Author: Anthony Browne
Publication: Times
Date: August 1, 2005
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1716156,00.html
As the rest of Europe acts, extreme
Islamists take advantage of British naivety
Elements within the British establishment
were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar
support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail;
this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC.
They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West's apologists
for the Soviet Union - useful idiots.
Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate
support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler,
scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists,
like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler
divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists
divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their
Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The
Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam,
Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same.
The two fascisms, one racial and
one religious, one beaten and the other resurgent, are evil in both their
ideology and their methodology, in their supremacism, intolerance, belief
in violence and threat to democracy.
The London bombings revealed only
to those in denial the extent to which Islamic fascism has taken root.
But we have a long way to go until we reach the level of understanding
in mainland Europe. With one of the smallest Muslim populations in Western
Europe, just 3 per cent of the total, Britain has been able to afford a
joyful multicultural optimism. Other countries, with far bigger Islamic
populations, from France to Germany to the Netherlands, have had to become
far more hard-headed.
The support of Islamic fascism spans
Britain's Left. The wacko Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the
Muslim Association of Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting
group, to form the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George
Galloway created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won
a seat in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.
When I revealed on these pages last
year both the fascist views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the fact that he was being welcomed
to Britain by Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, it caused a storm that
has still to abate. Mr Livingtone claims that Sheikh al-Qaradawi is a moderate
- which he is, in the same way that Mussolini was.
The BBC and The Guardian regularly
give space to MAB to promote sanitised versions of its Islamist views.
John Ware, one of the BBC's most-respected reporters, spent years trying
to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly
blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive. Last month it
emerged that The Guardian employed a journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, who is
a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that wants a global theocracy,
and is described by the Home Office as "anti-Semitic, anti-Western and
homophobic". The Guardian used Dilpazier Aslam to report not just on the
London bombings, but on Shabina Begum, the Luton schoolgirl who, advised
by Hizb ut-Tahrir, won a court case allowing her to wear head-to-toe fundamentalist
Islamic clothes.
The tale illustrates Britain's naivety
in many ways. Hizb ut-Tahrir is still legal, despite being banned in many
European and Muslim countries, and despite President Musharraf of Pakistan
pleading with Britain to ban it after it plotted to assassinate him. The
useful idiots of the Left insisted that Ms Begum's victory was a victory
over Islamophobia, but even the Muslim Parliament of Britain gave warning
that it was a "victory for fundamentalism", bringing Shariah law one step
closer.
In France, by contrast, the government
ban on wearing the hijab, or Islamic veil, in schools was widely supported
by the Left. It is impossible in France for radical Islamists to dupe useful
idiots into supporting a pro-hijab campaign presenting it as pro-choice,
as they did in Britain - because in France, the Left knows that the Islamists
believe Muslim women should be compelled to wear the hijab.
Here the Government talks about
deporting extremist imams, but does nothing. In contrast, France has deported
ten radical imams in the past two years, with another one deported to Algeria
last week, and ten more are under police surveillance. In France, no mosque
is off limits to the police. While Britain welcomes Sheikh al-Qaradawi,
Germany last week deported an imam who simply supported the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Bavaria alone, 14 "hate preachers" have been deported since November
2004, and a further 20 have received notifications of deportation.
The Netherlands and Denmark, worried
about the growth of ghettoised Muslim communities, have promoted integration,
with the Netherlands insisting that those wanting to become immigrants
take a test of Dutch language and the nation's values before they are even
given a visa. Both countries have clamped down on inter-continental arranged
marriages - which are thought to comprise 70 per cent of Muslim marriages
there, as in Britain - on the ground that they promote the creation of
separatist communities. Such measures are barely on the radar in Britain.
Even post-bombing, Britain has a
long way to go in its understanding of Islamic fascism. The tragedy is
that we start daring to understand it only when innocent lives are lost.
Anthony Browne is Europe Correspondent
of The Times