The Terrorist Next Door (22 page)

Essentially, Neumann was saying that Great Britain made a deal with the devil. And since the devil isn't known for keeping up his end of a bargain, it's no surprise Britain's unspoken accord with its growing jihadist subgroup did not last; it was irretrievably broken on July 7, 2005, when four British-born, al-Qaeda-linked terrorists murdered fifty-two people in a series of bombings against London's mass transit system, exposing the myopia of Great Britain's open-door policy for foreign jihadists.

“Only then did the policy change,” said Neumann. “However, the seeds of the radical Islamists' activity had already been sown.”

Indeed. In August 2006, London was the staging ground for a foiled al-Qaeda plot to blow up ten transatlantic airliners bound from Britain to the United States. Coming on the heels of the 2005 mass transit bombings, the '06 plot further convinced British law enforcement and intelligence
officials that it was time to shift their focus from the Irish Republican Army to the internationally connected Islamic jihadists in their midst. They may have been too late. In 2008, Britain's then-Home Secretary declared that British intelligence was monitoring some 2,000 potential terrorists, as well as 200 radical Islamic networks and thirty active terrorist plots.
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Confronted with such a pervasive threat, British officials have made the occasional nod to “cracking down.” They convicted extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri on terrorism charges and deported one of his cohorts, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, to Lebanon—this only came after both men had spent years openly calling for the overthrow of the British government and the imposition of Islamic sharia law in the UK. Additionally, the aforementioned Abu Qatada currently sits in a London jail, awaiting deportation back to Jordan. So that's three down and literally thousands to go—and perhaps many more.

Britain's Muslim population has exploded over the past thirty years to the point where “Mohammed” is now the most popular name for male babies born in the country.
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Seemingly every Islamic nation known to man has its own pocket in the British capital, from Turks to Iranians to Somalis to Bangladeshis and beyond. With the increased Muslim numbers have come rising demands that the British government—crippled by a suicidal mixture of political correctness, cultural self-hatred, and multiculturalist ideology—has been all too happy to oblige. Hence the surreal spectacle—captured on videotape in 2009—of thirty London police officers literally running away from a rampaging crowd of Muslim protestors at an anti-Israel rally. Screaming “Allahu Akhbar,” the Muslims made verbal threats against the cowering officers while pursuing them for several city blocks.
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It was a show of force that made abundantly clear who rules London's streets—and it ain't the bobbies.

As that incident showed, Islamists in Great Britain are supremely confident and carry about them an air of assurance that they will one day rule the land of Richard III and Winston Churchill. To that end,
Muslims have established enclaves in cities and towns across Great Britain where they have intentionally segregated themselves from the society at large. These are often no go-zones for police where sharia courts, not British Common Law, are the supreme legal authority.

Somehow, these alarming developments seem to have escaped the attention of most of Britain's political and media elites. More likely, it is willful blindness or outright acceptance of the new, Islamicized “normal.” In 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury—the head of the Church of England and Britain's leading spiritual authority—said that certain aspects of sharia law “seem unavoidable” in the UK.
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He added that British Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters settled in a sharia court and declared that Muslims should not be faced with “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” In other words, Muslims should receive special considerations and treatment apart from British law. With people like Rowan Williams carrying the mantle for traditional British institutions, it's no wonder many Brits I've spoken to believe their country will be Islamic by the year 2050, or in the very least, will consist of fairly large swaths of self-governed Muslim territories.

Their reasoning is twofold. First, the unchecked flow of Muslim immigrants into Britain, along with their high birthrates, create an unstoppable demographic tidal wave. Many of these immigrants refuse to assimilate or to adjust to the un-Islamic ways of their new “infidel” land; and their intransigence is only encouraged by Britain's unofficial state religion, multiculturalism, which deems Western culture to be no better than any other culture, and typically much worse—even if the other culture includes female genital mutilation and honor killings.

This brings us to the second reason many Brits believe the black flag of Islam will one day replace the Cross of St. George and the Union Jack: the all-out, state-sanctioned assault on Britain's traditional values and Judeo-Christian heritage. Simply put, Christianity is on life support in today's ultra-secular, atheistic Britain, where weekly mosque-goers now outnumber church-goers. While police in London are busy fleeing from
Muslim street punks, an officer in Britain's second-largest city, Birmingham, threatened two Christian evangelists with arrest in 2008 for handing out pamphlets in a predominantly Muslim area, telling them that if they got beaten up by local Muslims, they deserved it.
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It's safe to say that Churchill, a fierce critic of Islam and a tireless champion of British values, would be turning in his grave at such news. Drunken hedonism, celebrity worship, militant secularism, and yes, Islam have replaced Christianity as the guiding lights of British civilization—and voices of resistance are few and far between. Two members of the House of Lords, Malcolm Pearson and Baroness Caroline Cox, bravely speak the truth about the Islamic threat, but both are over seventy years old, and there is not a single anti-Islamist voice on the political horizon today in Britain to replace them.

A prime example of the British political class's feckless, pandering approach to Islam is evident in a speech given by David Cameron, then Britain's newly christened prime minister, on Turkish soil in July 2010, just as Turkey's Islamist government was reorienting the country away from the West toward Iran and Syria. With Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan looking on approvingly, Cameron said he was “angry” that Turkey had still not been admitted to the European Union, blaming its exclusion on anti-Muslim bigotry. He went on to blast Israel and suggest that the Israelis—not Hamas—were turning Gaza into a “prison camp.”
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This was just two months, mind you, after a state-sponsored Turkish organization had organized a flotilla full of left-wing radicals and Islamic terrorists who sailed to the Gaza Strip intending to provoke a confrontation with the Israeli Navy. When radio operators from the Israeli Navy warned one of the ships it was approaching a blockaded area, they were told in reply, “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz,” and “We're helping Arabs go against the U.S. Don't forget 9/11, guys.”
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Later, when Israeli commandos boarded the ship after it repeatedly refused to turn around, they were violently attacked by a mob wielding pipes, metal poles, and chairs, with one Israeli being thrown over the side of the ship onto a lower
deck.
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The skirmish resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish jihadis, sparking an international outcry against Israel—yet again—for daring to defend itself. And the British prime minister somehow found this to be the perfect time to side with Islamists—on Muslim soil, no less—and pile on against the only democracy in the Middle East.

Is it any wonder that many indigenous Brits today are uninspired and even ashamed of their identity and their proud history? Lacking cultural confidence and intimidated into silence by a politically correct government that appeases Muslims at every turn, many Brits simply shrug with resignation as masses of Muslim immigrants arrive on their shores bearing religious zeal and an aggressive, clearly defined mission: to make sharia the law of the land.

One notable exception to this discouraging British passivity is the English Defense League, or EDL. I had dinner in London with leaders of the group, which formed in reaction to a March 2009 incident in which a parade honoring British troops returning from the Middle East was disrupted by jeering Muslim radicals who waved signs denouncing the soldiers as “butchers” and “cowards.” The EDL is a multi-ethnic collection of average, working-class guys who oppose the Islamization of their neighborhoods and nation. They are staunchly pro-Israel, even waving Israeli flags at their rallies, and openly invite patriotic, non-jihadist Muslims to join their ranks. I think of the EDL as a smaller, British version of the American tea party movement—only instead of high taxes and big government, their focus is on turning back the Islamization of English society.

EDL members are mostly 9-to-5 family men who were largely nonpolitical until they became fed up with the British government's not-sosilent complicity in the spread of Islamic sharia law and Islamism on the home front. They have held several large rallies that the British police seem incapable of protecting from violent counter-protests staged by the usual unholy alliance of radical leftists and Islamists. In a campaign familiar to American tea partiers, the EDL's leftist critics in British government and media circles brand them as “fascists” and “bigots,” even as the group publicly welcome Jews (it has an entire Jewish Division),
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blacks, and any other minorities who favor English legal norms over sharia law.

In meeting with three EDL leaders over dinner, I was struck by their down-to-earth, plainspoken nature. Salt-of-the-earth and working class through and through, these were the sort of guys I grew up with in northeast Philly, only with different accents. They were tough men with old-school common sense, and you could see how they would have little tolerance for today's sissified, pandering British elites. I was also impressed with their knowledge of jihad, sharia, and Islamic geopolitics—they had obviously done their homework on the topic and were not speaking out of blind hatred or ignorance, as their critics suggest. In fact, they were speaking out of personal experience.

The EDLers told me, matter-of-factly, how their town, Luton—about thirty miles north of London—has become a war zone. The town's large, radicalized Pakistani Muslim population is openly hostile to non-Muslims, as Pakistani gangs roam the streets and beat up infidels. These gangs also control the town's drug trade, according to the EDLers, and naïve English girls—some as young as thirteen—have fallen prey to their lavish clothes, smooth talk, and fancy cars. The nightmarish result has been the establishment of sex slave rings in which under-age English girls are routinely violated by Muslim men.
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Because they're white, female, and non-Muslim, the victims are beneath contempt for their Islamic overlords and are treated as such.

In January 2011, Britain's
Daily Mail
published a shocking exposé on the sex slave rings, focusing on the authorities' reluctance to confront the depraved sex traffickers due to the officials' subservience to multiculturalism:

The EDL members told me a growing number of English girls in their town had converted to Islam and begun wearing the burqa-type full body coverings commonly found among Europe's Muslim women. Their husbands are, in many cases, polygamists who use the English girls strictly for child-rearing purposes. The EDLers went back and forth with each other for a few minutes, listing old female classmates and friends from the neighborhood—“good girls” who had been raised in traditional English homes, but were now estranged from their friends and families after converting to Islam and marrying Pakistani Muslims who forced them to cut all ties to their infidel pasts.

Anjem Choudary is no doubt smiling at these developments. If Londonistan has an unofficial symbol, then Choudary, a favorite of the British tabloids who's been called “Great Britain's most hated man,” is
certainly it. The leader of frequent rallies on London's streets calling for the death of non-Muslims, Choudary delivers his jihadi diatribes in a flawless English accent befitting his middle-class London upbringing.

A former beer-swilling, pot-smoking party boy in his college days at Southampton University (when, according to former classmates, he was known as “Andy” and took a liking to Christian girls), Choudary studied law and even qualified as a solicitor.
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He now advocates forcefully for a different sort of law to be enforced throughout Great Britain: sharia. At some point after graduation, he began attending a London-area mosque, where he fell under the sway of the now-deported extremist cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.