Author: Caroline Glick
Publication: The Jerusalem Post
Date: July 11, 2006
URL: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150885965509&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
In the wake of last year's terror attacks
on London, the people of Britain seemed muster the will to rally around their
flag. After years of denial, the country that gave Israel the British jihad
bombers who blew up Mike's Place in 2003; gave Pakistan and America Daniel
Pearl's British jihadist executioner; and gave America the British jihadist
shoe bomber finally acknowledged that British jihadists were a problem for
Britain.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair started
to admit that the source of the terror was not poverty, Iraq, Afghanistan
or Israel but the jihadist ideology propagated within Britain's Muslim community.
Rather than make excuses for the murderers and their army of teachers and
enablers, Blair began formulating a program to go after Britain's jihadist
hotbeds that indoctrinate British born and bred Muslims to wage war against
their country.
Yet, as Melanie Phillips points out in painstaking
and hair- raising detail in her book Londonistan, Blair's efforts to curb
the influence of radical jihadists and undermine their operations were quickly
stymied. The multiculturalists who have taken hold of Britain's cultural,
intellectual, judicial, ecclesiastical and political life attacked, blocked
or watered down every single one of his anti-terror initiatives. In the end,
far from winning over his seemingly endless critics, Blair backed down.
One of Blair's initiatives had been to establish
a Task Force which would tackle jihadist Islam that had declared war on Britain.
As Phillip's explains, "It would go into [Muslim] communities to actively
confront what [Blair] called an 'evil ideology' based on a perversion of Islam
and 'defeat it by force of reason.'"
Yet, with his anti-terror campaign torn to
shreds, Blair allowed the very extremists he was seeking to counter to take
over the Task Force. Not surprisingly these men - who included Swiss jihad
apologist Tarik Ramadan and prominent British Hamas supporters - decided that
the proper British response to the homegrown British jihadists who killed
52 of their fellow citizens was to surrender to their demands.
One of the chief demands of Britain's radical
Muslims is for Britain to change its foreign policy regarding Israel and the
US. The view that Britain should take a pro-Islamic stance on issues such
as Hamas, the US-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear
weapons program in order to placate British Muslims has gained currency in
British foreign policy circles.
Labor MP John Denhan, chairman of the Commons
Home Affairs Select Committee said in September 2005, "We need to recognize
that some foreign policy has now a very direct impact on domestic policy.
We may well need to …be prepared to change the emphasis of our foreign
policy in order to safeguard our security…It is no exaggeration to say
that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of
foreign policy - it is a matter of British domestic security as well."
UNFORTUNATELY, Britain's efforts to appease
its Muslim minority have only served to further radicalize its members. While
Britain has all but outlawed the use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism;"
as the British media studiously refused to publish the cartoons of Muhammed
out of respect for British Muslims and systematically distorts the reality
of the Palestinian jihad against Israel and the violence in Iraq; and while
the British police takes the mildest view of overt Muslim incitement to wage
jihad against Britain, the US, Israel and other Western democracies in mosques
and on the streets of London, the latest Pew Global Attitudes poll showed
that British Muslims have the most radical views of all European Muslims.
As Amir Taheri noted last week in The Wall
Street Journal, only 32 percent of British Muslims have positive views of
Jews while 71 percent of French Muslims reportedly have positive views of
Jews. A majority of British Muslims hold a dim view of Westerners and 16,000
of them expressed an interest in carrying out terrorist acts.
ONE OF the casualties of Britain's tilt towards
the jihadists is the struggle to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Last July, as the rotating head of the EU Presidency the British published
an appeal to Iran to release political prisoners Akbar Ganji and Nasser Zar-Afshan.
In the wake of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's less than democratic
electoral victory, Blair said, "It would be a serious mistake if he [Ahmadinejad]
thought that we are going to go soft on them, because we are not."
Today, the British are soft and silent as
thousands of Iranian protesters are rounded up, students and workers are brutalized,
and women are attacked by secret police. And Britain played a central role
in convincing the US to join Britain, France and Germany in trying to buy
off the mullahs rather than confront their program to acquire nuclear weapons.
Indeed, today there is little difference between
Britain's policy towards Iran's nuclear weapons program and that of the UN
and the Arab and Muslim world. This past weekend, Ahmadinejad hosted the foreign
ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia as well as the UN envoy for Iraq and the secretaries general for the
Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Teheran.
After participating Friday in a demonstration
calling for Israel's destruction, Ahmadinejad addressed his distinguished
audience and explained, "The basic problem in the Islamic world is the
existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must
mobilize to remove this problem."
He went on to say that anyone who supports
Israel should expect to be attacked and demanded that Israel's supporters
get rid of Israel themselves or face the wrath of Islam.
Although this was not the first time that
Ahmadinejad specifically called for the eradication of Israel, his speech
is nonetheless newsworthy because of his audience. Not only did none of those
assembled condemn his call for Israel's destruction, they issued a condemnation
of Israel of their own. They attacked Israel for "increasing aggression
against the Palestinian people" and condemned the "silence"
of the international community. The Teheran demonstrations were followed by
similar ones in Turkey.
FOR ITS part the so-called international community
in the EU and the UN leapt into action. Both issued statements condemning
Israel for using "disproportionate force" against Palestinian terrorists
in Gaza. And like the Arab and Muslim states, neither the EU nor the UN felt
the need to say anything at all about Iran's threat to "remove"
Israel.
Phillips wrote Londonistan for the American
rather than the British audience. She explained that she wanted to alert the
Americans to the true status of their closest ally and by extension of the
Anglo-American alliance. If Britain surrenders to the forces of jihad it will
spell both a national security nightmare and a political disaster for America.
As Phillips notes, on a cultural level, "Britain's already calamitous
slide into cultural defeatism might boost similar forces at play in the United
States."
Unfortunately, from the looks of things, those forces seem to have taken over
the Bush administration. Like the British and the EU, Washington had no response
to Ahmadinejad's latest statement of intentions about Israel and the rest
of the Western world. Nor did the administration have anything to say about
the silence of the Arab and Muslim states and the UN whose representatives
seemed to accept Ahmadinejad's remarks.
Rather, on Friday, President George W. Bush
stated that he sees reason for hope that the international community will
come together to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons during the upcoming
G-8 summit in Moscow. Moreover, on Saturday the Washington Post reported that
Bush will announce a dramatic policy shift at the opening of that summit.
Instead of attacking Russia for blocking all concerted international responses
to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Bush will announce that he is rewarding
Russian despot Vladimir Putin and risking the alienation of the Republican
Congress in an election year by agreeing to sign a civilian nuclear cooperation
deal with the man most responsible for Iran's free hand in developing nuclear
weapons.
Bush's apologists claim that the deal will
act as an incentive for getting Putin to stop supporting Iran and North Korea.
Yet that rings hollow. It is hard to find compelling examples of states who
behaved better after their bad behavior was rewarded.
One year after the London bombings, with Britain
slouching towards dhimmitude and the Bush Doctrine in shambles, it is hard
to keep from wondering what it will take for the free nations of the world
to abandon appeasement and fight for victory.
