Slouching towards dhimmocracy*

Thursday, 17th January 2008

According to Phil Johnston in the Telegraph:

Ministers have dropped the term ‘war on terror’ and will now refer to jihadis as 'criminals' in an attempt to stop glorifying acts of terrorism. ‘As you disrupt radicalisation you must be aware of how you describe it and must not do so in a way that is inadvertently inflammatory,’ said a Whitehall source.

Yes, the phrase ‘war on terror’ is conceptually incoherent; but the government’s intention is not to describe what we are facing more precisely. On the contrary, its intention is to make it impossible to describe the situation truthfully. We are being subjected to an onslaught from Islamic jihadi terrorism. First the government decided to ban the use of the word ‘Islamic’ in relation to terrorism; now it is banning the word ‘terrorism’ itself.

But what we are facing is not merely criminal activity. It is terrorism, the attempt to murder large numbers of innocent people in the pursuit of a political aim — namely, the Islamisation of Britain. The suggestion that if the British state calls jihadis ‘criminals’ they will feel less glorious about what they are doing is inane. As far as they are concerned they are fighting a jihad, or holy war. By denying that this is what we are up against, and arriving instead at a false analysis that denies the reality of holy war, the government is fatally undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself. By denying the political goal of the violence, it makes it much more likely that it will accede to that goal. You cannot ever defeat a threat that you refuse even to call by its proper name.

This became painfully obvious this morning when the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, delivered her first major speech on the government’s counter-terrorism strategy at a conference on ‘Radicalisation and Political Violence’, to launch the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College, London. The speech was a frightening demonstration of intellectual and moral funk. She said:

As so many Muslims in the UK and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorise, nothing Islamic about plotting pain, murder and grief. Indeed, if anything these actions are ‘anti-Islamic’.

This is demonstrably ridiculous. The campaign of terror being mounted against the free world is being perpetrated in the name of Islam, sanctioned and even mandated by leading Islamic scholars around the world, and rooted in Islamic theology — and in the history of violent jihadi conquest to which it gave rise that stretches back to the beginning of Islam in the seventh century. Certainly, there are Muslims and schools of Muslim thought that renounce this interpretation of the religion and want nothing to do with violence, nor with Islamising the societies in which they reside. Such true moderates and Muslim reformers should be given every support and encouragement. But to say therefore that this terrorism is ‘anti-Islamic’ is like saying that the Inquisition was ‘anti-Catholic’.

Does the Home Secretary think that Syed Qutb or Abu ala Maududi, the Islamic scholars who were the principal ideologues of the modern jihad, were ‘anti-Islamic’? Or Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood? Or Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who says human bomb attacks in Iraq and Israel are a Muslim religious duty? Or Hamas? Or the ayatollahs of Iran? Or the Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia who have radicalised Muslims across the globe?

Doubtless it is because the government believes that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam that the

leading Muslim scholars and opinion formers

whom Ms Smith said the government was backing to

talk about extremist ideology

to British Muslims in order to counter Islamic radicalisation are themselvesin large measure … Islamist radicals.

Really — you couldn’t make it up.

Much of the problem is that the government’s advisers and civil servants have had their heads filled with the revisionist and ahistorical rubbish about Islam produced by authors such as Karen Armstrong or John Esposito. Their resulting profound ignorance about Islam means they simply haven’t got a clue about what is actually happening.

So the Home Secretary prattles idiotically about ‘shared values’ and ‘consensus’. But there are no shared values in the steady encroachment into British society of sharia law. There are no shared values in the fact that half the stock exchange is now owned by Islamist financiers. There are no shared values in the steady Islamisation of Oxford university, or the totally unconsensual proposal to allow the muezzin of that city's Cowley Road mosque to broadcast on a loudspeaker three times a day his call upon the faithful to prayer. This is not consensus; it is cultural conquest.

Furthermore, Ms Smith even gave a fillip to Islamic terrorism by stating that it did not negate the need to address the ‘grievances’ fuelling it, including British foreign policy.

No grievance can justify terrorism. But where grievances are legitimately expressed we are of course prepared to debate then. Terrorism must not drown out dialogue. And where grievances are not only legitimately expressed but well founded we must be prepared to respond. That a cause has been misappropriated by violent extremism does not make it a wrong one. Rather, putting a grievance beyond the reach of a democratic solution is a goal of those who wish to harm us. We should do them no favours.

On the contrary — if a cause has been appropriated by a terrorist campaign, the only principled response is to put it automatically beyond the pale. Anything else is to give terrorism its victory. Can you imagine if, at the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign to bomb Britain into agreeing to a united Ireland, ministers had announced that they were now prepared to ‘enter into a dialogue’ about this ‘grievance’ with those who wanted to discuss it over tea and buns? It would have been rightly seen as a total capitulation to terror.

In its ignorance, panic and confusion over terrorist violence, the government has failed to grasp that Britain is being squeezed by a jihadi pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural aggression, each reinforcing the other and, according to plan, causing the governing class to descend into that state of cultural servitude to Islam known as ‘dhimmitude’.*

The Home Secretary said:

Whether terrorists ultimately succeed or not is up to us, not up to them.

Absolutely. And today she showed that, in accordance with this precept, they are currently succeeding.

* Definition of ‘dhimmi’ from the Dhimmi Watch site:

Dhimmis, ‘protected people,’ are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur’an’s command that they ‘feel themselves subdued’ (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, is part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race.

The dhimmi attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today.