What was missing from the 7/7 commemorations

Spectator

2 days ago

Something was scarce, if not absent, in the commemorations of the 7/7 Islamist attacks yesterday, and that is the fact that these were Islamist attacks. The word did not appear in the Prime Minister's official statement to mark the anniversary. Keir Starmer commended 'the unity of Londoners in the face of terror', but what kind of terror? Far-right? Far-left? The IRA? Eco-warriors?
The trouble is that if you specify the nature of the attacks, you specify the nature of the perpetrators. They were: Mohammad Sidique Khan (born in Leeds, parents from Pakistan); Shehzad Tanweer (born in Bradford, parents from Pakistan); Hasib Hussain (born in Leeds, parents from Pakistan); and Germaine Lindsay (born in Jamaica, family converted to Islam after settling in Yorkshire). That all were Muslims and all here as a result of immigration is purely coincidental and definitely not something we should learn any lessons from.
To recognise Islamism as the cause of 7/7 is to say that four British Muslims blew up people who were supposed to be their fellow citizens, and did so in the name of 'protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters', as Khan put it in a video statement. That to Khan, Tanweer, Hussain, and Lindsay, and those who think like them, a Muslim's kinship and loyalty is with co-religionists the world over and not with the country that welcomed their families and extended them the benefits of citizenship.
The obvious follow-up question is: how many Muslims in Britain feel the same way? In the wake of 7/7, 'Islamism' was never off the tongues of policymakers and pundits as the merits of various counter strategies were debated. Should ministers co-opt 'community leaders' to fashion a moderate British Islam that rejected extremism? Tried that. Should they root out extremist, foreign-born imams from UK mosques? Talked about it a lot but did very little. Should more money be directed to Prevent and anti-radicalisation outfits? That was popular for a while; what it achieved is anyone's guess.
Twenty years on from 7/7, Islamism is no longer on quite so many tongues but it is no less of a threat.
In 2010, Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed at his constituency surgery by Roshonara Choudhry, who was motivated by the Iraq war. In 2013, fusilier Lee Rigby was butchered in Woolwich by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in 'retaliation for deaths in Muslim lands'. In March 2017, Khalid Masood murdered PC Keith Palmer and four others in an attack at Westminster. Two months later, Salman and Hashem Abedi killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. One month after that, Khuram Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba massacred eight people on London Bridge while shouting 'this is for Allah'. In 2019, Usman Khan killed two people on London Bridge after being released from prison for his role in a conspiracy to blow up the London Stock Exchange. In 2020, asylum seeker Khairi Saadallah, seeking refuge in the UK after fighting for the Ansar al-Sharia terror group in Libya, stabbed three people to death in a park in Reading. In 2021, Ali Harbi Ali murdered Sir David Amess over his vote for air strikes against the Islamic State and his membership of Conservative Friends of Israel.
One in four UK Muslims say Palestine is the most important issue for them, compared to just 3 per cent of the overall population. Asked their views on Hamas, 29 per cent say 'positive' while 24 per cent say 'negative'. Fifty-seven per cent want halal food to be compulsory in schools and hospitals, 52 per cent want to make it illegal to show a picture of Mohammed, and one-third think it would be desirable to see sharia introduced in the UK. One in four British Muslims wants to outlaw homosexuality while one in five wants to legalise polygamy.
Meanwhile, a Kurdish man, Hamit Coskun, was prosecuted for setting fire to his own copy of the Qur'an in public. A teacher in Batley is still in hiding four years after Muslim mobs descended on his school because a religious studies lesson featured a depiction of Mohammed. A mother had to plead for her autistic son down the local mosque in Wakefield after the boy dropped a copy of the Qur'an in school. A historical drama, The Lady of Heaven, was pulled from UK cinemas after mosques and mobs put pressure on exhibitors to stop showing a movie they deemed blasphemous. The government is consulting on a broad and sweeping definition of 'Islamophobia'.
To bring all this up is divisive. Divisiveness is one of the great evils of liberal modernity because it reveals the presence of divisions, divisions that do not officially exist, whose acknowledgement is heretical in the civic religion of liberalism, not least because their growth tracks unhelpfully with Britain's embrace of multiculturalism, an infallible doctrine in the church of progress.
The Prime Minister gives the game away in his statement when he says:
'Those who tried to divide us failed. We stood together then, and we stand together now – against hate and for the values that define us of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.'
Every last word of that is wrong. Islamists do not want to divide us, they want to dominate us. Their goal isn't us at each others' throats, it's their boots on our throats. They want, they demand, and, if we allow them, they will enforce our submission.
Progressives like Starmer have no frame for Islamism. As the DPP, he could understand it as a series of offences to be prosecuted, and as Prime Minister he recognises it as a national security threat, but he shows no indication of grasping its civilisational import. Islamism aims at the destruction of a civilisation, our civilisation.
The closest frame that a secular liberal might understand is colonisation, but the western centre-left mind cannot conceive of a colonial project in which white westerners are the victims, and so the progressive retreats into comforting bromides about prejudice and standing together. To reduce Islamism to 'hate' is to mischaracterise the ideology. Yes, Islamists hate us for our way of life, as the deathless cliché goes, but it is a holy hate, the conviction of the dogmatist meets the zeal of the converter. Their mission is to conquer this land and all lands for a caliphate, where power is in the hands of the Muslims and all submission is to Allah.
Islamists don't care that the Prime Minister won't utter their name. It matters not to them whether we look back in anger or look forward in denial. The Norm Macdonald joke ('What terrifies me is if Isis were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?') might be government policy in Britain but the backlash fixation does not extend beyond our elites, and certainly not to Islamists themselves. If innocent Muslims are mistreated because of their outrages, Islamists will exploit it to further their cause. If an attacked nation rallies around its Muslims, Islamists will find other ways to further their cause. You can try to anticipate and deny them every grievance but it will not change the original grievance, the one that drives them above all others, and that is the existence of peoples and nations which are not subject to Allah.
That guarding against the victimisation of patriotic, law-abiding British Muslims will do nothing to dissuade Islamists from their murderous path is not a reason to lower our defences against bigotry. There is nothing that prevents a Muslim from being a good British citizen while living with devotion to Allah. We know that because Muslims do it every day. They raise families, start businesses, doctor to the sick, do charitable works, pray down the mosque, and do so with love for Britain, commitment to its customs and institutions, and sharing in its people's traditional orientation towards individual liberty, pluralism, fairness, and the rule of law. If the last 60 years of immigration had involved only these Muslims, Britain today would be a less multicultural but a far happier, safer, more prosperous country.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to operate an immigration system that delivers only good future citizens while weeding out extremists, tribalists and those who place ethnic and religious solidarity above the proper character and duties of citizenship. The threat of Islamism must be addressed at three levels: immigration, integration and enforcement. To begin that urgent work requires circumstances which simply do not pertain in Britain. You need a civic establishment that believes unwaveringly that your country and your civilisation are good things that must survive. You need to educate succeeding generations to celebrate rather than demean their country, to lionise rather than demonise its heroes, and to regard its enemies as villains rather than victims. You need the strictest possible border policy, one in which legal migration is controlled, illegal migration prevented, and social and cultural impacts given primacy over economic considerations. You need to tell immigrants that they are lucky to be here, are expected to integrate fully, and that failure to do so will result in their removal. You need to tell their children and grandchildren that Britain owes them nothing but they owe it unending gratitude.
The UK is nowhere near achieving these circumstances. If anything, it is less willing now than it was after 7/7 to confront the Islamist threat. We have an elite educated in civilisational shame and primed for performative oikophobia, a state that does not believe in itself and prefers to pander to internal foes, or avert its eyes from them entirely, rather than assert its legitimacy and exercise its power. Keir Starmer belongs to that elite, which explains his statement and the drift in which Britain finds itself.
A nation that lacks the courage to name its enemies lacks the confidence to confront them and, in the end, it will lack the guts to overcome them.