In the first edition of the excellent new magazine Standpoint, edited by Daniel Johnson, Michael Burleigh has written a superb article in which he claims "Britain is sleepwalking" into Islamism and the terrorist threat. Below are some extracts, which I have highlighted and I have really nothing to add to them. You can read the full article here. But some key extracts:
Many of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain, for example, still do not seem to fully appreciate the outrage that a finger-jabbing minority causes at home and abroad with each escalating demand for Islamist enclaves. Like perennial students, New Labour favours debate and dialogue, except when it involves matters of overriding concern to ordinary people, in which case Trevor Phillips is left to stick his head above the parapet. In dealing with the Muslim Council of Britain, the British Government unwittingly accepted as “community” interlocutors men who, in line with salafi-jihadi propaganda, blamed Islamist terrorism primarily on British foreign policy, while failing to condemn unequivocally suicide bombing outside the UK. Virtually nothing is being done to stem the flow of Wahabist money (and the attendant intolerant ideology) not only into mosques but university “Islamic studies” programmes, whose ideologically-slanted nature has been exposed in a report published last month by the Centre for Social Cohesion. The author, Anthony Glees, argues that pro-free speech arguments (and there is little free speech at all when it comes to Israel) are being used by the authorities to slip out of public responsibility towards taxpayers.
But others with far greater power than academia are also complicit in this process. Did major banks think about the cultural implications of sharia-compliant finance, which is conspicuously absent in Egypt? This was allowed by Gordon Brown without triggering the public outrage that attended the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sly unclarities about sharia law. The police — in their capacity as the paramilitary wing of the Guardian — seem to be turning a blind eye to “honour crimes” and to the informal resort to sharia law, even when this involves manifestly criminal offences.
Later in the article he writes:
The one British politician who grasps the need to be as frank as our American (or Australian) cousins about the threat from terrorists “who are actively plotting indiscriminate slaughter on a massive scale” is not the Prime Minister, who appears to be nostalgic for the globalising vapidities that thrill Davos seminars, but the Leader of the Opposition. David Cameron has a strong team behind him: David Davis, Paul Goodman, Michael Gove, Gerald Howarth and Baroness Neville-Jones.
David Cameron both understands the existential threat from jihadism and has comprehensive ideas about how to combat it which will link foreign, defence and security policies. He is fully conscious of the need to balance ancient liberties with the right to stay alive. Like the US, Britain needs a dedicated border police and defences against terrorism that commence at the stage when someone purchases an air ticket. His plans also include dismantling the bureaucratic residue of state multiculturalism so that councils do not end up funding fronts of the Muslim Brotherhood. The banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir which, as renegade members have amply testified, functions as a conveyor-belt to extremism, and the deportation of foreign agitators also figure on Cameron’s programme. Any appeal they might mount should take place after they have already been deported. They can pay for their own human rights lawyers. Cameron plans to replace the European Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights.
What we await are his ideas for a new set of relationships with those populous parts of the wider Muslim world that do not suffer from the same grim pathologies as Arabia. During King Abdullah’s recent visit to Britain, Cameron reminded the Saudis of their obligations to our security. Cosy chats about horses and oil with a handful of Gulf oil sheikhs, while neglecting Egypt, Indonesia or Turkey, are no longer enough in the post-9/11 world. A more imaginative approach to the wider Muslim world should go together with a much clearer statement of what the domestic majority are or are not prepared to tolerate and with an implacable determination to defeat terrorism. That is the difference between a proper strategy and the present government’s alternation of appeasement with knee-jerk authoritarianism.
