Mark Steyn: Terrorists Way Too Cozy in United Kingdom

July 31, 2005
The Chicago Sun-Times

On Tuesday, the Times of London contained this intriguing tidbit about one of the thwarted suicide bombers of the July 21 tube attacks -- Yasin Hassan Omar, a Somali ''asylum seeker'':
''Omar, who was last seen vaulting a barrier at Warren Street station, has been the registered occupant of the flat since 1999. Ibrahim, who was last seen in Hackney Road, East London, after his failed attempt to blow up a No. 26 bus, shared it with him for the past two years. Omar, received £88 a week in housing benefit to pay for the council property and also received income support, immigration officials say.''

''Council property'' is Britspeak for public housing. So here's how things stand four years after 9/11: United Kingdom taxpayers are subsidizing the jihad.

There's a cheery thought for any Englishman the next time he's on a bus when some Islamakazi self-detonates: It's on his tax bill; pay as you blow.

This isn't some stunning shocking development, either. In a column on December 29, 2001, I noted the likes of Zac Moussaoui, the French citizen who became an Islamist radical while living on welfare in London, and wrote: "If you're looking for 'root causes' for terrorism, European-sized welfare programs are a good place to start . . . Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.''

I wasn't the first to notice the links between Euro-Canadian welfare and terrorism. Mickey Kaus, the iconoclastic California liberal, was way ahead. But, after 3-1/2 years, one would be entitled to assume that Tony Blair might have spotted it, too -- especially given the ever greater numbers of British jihadi uncovered from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel and America.

That's why a law-enforcement approach to the war on terror -- the John Kerry approach -- can't work, not just because it's mostly reactive -- blow somewhere up, we'll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene -- but also because it involves entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy, and trusting them to improve scrutiny of immigration, entitlement to welfare and other matters within the purview of government. That snippet from the Times makes clear the likelihood of that happening. A ''criminal'' approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, and between British and European -- and, indeed, American -- ''human rights,'' that's quite a bundle. If it's a war, you can take wartime measures. But, if you fight this thing as a law enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens will use all the above to their full extent. So today imams living off welfare checks openly promote the murder of Tony Blair, British troops, etc., with impunity.

Madrid and London -- along with other events such as the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh -- are, in essence, the opening shots of a European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists' most oft-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate living under sharia that extends to Europe, and there's a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behavior is consistent with that.

Furthermore, there's a lot more of the world that lives under sharia than there was, say, 30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Fifty years ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of Islamic law. So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: Since the beginning of the year, for example, some 10 percent of southern Thailand's Buddhist population has abandoned their homes -- a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the Western press. And whatever one's opinion of the various local conflicts around the world -- Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Jews in the Holy Land, Muslims vs. Russians in Chechnya, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa -- the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

If the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world's grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency -- not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahhabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalizing force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Yorkshire to Virginia. Europeans who aren't prepared to roll back Wahhabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it.

Mustering the popular will for that sort of struggle isn't easy. But the longer you leave it the harder it becomes. These days, if an American business traveler lands at Heathrow, the immigration officer plunks down in his passport a big stamp saying ''RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS PROHIBITED.'' What a pathetic example of pointless gesture politics: If you're a fancypants executive in town for 48 hours to splash a ton of hard currency around the West End, British immigration goes through a big hoop-de-do about saying you've no entitlement to welfare. But if you're a Somali and you want to live in public housing at public expense for six years while you fine-tune your plot to blow up Warren Street Tube station, pas de probleme!

That's a classic example of what you get when you opt for a narrowly drawn law enforcement approach entrusted to a complacent bureaucracy: Rather than do anything about immigrant welfare fraud, they'll simply order up a new rubber stamp that gives the vague air of doing something about it. And back in the real world, daily, weekly, remorselessly, the situation will deteriorate. The British have been heroic in Iraq. They need to show they can do it closer to home.