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Britain’s View of Terrorism Aligns With Extremists

By Joel Hilliker Friday, October 6, 2006

The toxic worldview of Islamist extremists is largely shaping Britain's view of itself. Who is to blame for Islamist terrorism? The logical answer is Islamists. The common answer from prominent Muslims, however, is to blame the West. In this view, for example, the pope’s use of a quotation that was critical of Islam was the “root cause” of street riots, churches being firebombed, a nun’s murder, Islamic declarations of intent to annihilate the West, and death threats against the pope. Sadly, Britain has largely accepted this twisted view. The ridiculous idea at the core of political correctness is that a minority culture is always a victim of the majority culture—that even its crimes can be understood as having been provoked by the oppressions of the majority. During the cultural revolution of the 20th century’s later decades, Britain swallowed that toxic brew in lethal doses. This fact was on display after the 7/7 attack. On July 7, 2005, coordinated suicide bombings killed 52 Londoners on their morning commute. British officials read from the politically correct script, blaming not Islamism, but Islamophobia. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, after initially condemning the attacks, within a couple weeks was saying that the true fault lay in “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.” Yes—in Britain, one of the most widely used receptacles for pitching blame for Islamism is the war in Iraq. If only Tony Blair wasn’t George W. Bush’s poodle, 7/7 never would have happened, in other words. The Church of England—deeply infected by liberalism and hatred of the West—put forward its recommendation for protecting Britain from another 7/7: Win the hearts of militant Muslims by prostrating before them. A group of Anglican bishops, in a September 2005 report, proposed that Britain apologize for the Iraq war. Since they didn’t expect Downing Street to do so, they agreed that the church itself should make a “public act of repentance” before Muslim leaders. It is one thing for Islamists to blame Britain for Muslim rage—it is another for Britain to blame itself. Self-hatred is a sickness, and Britain has a raging case of it. Case in point: The British establishment—including the media, particularly the bbc—is continually serving the British people a potent concoction with two noxious ingredients. First is an absence of facts regarding the dangers of violent Islamism in Britain and abroad; much is underreported, and what is reported is often stripped of its Islamist context. For example, Prime Minister Blair’s speeches this past summer outlining his war strategy and explaining the seriousness of the danger posed by Islamism were barely reported in the British press. Daniel Johnson wrote in the New York Sun September 7, “If neither his officials, nor his political allies, nor the media are listening, how can he expect the public to hear? His message about the existential threat posed by Islamist ideology has been drowned by the din of speculation about his future.” Blair has been vilified even for what mild attempts he has taken to address the problem. Soon he will be run out of office for them. The nation is interested in other things. Second is the incessant peddling of the message that Britain is somehow to blame for Islamist attacks on itself. Why? Because it is killing Iraqis to take their oil; because it oppresses British Muslims; because it supports the U.S., which supports Israel, which is the cause of all the world’s problems. These themes occur in various forms in print and on television ad nauseam. A chilling truth the establishment must face is that its party line, on many specific points of doctrine, falls in lockstep with the radical Muslim view. Another way to look at it is that the Muslim worldview is measurably shaping Britain’s worldview. Part of the reason for that is the newsmakers’ fear of provoking Muslims and stirring up violence—which in itself shows there is a serious problem that should be dealt with rather than papered over. (After all, what better proves that Islam is violent than the fact that anyone implying this is accused of provoking peaceful Muslims to become violent?) But the more insidious reason is that the leftist media and political personalities agree with many of the Muslim ideas: that the U.S. is imperialistic, that peace in the Middle East is contingent upon Israel moving somewhere else; that terrorism would stop if only coalition forces would pull out of Iraq. In fact, a majority of Britons believe these ideas. A YouGov poll conducted in June revealed that 65 percent of Britons consider Americans “vulgar,” and 58 percent see the U.S. as “an essentially imperial power, one that wants to dominate the world by one means or another.” A strong majority of Britons believe Israel used “disproportionate” force against Hezbollah in Lebanon. In these ways, the British people have more in common with Islamist extremists than with their own prime minister. British leaders should be challenging the lies propagated by Muslims. Instead they publicize those lies—because they believe them. As Bret Stephens wrote in the September 5 Wall Street Journal, “[W]hat really ought to terrify Britain’s leaders aren’t the conclusions that divide mainstream and Muslim Britain, but the premises that unite them. From the credence given to people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, to the simplistic derision of the U.S. and the frenzied hatred of Israel, the two camps attend the same church and sing from the same hymnal.” The irony is that, in purchasing the Islamist bill of goods regarding the evils of Western imperialism and so on, these opinion shapers are forced to overlook the evils of Islamist ideology—predominantly, that killing innocent people is a righteous act; not to mention its blatant contraventions of Western ideals such as women’s rights, monogamy and free speech. In the end, whatever the reasons, the effect of the left’s sympathy with Islamism is the same: When people—Muslim, Christian, secularist or anything else—are endlessly flooded with such messages, they are bound eventually to have increased hostility, even rage, against the U.S. and Israel, as well as any British policy that aligns with them.