political variants, is Saudi Arabia. Find an effective alternative to oil, and the Saudis’ malign and growing influence would collapse. Thus, to find such an alternative should be one of our key political and economic tasks. The Saudis produce nothing of value other than what they pump out of the ground, with the rest of their wealth being derived from parasitic investment around the globe. If Cameron truly wished to wage war to destroy Islamism he would call for the subjugation and occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, but to be ‘successful’, that sort of war would call forth the logic of total war witnessed in the horrific brutality displayed by both sides on the Eastern Front with its associated exterminist logic. Who wants such a war? Not me. I would prefer the option of the peaceful development of viable alternative energy sources and the concomitant undermining and collapse of the economic, political and cultural influence of the Arab petrodollar states. Only then will we stand a chance of defeating Islamism.

Cameron and Hague are intellectual lightweights, and if they truly wished to root out Islamism they could make no better start than by rooting it out at home, for after all, they and their political predecessors in the Labour Party have allowed it to flourish in Britain. They may as well launch drone strikes on Tower Hamlets and Bradford as upon Pakistan, for there is not a great deal to differentiate the two environments other than an increasingly nominal sovereignty. As it is, the two men seem intent upon poking their noses into as many Islamist hornets’ nests as possible, with Syria and Mali looking like our most probable forthcoming entanglements.

Such interventions will be pointless, bloody, expensive and ineffectual. Moreover, they will generate ever-greater resentment against us, no matter how ill founded, by Muslims around the globe. At the same time, Cameron, Hague and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will continue to push for the economic and eventual political integration of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa into an expanded EU, arguing that this is ‘necessary’ to disseminate economic prosperity throughout the Arab world and thereby undermine support for Islamism. This is the eventual goal of Euromed, but in reality what it would achieve, if its logic were to be fully enacted, would be for every state in the EU to be flooded by a massive demographic wave from the Muslim states of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, bringing economic and cultural decline to Europe, as well as the demographic eclipse and eventual disappearance of the European peoples. Alas, a twin combination of cack-handed interventionism and half-baked policies on economic integration are likely to be the favoured response of the current Government. It is a grim prospect, but we can expect only support for such a policy from an intellectually bankrupt Labour Party. Where is the effective opposition? Who will articulate the much-needed alternative?

The Odd Couple: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Nikki Sinclaire

Yesterday’s announcement that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alternatively known as Tommy Robinson, was leaving his position as joint Vice-Chairman of the BFP to focus on his leadership of the EDL came as a surprise to many. Quite what precipitated his decision is unclear, but this announcement comes only a fortnight after an unsubstantiated rumour circulated that Paul Weston had resigned from his position as BFP Chairman, a rumour that was swiftly rebutted. It begs the question as to who started this rumour and why?

In his interview with The Independent yesterday, Lennon (for the sake of brevity I shall avoid the double-barrelled formulation) stated:

"I am looking at how to change the EDL into a genuine political party but we can't put a time on it at the moment. We are looking at the 2014 elections in Europe.

"It [the BFP] just isn't for me, I want to stick to the EDL. I wanted to make this decision before I committed myself to campaigning for the BFP. I have not been involved in an election campaign for them yet, so it is the right time."

What was it about the BFP’s policy platform that caused Lennon to take this decision, if indeed it was a matter of policy that caused his departure? Whatever the underpinning cause happened to be, attempting to turn the EDL into a political party is an utterly pointless venture, being as it is a single-issue protest group. Lennon would be better off re-evaluating his movement’s aims, objectives and tactics, transforming it into a more tightly focused and effective campaigning vehicle independent of any particular political party. Although it has managed to establish itself in the public consciousness, the EDL has not, generally speaking, projected an image that would exert electoral appeal to anything other than a small hardcore of supporters. Irrespective of the fact that there are certain widely-recognised negative behaviours exhibited by Islamists in this country which the majority of the general public find abhorrent, voters are not going to cast their ballots for a party that makes tackling Islamism its number one issue, although they would of course be happy to vote for a party with a comprehensive policy platform that dealt appropriately with the Islamist problem as part of its wider policy mix. Voters are primarily concerned about the economy, public services, education, housing and immigration, not Islamism, no matter how much distaste they may possess for it.  

Does Lennon intend to transform the EDL into a political party with such a broad policy mix? This seems doubtful. For all of its flaws and fixation upon the Islamic issue, the BFP does at least profess to possess objectives other than tackling Islamism and Islamisation; the EDL does not. In this respect, Lennon’s move brings to mind the recent announcement by former UKIP MEP Nikki Sinclaire in connection with the creation of a new political party named ‘We Demand a Referendum’ (WDAR), which possesses no policy other than to secure a referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU. For some reason, The Sun threw its backing behind this venture last month, presumably because Murdoch no longer finds Cameron’s Conservative Party to his liking.

How peculiar it is, that both Lennon and Sinclaire have decided to leave single-issue fixated parties and establish new splinter parties focused purely upon Islam and the EU respectively. This is not the stuff of electoral politics, but of pressure group agitation, and given the obsession of both figures with these single issues, they would be best advised to keep out of electoral politics and instead concentrate upon building up convincing arguments and campaigns in support of their respective positions. A vote for either will be a wasted one; both parties will fail, and badly at that. Voters need to be presented with a credible alternative to which they can lend their support; a party that genuinely tackles both of these concerns alongside the pressing need to address those issues that are central to the winning of any campaign. The EDL will not be such a party, and neither will the WDAR.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon: Leader of the EDL

  Nikki Sinclaire: Leader of 'We Demand a Referendum'

Video: Muslims Pray at Westminster Abbey

As mentioned in a brief post yesterday, whilst an anti-Muslim grooming demonstration was being held near Downing Street, another demonstration was being held by Muslims in Westminster. In the first of the short videos below, a group of Muslims can be seen praying beneath the walls of Westminster Abbey. Edward the Confessor would not be happy. The second video shows yesterday's Muslim demonstration against the 'Innocence of Muslims' film opposite the Houses of Parliament in the Abbey grounds. Who gave them permission to demonstrate there? Was it the Church? If so, why? Does this imply that some elements within the Church of England support the introduction of a blasphemy law protecting Islam?

Whereas previous Muslim protests in the capital that have caught the media's attention tended to be organised by one of Anjem Choudary's radical Islamist groups, this protest seems to have consisted of 'mainstream' Muslims, and was much larger. As in the recent demonstration about this matter in Bradford, the speakers address the crowd not in English, but in some sort of 'community' language from the subcontinent, thereby doubly demonstrating that they do not belong in England. For some reason, the BBC website did not cover this. Could it have been that the editors did not wish to alarm people?

Central London was evidently buzzing with demonstrations yesterday connected with Islam in one way or another, for the third video shows a group of Pakistani Christians protesting against the persecution of their co-religionists in Pakistan. Given the appalling treatment of Christians in Pakistan, their disquiet is fully understandable.

New Polish Film: September 11 1683

The Poles are just about to release a film that is bound to appeal to patriotic sentiment in Poland, focusing as it does upon the pivotal role of the forces of Polish King Jan III Sobieski in the defeat of the Ottoman forces that ended the Second Siege of Vienna. This moment represented a turning point in European history, with Sobieski leading the charge of 3,000 winged hussars which finally broke the Ottoman line. Thereafter, Muslim expansionism in Europe was checked and gradually driven back, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in the wake of World War I representing the logical denouement of this new phase in history. The threat that had hung over Europe since the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711 appeared to be over. For a full millennium, the peoples of Europe had been prey to the aggression and territorial expansionism of Muslim imperialism, but by the 1920s it seemed that this menace was dead. How wrong we were.

One of the legacies of World War II was a loss of confidence in the values of Western Civilisation and a questioning of its moral worth with respect to other cultures. The resultant cultural relativism coincided with rapid decolonisation, the rise of anti-Western movements and the fostering of a cult of post-imperial guilt in many European societies. This was the moment when Islam – or more specifically Islamism – began to revive with a building intensity. The former metropolitan imperial powers of Britain and France opened their borders to mass immigration from their ex-colonies, a process aided by new and cheaper modes of mass transport. No consideration was paid to the cultural baggage carried by these new arrivals, and the heaviest baggage of all proved to be Islamic.

The post-war world witnessed the bloody partition of British India leading to the creation of the explicitly Islamic state of Pakistan, with two other key events being the Iranian Revolution and US assistance to anti-Soviet Islamists in Afghanistan. Throughout this period, Saudi influence burgeoned as the vast oil wealth of the kingdom enabled Wahhabi proselytisation around the globe, and today, in the wake of the Arab Spring, we find Islamism on the rise across the Arab world, and Muslim minorities in Europe growing more vocal and assertive in their desire to snuff out free speech and impose their own Islamic mores upon our societies. The victory of 1683 therefore, was perhaps not as decisive as we would wish it to have been, for the forces of Islamic obscurantism have successfully regathered themselves and are once more on the offensive.

In recent weeks we have witnessed Muslim protests against the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the latest Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocking Mohammed and even demands for a student society at Reading University to be removed from the Freshers’ Fayre for naming a pineapple “Muhammed”. What then, might we expect when September 11 1683 is released in Britain? In Poland, there should not be any problems, as the country possesses a miniscule Muslim population, but here in Britain, especially in England, it is a different matter altogether. Given Sobieski’s role as a Polish national hero, an upholder of the Catholic Faith, it is unlikely that the forthcoming film will seek to fit the sort of pro-multicultural cultural relativist narrative that would have been forced upon it had it been made in Hollywood or Britain, so that in itself should make it worth viewing. However, as to whether the film is itself any good as a piece of cinematography or drama remains to be seen, but the fact that the Poles have produced this film at this particular time should stimulate some interesting debate. It is likely to be vilified by many British critics as “crude Islamophobic propaganda”. As to what I make of it, I shall let you know once I have seen it. The clip below gives a foretaste of the film.

Review: 7/7 Bombings: Conspiracy Road Trip

This evening witnessed the broadcast of the first in a three-part series on conspiracy theories with the theme being the 7/7 Bombings; the second and third instalments will deal with Creationism and UFOs. Hosted by comedian Andrew Maxwell (I hadn’t heard of him either), I initially feared, given that is was screened on BBC3, that this offering from the BBC would be from the same stable of “in-depth” documentaries as have previously been hosted by Stacey Dooley, a young woman possessed of all of the gravitas of a helium balloon. Thankfully, this was not to be the case, with Maxwell putting aside his comic persona for the evening and doing a decent job of narrating the piece, questioning each of the conspiracy theorists and attempting to get them to see that “the official narrative”, as they would term it, was actually the correct one.

The four conspiracy theorists came from quite different backgrounds: Layla, a 32-year-old journalist and part-time model; Davina, a 20-year-old Muslim convert and law student; Tony, an ex-security worker and CCTV operative, and Jon, who was described as a “political activist” (i.e. presumably unemployed) from a group calling itself “We are Change”, which from the appearance of its website seems to be some sort of anarchist/Far Left platform akin to Indymedia.

At the start of the documentary, all four believed that the 7/7 bombings were not the responsibility of the men who carried them out: Shehzad Tanweer, Siddique Khan, Hasib Hussain and Germaine Lindsay, but it was the documentary’s express intent to challenge and change these perceptions by presenting them with rebuttals of their pet theories. One of the most interesting aspects of the documentary proved to be how resistant to evidence and logic some of the four proved to be owing to their deeply held and emotionally-charged beliefs, illustrating the lengths to which some people will go to validate a firmly held conviction that is buoyed up by emotional fervour rather than evidence. It seemed, especially for Tony, that to challenge the theory was to in some way question and undermine some aspect of their sense of self.

The four bombers detonated themselves in the bloodiest terrorist act witnessed in Britain (if one excludes the Lockerbie bombing) killing 52 victims and wounding over 700, yet unfortunately the conspiracy theories articulated by the group of four possess a certain resonance with a segment of the population, for an opinion poll carried out by Channel 4 News in 2007 revealed that 24% of its sample of 500 “British Muslims” believed that the 7/7 attacks were planned and implemented by the Establishment.

Maxwell spent a week with the conspiracy theorists, starting out in Leeds where they were introduced to a resident of Beeston named Sasha, who had lived opposite Shehzad Tanweer and knew two of the other bombers. Davina’s belief in a conspiracy theory rested upon her conviction that the personalities of the “Muslim boys” simply did not fit with the atrocity that they had committed. She posed the question as to whether they had been “forced to do it”. Sasha herself noted that a great deal of suspicion had grown up between Muslim and non-Muslim residents since 2005, but stated her belief that the bombers had been “innocent” and that the Hamara Centre – which is where the bombers had spent a great deal of time together – had nothing to do with terrorism as “they were good Muslim boys” who didn’t go to London to kill people. This delusional thinking was demolished by a Muslim academic named Dr Russell Razaq, who specialises in terrorist psychology. He noted how the three bombers sequestered themselves in the Hamara Centre until two or three in the morning, long after it had closed, with nobody else present. Talking long into the night, the three reinforced and radicalised each other’s worldview, free from the observation of others. Davina appeared impressed by this reasoning, and conceded that the apparent discrepancy between their characters and their actions could be accounted for in this way.

The group then took a minibus to Luton, where the three bombers who had set off from Leeds met up with Germaine Lindsay in a Luton car park. This is where one of Jon’s pet theories – that the train times had been “falsified by the Government” because the 07:40 from Luton had been cancelled – was challenged. All four were given the task of pretending to be one of the terrorists, and of making their way from Luton Station to the various points in London where each had detonated their devices. Contrary to their expectations, they made it to the designated locations at just the time that the bombers had – with three of the bombers simultaneously detonating their devices at 08:50 – thereby disproving Jon’s assertion that this had not been possible. Nonetheless, Jon remained convinced that elements in the Government had deliberately planned an operation to murder citizens to legitimise its ongoing war in Iraq and to secure access to oil. Even by the end of the documentary, having been confronted with much more evidence disproving his theory, he held dear to his paranoid leftist delusion that the 7/7 bombings had been planned as “a justification to continue those wars in the Middle East” and to support the spread of “British imperialism” around the world. Tony too was of a very similar mindset, thinking that “big business” also had something to do with it.

Tony had been convinced that there was something fishy about some CCTV footage having gone what he termed “deliberately missing”, with Jon concurring that 20 minutes of missing footage from the Tube “reeks of an inside job”. Brian Paddick, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Met on the day was unable to convince the duo otherwise.

The four were introduced to a survivor of the Edgeware Road Tube explosion – Jacqui Putnam – who had seen Siddique Khan reach down and detonate his bomb, yet this convinced neither Jon nor Tony. Davina however, dabbed away a few tears, and at this point came to recognise that the four had committed this crime. Jon and Tony were now taking the line that the four had been “patsies” to cover for a “parallel operation” by the security services.

An Imam – Dr Naseem – was visited, who made the ludicrous claim that the Government had planned the suicide bombings to incite hatred against Muslims, a view with which Jon and Tony enthusiastically concurred.

Layla stated that she had some doubts over who had detonated the bombs, for she had heard that they were already in the trains and had been detonated remotely from beneath. However, an explosives expert explained that none of the trains had derailed, which would have occurred had bombs been planted beneath the carriages. This was the moment when the penny dropped for Layla, who promptly discarded her previous belief in the bombings having arisen from a conspiracy theory, the nature of which she had not elaborated to any great extent. A bitter row then later ensued between Layla and Tony and Jon, with Layla stating that neither of the two men believed in logic. This caused particular offence to Tony, whose argumentativeness appeared to grow out of his innate truculence.

It was Tony who also scoffed at the idea that homemade explosives could be powerful enough to cause the blasts, a belief blown apart like the bus in a quarry demonstrating the power of an improvised device using black pepper and hydrogen peroxide.

In pithy fashion, Maxwell turned to Tony and Jon and said: “Can you not have some more fucking doubt in these online idiots?!” A fair point. By now, Tony conceded that Maxwell had made him realise that “it was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy”. Not Jon though. Jon continued to stick to his conspiracy theory. Whether or not he also believes that the world is controlled by a global elite of lizards was not made clear, but it would come as no surprise to learn that he subscribes to such lunacy.

Although this documentary appears to have caused something of a furore in the press, it was a decent programme that sought to undermine some frankly outlandish conspiracy theories held by a worrying minority of people about the atrocity on 7 July 2005. The words of a father about his 22-year-old son David, who died that day on his first solo trip to London as he stood next to Siddique Khan, summed up the loss that many experienced, and will never be able to replace owing to the actions of a small group of violent Islamists: “I’ll never ever stop feeling angry about the death of my son”.

There are others like them in our towns and cities today, and it is to the credit of the security services that so many would-be bombers have been intercepted before being able to carry out their plots. Islamism is what caused these deaths, and it is Islamism that must be rooted out to ensure that this never happens again. Many so-called 'truthers' are apologists for and enablers of Islamism, and their ravings deserve no credence, just as Islamism deserves no place in our country. Who do they think made Shehzad Tanweer's 'martyrdom' video? MI5? Their position is delusional and risible.

Jon, Davina, Andrew, Layla and Tony: Conspiracy Road Trippers

Charlie Hebdo and the Hysteria of Islamists

Once again, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has fallen foul of the Islamists by publishing cartoons of Mohammed, leading to the usual threats and security alerts that attend any slight to the fragile sensibilities of ‘the devout’. This is not the first time that it has been targeted, for back in November last year its decision to publish a special issue entitled Charia Hebdo which contained many cartoons of its ‘guest editor’ Mohammed, led to its offices being firebombed. Both incidents highlight a phenomenon first generated by the Danish Jyllands-Posten furore and its publication of a number of Mohammed cartoons in 2005.

Charlie Hebdo published a fresh set of cartoons this week as a response to the violently febrile reaction to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ film that has been witnessed across much of the Muslim world and amongst some Muslims resident in European states. These reactions serve to illustrate the ugly domineering impulse that lies at the heart of Islamic doctrine, and it is of course crucial that we tackle this challenge in an appropriately robust fashion: we must not cave in to Islamist threats, and their demands to restrict freedom of speech and expression in our nations; blasphemy is no offence.

In Germany, the Pro-Deutschland movement has expressed its desire to publicly screen the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, causing some disquiet amongst the German authorities and sections of the media that have wheeled out the usual demonising ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’ labels to apply to the group. In Russia, Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov called for Google to block Russian web access to the film’s Youtube site, threatening to curtail its freedom to operate in the country from November if it failed to do so. Rostelekom, one of Russia’s biggest internet providers, blocked access to Youtube in a number of Russian regions last night, and Yaroslav Nilov, Chairman of the Duma Committee on Social and Religious Organisations, has called upon the Ministry of Culture to ban screenings of the film in Russia on the basis that this would constitute “incitement to religious hatred.” He noted that Russia had a Muslim population of 20 million. The reaction of these influential Russian politicians seems to have been born out of a combination of a desire to appeal to the growing number of Muslim voters in the country, and of fear.

It is time that mainstream broadcasters and politicians in Britain and other European nations stopped pretending that these violent outbursts, threats and intolerance are not connected to Islamic doctrine, which is incompatible with a modern, civilised political and social worldview. In our countries, Muslims should not only be seen to respect our right to freedom of speech and expression and to acknowledge the supremacy of secular law, but they should also give active support to these principles. If not, then they should give serious consideration as to where they ought to live: is it to be here, or somewhere more conducive to their mental and cultural universe, such as their ancestral familial homeland(s)? The recent violent reactions to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and Tom Holland’s ‘Islam: The Untold Story’, have followed swiftly upon the anniversary of 9/11, which makes it apparent that all of these attacks upon freedom of expression are part of a wider Islamist political agenda.

Given this reality, how can anyone still give credence to what is printed in the pages of The Guardian upon such matters? That paper, and the BBC, to name but two influential players in the mass media, ought to offer us an explanation as to why they have systematically distorted reporting about Islamic issues so as to provide Islamic doctrine with a veneer of respectability, helping to embed it within our country and to facilitate its spread. We never wanted it, and we certainly do not need it. Now is as good a time as any to make this fact crystal clear.

Charlie Hebdo's latest cover

 

Obama: preparing to attack Syria?

There are ominous signs that the US is preparing for military intervention against Syria. As in Iraq, it is of course the pretext of WMD - this time the potential movement of Syrian chemical and biological weopons - that is being deployed to rationalise US aggression. The New York Times quotes Obama as saying:

We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.

In other words, the US President is implying that such weapons could fall into the hands of Islamist militants including Al-Qaeda. This comes a day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennadii Gatilov claimed that:

Yet more facts have appeared, including those in the mass media, about the massive scale of the supply of weaponry manufactured in the West to the Syrian opposition through third countries.

Today, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo as well as a Syrian government delegation, and issued a statement reiterating their opposition to foreign intervention in Syria, emphasising "the need to strictly adhere to the norms of international law and the principles contained in the UN Charter, and not to allow their violation". No country or group of nations, in their opinion, should pursue a policy of imposing "democracy by bombs". The message from Moscow and Beijing to Obama is clear: stay out of Syria. The question is, will the world's sole military hyperpower take heed of these words, or instead pursue the reckless policy of destabilising and destroying another Arab state with no clear vision of what is likely to come next? Some within America's Christian fundamentalist eschatological fringe may rave with enthusiasm at such a potential portent of the coming of the 'end times', but rational beings everywhere will instead shudder at the likely mass bloodletting which will ensue.

It is widely known that Islamist militants, including some holding UK passports, have entered Syria in order to destabilise the Assad regime, and that regional powers such as Saudi Arabia appear to have been funding the uprising. Whatever should happen, Syria's internal problems are not our problems, and the UK should not interfere in Syrian affairs. However, just as in Libya, there has been a clamour for intervention within our foreign policy establishment that has been paralleled by the BBC's emotive tenor favouring direct intervention. We should not succomb to such propaganda. Atrocities are being committed in Syria, and they are being committed by both sides. However, the so-called "activists" of the "Opposition" are not, on the whole, humane Western-style democrats. Islamism looks set to come to Syria aided, no matter how unwittingly, by the US and the UK. Life under Assad may have been bad for some people, but for others, particularly Christians and Alawites, many may find that they have no lives at all once his regime is gone. If Syria fragments, what happens to her neighbouring states? What impact, in particular, will this have on Turkey? Ethnic and confessional groups straddle borders, and hundreds of thousands of refugees threaten to add an additional destabilising influence to the mix.

Hizb ut-Tahrir in Tatarstan

Although the trial of Pussy Riot has currently made the international news (see forthcoming article after sentencing), much that goes on inside Russia, particularly if it is outside of Moscow or St Petersburg, passes largely unnoticed by the outside world. Last month, an Islamist double attack on prominent Tatar Muslims critical of Salafism led to the death of Tatarstan's Deputy Mufti Valiulla Yakupov and the serious wounding of the Chief Mufti Ildus Fayzov, prompting a Spetsnaz operation that rounded up many Islamist militants. Now however, it would seem that Tatarstan's Islamist problem may be embedding itself within the republic's official structures, for allegations have emerged that Tatarstan's police have been "pandering to Islamists".

Izvestia reports that deputies of the Russian State Duma have requested an explanation from Tatarstan's General Prosecutor's Office for the failure of police to intervene in recent meetings, where representatives of Hizb ut-Tahrir (a proscribed organisation in the Russian Federation) gathered alongside Tatar separatists and flew flags emblazoned with the organisation's slogans. The meetings at which these symbols are said to have been displayed were held in protest at the Spetsnaz crackdown on Islamists following the double attack. Aleksandr Starovoitov, a deputy belonging to Russia's Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) - a rather different beast to our own Liberal Democrats - told Izvestia:

That representives of separatist organisations and even of banned extremist organisations came out bears witness to the fact that the Tatarstan authorities may fully share their views, if not support them.

That a figure such as Starovoitov might be inclined to make such a statement is not surprising, but is there an underpinning factual basis for his assertion? It would seem that comments by other Duma members would suggest that there is, for the Head of the Committee on Nationality Affairs Gadzhimet Safaraliev told the paper:

The appearance of flags of such an organisation as "Hizb ut-Tahrir" is completely inadmissible. This is an extremist organisation banned by the courts. And that the Kazan police in no way reacted to the appearance of such symbols on the streets of the city represents a failure to discharge their duties. 

Today they march with flags, tomorrow with machine guns. Such activists must be called to account. The General Prosecutor's Office must deal with this.

Tatarstan's Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to comment on a meeting of the Tatar nationalist group Azatlyk (the Union of Tatar Youth) at which Hizb ut-Tahrir flags were said to have appeared, although it did acknowledge "that there were flags with Arabic inscriptions". As commented previously, it is unfortunate that many young Tatars of a nationalist inclination are falling into the trap of identifying with Islamism as the primary facet of their being, for after all, Hizb ut-Tahrir's call for the establishment of a universal caliphate has nothing to do with autonomy or political self-determination for the Tatar nation.

Although Russia does possess a genuine problem with civil liberties owing to the routine abuse of power by influential members of the political elite, as exemplified in the current Pussy Riot trial, it appears that those who have no genuine respect for such liberties, just like their Islamist counterparts in Britain, are happy to invoke the name of Western civil rights and freedom of expression in order to subvert those values. Nail' Nabiullin, the Leader of Azatlyk thus told Izvestia:

Our organisation is unregistered and up to this point we do not wish to be registered, since as soon as we had registered, they would ban us immediately. Now the authorities exert strong intimidation against activists, so that they don't conduct any activities or pickets. This is done through institutions of higher education, which they threaten to purge.

I am not acquinted with the flags of "Hizb ut-Tahrir". Although, of course, at the last meeting there were people with flags with Arabic inscriptions. They translated them to me as "There is no God but Allah".

Quite how far Azatlyk is focused specifically upon the Islamic inheritance of the Tatars is hard to say, since my knowledge of Tatar and the other Turkic languages is minimal to put it mildly. However, a report appearing on Russia's Ria Novosti today revealed that Nabiullin had led a protest on Sunday "against the mass detention of Muslims afer the double attempt on the lives of Muslim leaders in Kazan". Given the focus of this protest and the fact that it was jointly organised by Azatlyk and Kazan's Al'-Ikhlis mosque, it would seem to have a heavily Islamic, possibly Islamist, bent. Altogether, it is said that circa 100 individuals participated in the protest that passed off peacefully.

The growth of Islamism across the Russian Federation - particularly in those constituent republics and regions hosting a traditionally Muslim population - is a cause for concern, for the differential birth-rates between Muslims and non-Muslims is pronounced; the long-term decline of the ethnic Russian population continues, whilst the Muslim population booms. Many analysts, both within the country and without, must be posing the question of whither Russia should a Muslim majority hold sway in a few decades time? Such an eventuality would be positive neither for the Russians, nor for the rest of the world.

Kazan's Kremlin

Dewsbury Bomb Plot?

Normally, the fact that a significant swathe of the resident Pakistani population evades car insurance rankles with me, given that this results in the rest of us having to pay higher premiums. However, today this selfish and anti-social practice has proven to be a blessing in disguise, for according to articles in today’s editions of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, a chance traffic check that led to a car being impounded because the driver was not insured, could have saved Dewsbury, or possibly somewhere else, from an Islamist terror attack.

The car was stopped and impounded as it was heading southbound on the M1 between Junctions 34 and 33 last Saturday near Sheffield’s Meadowhall Shopping Centre. The driver and his passenger were released, and the incriminating contents of the car are not said to have been discovered until last Monday, when someone in the pound raised the alarm regarding something suspicious in the car. Without this alarm, the improvised explosive device (IED), two firearms, ammunition and anti-British leaflets would not have been discovered. The leaflets, claims the Mirror, made specific negative references to ‘the EDL, David Cameron and the Queen.’

It was this discovery that precipitated this week’s second national police swoop to arrest Islamist militants, with three men from Sparkhill in Birmingham being seized on Tuesday, and three others from Moseley, Alum Rock and Sandwell on Wednesday. A seventh man, from Dewsbury, was arrested on Thursday. With such a gap between the seizure of the car and the arrests, the Telegraph notes that this meant that:

the suspects were at large for three days after the police had seized the vehicle, which could have allowed time to destroy or hide other weapons or incriminating evidence.

Evidently, the suspects and their accomplices will have done their best to cover their tracks during the intervening period, which could unfortunately hinder the prosecution of all involved, and potentially mask the identities of other individuals linked to the plot.

A 'notorious far-right group' and a 'wonderful family' man: a view from a distorting mirror
It is striking that the Daily Mirror chose to open its story on this foiled plot with a sentence that sought to blacken the name of the bombers’ potential target rather than the bombers themselves:

One theory is the occupants were planning to bomb a march by the notorious far-right group taking place just hours later.

Later in the article the EDL is described as ‘the notorious anti-Islamic group’. Note how this stigmatising linguistic usage contrasts to the Mirror’s attempt to normalise and humanise the Dewsbury terror suspect, whom it described as a:

dad-of-three [who had] set up a boxing club in 2009 to get youngsters off the streets. One neighbour said: “They are a wonderful family and this must be one huge mistake.”

How very interesting to see another member of this ethno-confessional ‘community’ not condemning the fact that this man was plotting terroristic violence, and instead describing his actions as “one huge mistake”. Why did the interviewee regard it as a “huge mistake”? Because he had been caught, rather than being able to see through whatever act of mass murder and maiming he was planning?

In the Telegraph the reader encounters yet more apologia for one of the terror suspects arrested in Sparkhill: 

We’ve grown up with them. They’re all lovely. They’re fine. They had a bit of a family issue with the mum and the dad separating, but there’s never been any problem with them as neighbours. They’ve never given any impression of being radicalised. They’re British Pakistanis. We’ve known them since they were babies and they’ve always seemed pretty westernised.

The Dewsbury terror suspect was part of a “wonderful family” and his alleged Sparkhill accomplice was “lovely” and “fine”. Such descriptions could seem to express a deep-rooted unwillingness on the part of Pakistani British residents to condemn Islamism and Islamist-related violence, which may ultimately rest upon the fact that they share and approve of the goals of violent Islamists: the Islamisation of Britain. Although not perhaps willing to use violence to achieve this themselves, are they particularly bothered when others do so in their name? The evidence would seem to suggest not. 

Bomb, Assassination or 'Mumbai-style attack'?
According to the Telegraph, a number of the suspects were already known to MI5, and the seizure of materials ‘raised the suspicion that a group were planning an assassination attempt or a Mumbai-style shooting atrocity that day or imminently.’ Dewsbury of course lies to the north of Sheffield, so it is odd that the men were stopped as they were travelling south on the day of the EDL march in Dewsbury if they were attempting to attack it. Perhaps they were on their way to pick up co-conspirators? Then again, their intended target may have been something else altogether.

Over at the Casuals United blog which supports the EDL and other ‘infidel’ groups across the UK, two of its contributors speculate that there is something fishy about this alleged plot. Both of the posts below take a conspiratorial stance, although each with a distinct slant:

7 07 2012

We are supposed to believe that police pulled over a car that had no insurance and they impounded it. We are supposed to believe that there were guns and a bomb in the car, but police let the men go and didn’t bother searching the car till the next day? We all know that this would never happen. Police stop you for something like that, they always search your car. If it does turn out to be true then it validates everything we[’]ve said about this country being full of dangerous scum who need to be deported in large numbers.

This story stinks and I reckon its been manufacture[d] to cause fear and put people off going to EDL demos. What do you think? If they ever did bomb a demo Britain would turn into Northern Ireland overnight and that is a fact.

NFSE

Suzy

7 07 2012

Someone[‘]s just pointed out that its funny that at the last two demos there have been no Muslims on the streets at all, no gangs of Jihadis and bad boys as there usually are, and they catch a car full of them supposedly on their way to plant a bomb at our demo. Prior warning via the Mosques? Makes you wonder.

Zoe

The strange death of Muslim 'anti-fascism'
It is true that the so-called ‘anti-fascist’ counter-demo in Dewsbury attracted startlingly low numbers of supporters despite heavy backing and publicity, and there was a notable absence of local Muslims amongst the small crowd that turned out. Hitherto, the SWP-dominated ‘Unite Against Fascism’ and its various Trotskyist-led front groups have found ‘anti-fascist’ mobilisation against the EDL useful from their perspective, drawing in hot-headed young Muslims as an aggressive shock-force, designed both to intimidate and to manufacture the perception in the national media that there exists a genuine ‘fascist threat’ in this country, which is just grist to their mill of Marxist revolutionary radicalisation. However, it seems that many Muslims have cottoned on to the opportunistic nature of the Trotskyist far-left and the fact that they have been used as a catspaw to further a Marxist agenda with which they fundamentally disagree. Moreover, highly politicised groups with a specifically Muslim identity have emerged that appear to have been attracting many younger Muslims who might previously have been siphoned off into the ranks of the SWP and other leftist organisations. Thus, the absence of Muslim ‘anti-fascist’ mobilisation at the last couple of EDL demos could be more indicative of both of these trends, than of any ‘warning’ from mosques to stay away because of potential violence.

Seven years ago today 58 people died in London in the 7/7 bombings and hundreds were maimed and mentally scarred. These latest arrests, together with the London arrests on Thursday, illustrate the ever-present threat of violent Islamism within our shores. We must remain vigilant and ensure that all forms of Islamism are rooted out of our country, and its proponents removed.  

7/7 Mass Murder Victims