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A Look Into Londonistan

| 5 Comments | 2 TrackBacks

The concept of "Londonistan," which came to prominence after the 7/7 bombings and has become the subject of a book by Melanie Phillips, is deserving of attention. Theodore Dalrymple's "The Suicide Bombers Among Us" offered an early peek behind the scenes, and was particularly interesting in linking young Muslim men's fear of women and corresponding impulses to dominate them to the atractiveness of Islamist hate in other areas.

Even the New York Times can't ignore the phenomenon - and the more Britain's authorities and police look at London's Muslim communities, the more worried they are becoming. From the New York Times Magazine article:

"Lord Carlile of Berriew, a Welshman who is Britain's independent reviewer of counterterrorism laws, has wide access to classified intelligence about terrorism plans. He is the last person you would expect to hype the dangers. For one thing, his party, the Liberal Democrats, has reaped electoral gains by opposing Tony Blair's war on terror, particularly Blair's belief that Iraq is a front in that war. For another, Lord Carlile has made a name for himself as a civil libertarian - a champion of legal underdogs from the terminally ill to the transsexual - and civil libertarians are the ones who have led the opposition to antiterror measures. "How serious is it?" he asked, sitting beside a conference-room table in his law chambers off the Strand on a sunny morning this spring. "Very. Complacency, tempting though it is, is the worst possible attitude. We've been fortunate we haven't had more attacks. There will be more."

Some excerpts:

"Like most modern 'diaspora' immigrants, the Pakistani-British visit their native country with little difficulty. There were 400,000 British visitors to Pakistan in 2004. All countries with large Muslim diasporas are vulnerable to the worldwide Wahhabi radicalization fomented at mosques and cultural centers financed by Saudi Arabia's government and its private charities. But on top of that, Britain is vulnerable to radicalizing trends of South Asia: India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. These trends risk becoming Britain's own..."

It helps to understand that people are one of the Pakistani economy's largest exports, and that remittances from foreign countries are an even more important percentage of GDP in Pakistan than they are in Mexico. See Winds' coverage of Pakistan and Bangladesh for more on the Islamist dynamics there, and esp. our coverage of Bangladesh's slide toward the violent, imperialist side of Islam.

Worse...

"But over the past quarter-century, Britain has seen a dispiriting tendency toward segregation, or resegregation. Young newcomers have not found a niche in the service economy as easily as the arrivals of 40 and 50 years ago did in the industrial one. Others, born in Britain, have cast about for identities other than the British one they were raised with. In 2001, the northern industrial towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford experienced several days of violent racial mayhem between white and Asian gangs. A Home Office report issued in the wake of the riots found 'separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks,' producing living arrangements that 'do not seem to touch at any point.' "

This is all aggravated by trends Winds has reported on extensively...

"South Asian religion has changed, too. The Islam that most immigrants took to Britain from the Indian subcontinent was a pious traditional Sufism, marked by great reverence for the Prophet Muhammad and an elaborate system of mentorship, under the control of various pirs, or holy men. Probably the majority of Britain's 1,500 or so mosques have their roots in Sufism. This kind of Islam has not been wiped out, but it has been losing ground in South Asia and Britain alike to simpler, more fashionable trends in Sunni Islam. The Deobandi school, which was founded in Pakistan in the 19th century, has grown increasingly conservative - and distrustful of non-Islamic cultures - under the influence of the Saudi Wahhabis."

What a polite way to describe organized racism and the promotion of violent hate.

"At least since the Afghan war in the 80's, hard-line Deobandi madrasas have spread throughout Pakistan. Jamaat-i-Islami, the sectarian and highly politicized movement started by the journalist Abu A'la Maududi, has grown since the 60's and is influential in the largest Muslim group in Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain (M.C.B.). While the M.C.B. has no official government status, it does claim to speak for much of the Muslim population and is the government's interlocutor of first resort when integration is at issue."

It is frankly amazing to see this bit in the ultra-liberal New York Times Magazine, but here you go:

"The Muslim Council of Britain now boycotts Holocaust Memorial Day every January, on the grounds that it focuses too exclusively on the genocide committed against the Jews. In response, Asim Siddiqui, the young leader of a London-based Muslim group called City Circle, organized a separate Holocaust memorial event. City Circle declares itself 'nonaligned to any overseas or established doctrinal organization.' Siddiqui is clearly a courageous and independent man. Yet the M.C.B. still gets more invitations to governmental meetings and is accepted as the logical outlet for the community's demands after, say, an antiterrorist raid. It is a good example of how the 'traffic light' strategy can fail. Its incentives drive community representatives toward radicalism. Strident political voices are not just admitted to conversation - they are the preferred voices, because they are seen as more 'authentic.' If the government's top priority is finding people with the street credibility to dissuade potential terrorists, then the ideal Muslim interlocutor is someone who shares the terrorists' goals while publicly condemning their means. Standing up for Holocaust victims and for fellowship among Britain's peoples is not much of a credential."

...and then there's this. As I've pointed out before, it's not as if people who were otherwise tolerant and inclined to peaceful cohabitation with other faiths suddenly snap one day... there's a long transmission belt of hate involved, resulting in human weapons that require only a trigger - and really, any trigger will do:

"Whether Iraq is a "cause" of terror or a mere pretext is a difficult question. Radical jihadists have threatened and attacked countries that opted out of the Iraq conflict. And if Iraq "causes" someone to become a suicide bomber, it is almost certainly not in the way Western liberals understand political causation. The terrorist may already hold jihadist views. He may be whipped into bloodlust by images on TV or the Internet. He may regard the invasion of Iraq as an incursion upon the prerogatives of the Ummah — but the source of his anger is unlikely to be any supposed violation of international law. In the end, though, it may not matter if everyone means something different by "Iraq." A shared opposition to the war tightens the identification between radical and nonradical Muslims, and between both those groups and some members of the non-Muslim Western left, and this muddies the terms with which the battle of ideas around terrorism is fought."

The collaboration of various segments of the western left goes far deeper, of course, from encouragement via "multiculturalism" of the segregation that helps to encourage violence, to apologetics for terrorism, to outright co-belligerence with Islamic terrorism's practitioners against the West.

Caldwell doesn't deal with that aspect at length, largely because he's more interested in what's going on outside the West's internal war. Which is a proper attitude to take in such situations; the world is not just a reflection of our own internal concerns.

You can read the whole article here." It's worth your time.

2 TrackBacks

Tracked: June 26, 2006 1:17 AM
Excerpt: Joe Katzman links to this informative piece from the NYTimes magazine (another link). In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombing,
Tracked: June 26, 2006 8:41 AM
Monday's Winds of War: 26 June 2006 from Security Watchtower
Excerpt: Welcome! Our goal at Winds of Change.NET is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from the global War on Terror that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Friday. Monday's Winds of War brie...

5 Comments

Lest anyone think government opinion has shifted as far as the acceptance of Londonistan goes, look what will be going on on the anniversary of 7/7: "IslamExpo" (http://islamexpo[dot]info/index.php) - a festival of Muslim Brotherhood speakers, terrorist sympathisers and their British apologists speaking on the wonders of Islam and the 'myths' surrounding the religion.

Featured speakers include:

  • Tariq Ramadan, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. Favours a 'moratorium' on stoning women to death, connected to several Algerian and al-Qaeda terrorists, and refers to 9/11, Bali, etc as 'interventions'.
  • Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain - a MB front group. Considers the Taliban 'courageous', says he is willing to be a suicide bomber, and claims Saudi madrassas don't preach violent jihad.
  • Prof John Esposito - co-wrote a book with Tamimi, considers pro-terror Qaradawi a 'moderate reformist', managed to write a book titled The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? and only using the term 'jihad' twice (and, of course, concluded there is no threat at all).
  • Abdelbari Atwan - the BBC's select angry Arab journalist, who rants almost weekly about Fallujah and Western 'crimes' and, of course, says terrorism committed by Muslims (including the terrorism he supports) is Our Fault, and has nothing to do with religion.
  • Daud Abdullah, a senior member of the MCB - says the Balfour Declaration was 'the tragedy of the century' and wants it repealed, echos Hamas's "Gaza today, Jerusalem tomorrow" slogan, supported the 'expression of revulsion' when hundreds of Muslims rallied with signs calling for genocide, terrorism and murder outside the Danish embassy in London.
  • Qazi Hussain Ahmad - leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, and of the Deobandi Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal party.
  • Yvonne Ridley - Muslim convert, who says the Taliban get a bad press, excused the Amman bombings, praised Zarqawi and supports terrorists around the world.

And the list goes on like that. Terrorists, Islamists and their Western apologists - including several from the BBC and Guardian.

Perhaps the most disgusting thing is that this festival of dangerous disinformation and intimidation will be endorsed by the British government. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, is to be a keynote speaker.

BTW, the new Home Secretary John Reid recently told families of those murdered on 7/7 that the British security services have thwarted at least 20 attacks. The Times report didn't mention the period of time in which they were thwarted, but there are known to have been at least three since 7/7 (that was several months ago).

The reason this article is more in touch with reality than one would suspect in the NYTimes is because it is by Christopher Caldwell.

That the UK government chooses to take the path of least resistance with regard to who to talk with in Mulsim communities must be disheartening for reasonable Muslims.

The Blair government has prostrated itself on the alter of political correctness. There is no credible alternative because the Tory party, what should be the loyal opposition, is no different.

I do not hold out much hope for my birthplace.

Davod, you should not despair. Before the martyrs of 9/11, Madrid, and then 7/7 (I am referring to our matyrs--the Western victims--here, and not the scum who perpetrated these outrages) most of us knew very little about the true nature of Islam: the pernicious personality cult of Mohammed.

Many of us have travelled (intellectually and emotionally) a very long way these past 5 years. We are gaining strength, but the speed of events thus far suggest we may soon have to prepare (however reluctantly) for the greater reckoning.

Sad as it makes me feel, we may well have to deal decisively with the Liberal-Left's nihilistic hold on our institutions "outside of" the democratic process. Violence or the threat of violence may be the only practicable way forward, for several reasons.

For example, consider the degree to which our western judiciary are already heavily slanted towards a displaced compassion for the Islamic forces seeking our destruction. And let's face it, the Western Liberal Elite will literally do anything to hide the fact they are responsible for one of the worst phases of destruction ever visited upon Western Civilization: consider all the economic, psychological, and medical casualities emanating from the many social experiments enforced by these "wine-bar sitters with Social Science Degrees." Study the suicide numbers for the past 50 years and look at the recent upward trends.

Factor in economic, psychological, and physical (alcoholism, street violence, crime, etc) then you will see the total casualty count makes Iraq or Vietnam look irrelevant. In truth, the total number must be comparable to the Second World War. That is the major success of this hate-filled Liberal-Left assault on the western tradition, and its culture.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton is ever elected America's first female President (2008), she may well become--before the end of 2010--the first female President to be assassinated. That rather unpeaceful speculation is predicated on the strong expectation she will preside over a Hollywood ++ New York Times political "love-fest" taking PC, Multiculturalism, Open Borders, and acceptance of United Nation's authority, et al, to the extremes. She and her new "Democratic Party" cohorts (i.e., dominated by pseudo-communists) would put us all on a fast track to cultural annihilation, hence my rather negative prediction.

As for the British situation ... there are growing similarities between Britain and certain other European countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark. The situation in France is already very grave. It could fall under Islamic domination within 20 years. The European Union will fall apart long before then. The disintegration will begin just as soon as the average European begins to undertand what the Euro Elites have been busy doing in their name, and what they are planning to further mis-use their undemocratic power Brussels for. Whatever else we do, or are forced to accept, the admission of an increasingly "radically islamic" Turkey has to be stopped at all costs.

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