Britain has been unable to counter such intimidation because it has already sold the pass to other “victim” groups. It has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “antiracists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. And those demands were identical to those made by the Islamists: not merely to tolerate their values as minority rights but to replace normative values altogether and subordinate the values of the majority to the minority, because majority values set up a hierarchy that is deemed to be innately discriminatory. So when Muslims refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.
This in turn is part of a wider movement that has become the orthodoxy amongst the progressive intelligentsia of Britain and Europe. As religion has retreated and morality becomes privatized, individual conscience has become universalized. The nation and its values are despised; moral legitimacy resides instead in a vision of universal progressivism, expressed through human rights law and such supranational institutions as the European Union, the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, and revolving around multiculturalism and minority rights.
This has produced the extraordinary phenomenon of radical Islam—which denies female equality and preaches death to gays—marching under the banner of human rights. The self-styled progressives on the British left, for whom human rights have replaced Christianity as the religion for a godless society, have formed a jaw-dropping axis with militant, fundamentalist Islamism. These two revolutionary camps have put their very sizeable differences to one side so that each can use the other to advance their goal, which is the destruction of Western society and its foundation values.
The effect on Britain of Islamist-chic has gone far beyond left-wing circles. Because of the grip exercised by such circles on British institutions and popular culture, the Muslim/Arab take on America and events in the Middle East has been adopted by the media and other shapers of public opinion, most influentially by the BBC and Christian nongovernmental organizations.
This has had a far-reaching effect on Britain. It has fueled hostility towards America and the Iraq war, which has in turn distorted British political debate and now threatens to undermine Britain’s continuing role in the defense against terror. The issues of Iraq, America and Israel are now conflated in the British public mind in a poisonous stew of irrationality, prejudice, ignorance and fear.
Britons believe that the only reason they are currently threatened by Islamist terror is the UK’s support for America in Iraq. They do not believe Saddam Hussein was ever a threat to Britain or the West; they believe they were lied to over his weapons of mass destruction. They think the main reason for Muslim rage is the behavior of Israel towards the Palestinians, and that America made itself a target simply because of its support for Israel. And now, after London was bombed, they think the reason for that was Britain’s role in Iraq.
The outcome is that—unlike the vast mass of Americans in the more conservative “red states,” who may be aghast at the continuing war in Iraq but never doubted that their nation was threatened by clerical fascism—“middle Britain” thinks that America is the fount of all evil, that George W. Bush is a greater war criminal than Saddam Hussein ever was, and that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace.
The resulting antiwar movement has provided a vast platform for Islamic extremism. It has turned what would otherwise have been dismissed as far-left, inflammatory and deeply unpatriotic statements in time of war into acceptable mainstream opinion. The impact of the daily invective against Jews, Israelis and evil Americans upon young Muslims who were already inflamed against the West has almost certainly turned up the temperature to boiling point. The relentless demonization of America and Israel by the British media, along with the demagoguery of George Galloway and Ken Livingstone, have acted as powerful recruiting sergeants for the jihad and have entrenched Londonistan in Britain’s national psyche.
Faced with this potentially lethal cultural meltdown, what is Tony Blair doing to combat it? For Americans who take British support for granted in the defense against terror, the signs are unfortunately ominous. Instead of fighting these prejudices, the British government has decided to take the path of least resistance.
Despite Tony Blair’s brave stand on Iraq and his stern words against Islamic fanaticism, the fact is that the Labour party he leads does not follow him. Despite ministers’ awareness of the extent of Islamist extremism in Britain, the government’s response has been to appease it in the belief that by doing so it will draw the poison and transform Muslims into a model minority. If ministers are pusillanimous, their officials are worse. Throughout the British civil service, there is a refusal to identify fanatical Islamism as the problem. In thrall to a combination of victim culture and pragmatic cynicism, the establishment is salami-slicing its cultural inheritance and being drawn inexorably into the balkanization of Britain.
This book is an attempt to explain how Britain has walked into this situation with eyes firmly shut. It describes a society that has progressively torn up its cultural maps and as a result has become so badly confused that even now it cannot properly grasp the danger that it is in. The effect on America if its principal ally continues down this perilous road will be profound. The consequences for the West, for which Britain remains a cultural beacon, would be incalculable. That is why this book is a warning—to America, to Britain and to all who care for freedom.
London, February 2006
· CHAPTER ONE ·
THE GROWTH OF LONDONISTAN
London, Britain’s capital city, has become the human entrepôt of the world. Walk its streets, travel on its buses or Underground trains or sit in a hospital casualty department and you will hear dozens of languages being spoken, testimony to the waves of immigration that have transformed the face of London and much of the southeast of England as people from around the world have arrived in search of work. But you will also notice something else. The urban landscape is punctuated by women wearing not just the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, but burkas and niqabs, garments that cover their entire bodies from head to toe—with the exception, in the case of the niqab, of a slit for the eyes—in conformity with strict Islamic codes of female modesty. In general, religious dress, even of an outlandish kind, makes a welcome contribution to the variety of the nation. But in this case, one wonders whether such attire really is a religious requirement commanding respect, or a political statement of antagonism towards the British state. The effect is to create a niggling sense of insecurity and unease, as the open nature of London’s society is vitiated by such public acts of deliberate concealment, with faces and expressions—not to mention the rest of the body—hidden from sight. In the wake of the London bombings in July 2005, such concealment appears to be a security issue too.
Moreover, as you travel across London you notice that district after district seems to have become a distinctive Muslim neighborhood. Nor is this particular to London. Travel further afield, to rundown northern cities such as Bradford, Burnley or Oldham: in some districts the concentration of mosques, Islamic bookshops and other Muslim-run stores, the Islamic dress on the streets, the voices talking not in English but in the dialects of the Indian subcontinent make you feel that you have stepped into a village in the Punjab that has somehow been transported into the gray, drizzly setting of an English mill town. What becomes even clearer here than it is in London is that these Muslim enclaves are just that: areas of separate development which are not integrated with the rest of the town or city.1 More than that, this separatism is a cause of communal tension that all too frequently simmers just below the surface in a low-level susurration of aggression between Muslims and their neighbors—and which occasionally explodes in rioting and violence. Except that, in Britain, people don’t refer to them as Muslim areas; they are “Asian” areas, an
d the cause of such communal tension is said to be racism or discrimination. The issue of religion is carefully avoided.
Yet one of the most striking features of Britain today is the significant and increasing role being played by religion—not Christianity, the established religion of the British state, but Islam. It is Islam that is Britain’s fastest-growing religion. With the Muslim minority officially estimated to number 1.6 million people out of a population of 60 million—although the true figure, as a result of illegal immigration, is likely to be significantly higher—Muslims are now Britain’s second-largest community of faith after Christianity. More people go to the mosque each week than now attend an Anglican church. Over the past two decades, London has become the most important center for Islamic thought outside the Middle East. It is home to some of the most influential Muslim and Arab research institutions, lobby groups and doctrinal groups—Sunni, Shia, Ismaili and Ahmadi—and is a world center for the Arab press, home to the newspapers Al-Hayat and Al-Quds al-Arabi, the Middle East Broadcasting Company (MBC) and a long list of specialist Islamic publications.2
Probe a bit deeper, however, and the situation becomes rather more troubling. Go into one of these bookshops and you may well turn up a copy of Mein Kampf or the tsarist anti-Jewish forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are openly on sale. Many specialist Islamic publications contain diatribes of hatred against Israel or glorify some of the ideologues of Islamist terrorism. Filisteen al-Muslima (Muslim Palestine), the journal of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, is published and distributed from the north London district of Cricklewood. Al-Sunnah, the Islamist magazine that calls repeatedly for human-bomb terror operations against the United States, is published from London, as is Risalat al-Ikhwan (Message of the Brotherhood), which states: “Active resistance (muqawamah) to the occupation and the use of any available means to resist it are a religious Moslem duty, a national duty and a natural right anchored in both international law and the United Nations Charter.”3
These publications are merely the tip of an iceberg. For London has become a major global center of Islamist extremism—the economic and spiritual European hub of a production and distribution network for the most radicalized form of Islamic thinking, which not only pumps out an unremitting ideology of hatred for the West but actively recruits soldiers and raises funds for the worldwide terrorist jihad.
London is home to the largest collection of Islamist activists since the terrorist production line was established in Afghanistan. Indeed, one could say that it was in Britain that al-Qaeda was actually formed as a movement. It was in Britain that disparate radical and subversive agendas, which until then had largely been focused upon individual countries, became forged into the global Islamist movement that was al-Qaeda. Many of Osama bin Laden’s fatwas were first published in London. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of important conferences took place in Britain bringing together radical Islamists from all over the world, ranging from violent groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah to nonviolent groups running for parliament in Jordan or Malaysia. These conferences were where the global Islamist project came together.4
Yet the bizarre fact is that the British authorities allowed all this extremist activity to continue with impunity for more than a decade—even after the ostensible “wake-up call” of 9/11. Moreover, although the London bombings in 2005 revealed the devastating fact that British-born Muslims had somehow been radicalized so that they were prepared to turn themselves into human bombs to murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible, Britain is even now displaying an extreme reluctance to identify, let alone confront, the fact that a religious ideology connected these young bombers from the northern mill towns with the astonishing procession of terrorists fanning out from London across the globe. Even to talk in such terms, Britain tells itself, is “Islamophobic.” Welcome to the alternative political and intellectual universe of Londonistan.
There are two separate but intimately related strands of extremism in Britain. One has arisen from the influx of foreign radicals from North Africa and the Middle East, who arrived in large numbers during the 1980s and 1990s. The other—along with some converts to Islam from the wider British community—has developed from the radicalization of Britain’s own Muslims, who first started arriving during the 1970s and 1980s from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir. As a result of these twin developments, London has become, over the past two decades, the world’s principal center for Islamism outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Islamism is the term given to the extreme form of politicized Islam that has become dominant in much of the Muslim world and is the ideological source of global Islamic terrorism. It derives from a number of radical organizations that were founded in the early part of the last century, which all believe that Islam is in a state of war with both the West and the insufficiently pious Muslims around the world. The first was the Tablighi Jamaat in India/Pakistan, secessionists who believed that Muslims must return to the basics of Islam and separate themselves from non-Muslims. The second was the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna with Sayed Qutb its leading ideologue. Its creed is known as Salafism and is deeply antisemitic; this is virtually indistinguishable from Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. The third was the Jamaat al-Islami, founded by Sayed Abu’l Ala Maududi in India/Pakistan, which had similar ideas to the Muslim Brotherhood, and with Maududi providing a major influence over Qutb.
When the Muslim Brotherhood was thrown out of Egypt, its leaders fled to Saudi Arabia, which became the world’s major exponent of Wahhabism and which in turn contributed to the radicalization of Pakistan. Thus a fateful line of extremism was drawn which in due course would lead from the rural villages of Mirpur and Sylhet straight to Bradford and Dewsbury, Luton and London.
It must be said at the outset that there are hundreds of thousands of British Muslims who have no truck whatsoever with terrorism, nor with extremist ideology. They simply want what everyone else wants: to make a living, bring up their children and live peaceful and law-abiding lives that threaten nobody. They are as horrified by the terrorism that has disfigured their community as is anyone else. Nevertheless, it remains the case that not only is such terrorism being carried out in the name of Islam, but the British Muslim establishment has itself been hijacked by extremist elements funded and promoted by the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere. While many imams doubtless promote only messages of peace, there has been no suppression by British Muslims of the ideology of holy war. This shifting of the center of gravity towards extremism in Islamic discourse in Britain has created the sea in which terrorism can swim.
And the number of terrorists who have come roaring out of these polluted British waters is startling. UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain and the United States. The roll call includes Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, killer of the journalist Daniel Pearl and disaffected, brilliant son of Pakistani immigrants; Dhiren Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi, British citizens and al-Qaeda members who plotted to attack major financial centers in the United States; Mohammad Bilal from Birmingham, who drove a truck loaded with explosives into a police barracks in Kashmir; the “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, who was converted to Islam at Brixton Mosque in south London; Sajid Badat from Gloucester, a putative second shoe-bomber but who was also caught and is now in jail; and Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British boys who helped bomb a Tel Aviv bar in 2003 and killed three Israeli civilians.5 And let’s not forget Azahari Husin or the “Demolition Man,” the Malaysian engineer who belonged to the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah ( JI). He had studied at Reading University in the 1980s, honed his bomb-making skills in Afghanistan in the 1990s, helped mastermind the terrorist attacks in Bali (twice) and finally blew himself up in a gun battle with Indonesian police in November 2005.
Al-Qaeda’s first high-prof
ile attack on U.S. targets was partly organized from Britain, and the claim of responsibility for these bombings went out from London.6 For al-Qaeda, London was a vital nerve center. In 1994, Osama bin Laden established a “media information office” there named the Advisory and Reformation Committee. According to the U.S. Justice Department’s indictment of bin Laden, this office was designed both to publicize his statements and to provide a cover for terrorist activity including the recruitment of military trainees, the disbursement of funds and the procurement of necessary equipment such as satellite telephones. In addition, the London office served as a conduit for messages, including reports on military and security matters, from various al-Qaeda cells to its headquarters.7
Another al-Qaeda organization based in London was the Committee for Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), which was established by Mohammed al-Massari, a Saudi who had been given indefinite leave to remain in Britain after fleeing Saudi Arabia—according to the Saudis, having been involved in terrorism. In December 2004, al-Massari claimed that CDLR was the “ideological voice” of al-Qaeda. 8 On his website he justified assassinating President George W. Bush and Tony Blair, argued that the death of civilians in terror attacks in Iraq was “collateral damage and a necessity of war,” and called for attacks on coalition forces and “apostate” Muslims who helped them in Iraq and Afghanistan.9
CDLR’s activities went beyond rhetoric into terrorist activity in East Africa, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Other terrorist groups—such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), its offshoot, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group—have also used Britain to coordinate attacks against American and European targets. Such groups formed a web of terror with many links to al-Qaeda. The striking feature of all of them was the freedom with which they were able to use London as base camp for their terror activities, providing money, means of communication and bogus travel and identification documents to trainees who had graduated from the terrorist training camps. And all this without any attempt by the British authorities to stop them.
Londonistan Page 3
