‘Londonistan’ is still the weakest link

By Melanie Phillips
Daily Mail, 28 December 2009
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So here we go again. Another international Islamic terrorist plot — and yet another British connection.

The attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an American plane was averted only by luck and courage.

The incident obviously raises alarming questions about gross lapses in security. In particular, how did Abdulmutallab obtain a U.S. visa when he had been on an American watch-list of people with known terrorist connections?

But the deeper and more urgent issue for Britain concerns the key role this country has once again played in a Muslim’s trajectory to radicalisation and terror. Abdulmutallab, who claims to have been working for Al Qaeda, was an engineering student at prestigious University College London for three years until 2008.

He was actually refused an entry visa to Britain earlier this year, but only because the institution at which he said he wanted to study turned out to be non-existent.

How, people might well ask, could such a radical have been educated in Britain without the authorities jumping on him? Did MI5 know anything about him - especially since he was on a U.S. terrorism watch-list for two years?

As yet, we still don’t know much about this man’s history. It appears he became a religiously extreme Muslim at a school in Togo, but was further radicalised while studying in London before apparently going to Yemen and linking to Al Qaeda.

Who can be surprised? After all, this is ‘ Londonistan’ — the contemptuous term coined by the French security service back in the Nineties as they watched Britain become the central hub of Islamic terrorism in Europe.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain’s toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.

Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and ‘human rights’.

As a result, Britain remains — to its eternal shame — the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.

Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their ‘human rights’ abroad.

London boasts the shameful reputation of the world’s premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of ‘charity’ that the authorities choose not to challenge.

Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.

More than four years ago, the intelligence expert Professor Anthony Glees listed 24 British universities which he said had been infiltrated by militant jihadists.

Indeed, the long list of Islamic terrorists who were educated at universities in Britain should in itself have raised concerns about radical Islam on campus. Yet Professor Glees was instead undermined by university authorities determined to bury their heads in the sand.

Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found — horrifyingly — that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law.

The Centre also noted on campus the presence of extreme Islamist books in some prayer rooms, appearances by militant Islamist speakers, and links between extreme Islamists and the student Islamic Societies.

Yet the government refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the key groups that is radicalising students on campus by infiltrating and taking over these student societies and preaching its subversive message of Islamising the free world.

But it’s not just in the universities that Britain seems unable to recognise, let alone deal with, highly manipulative Muslim extremists. Astonishingly, similarly radical speakers are regularly invited into the very heart of the defence establishment, on courses teaching intelligence officials as well as soldiers and police officers about radical Islam.

The Government is funnelling money into extremist Islamist groups, and even employs Islamist radicals within government as advisers on — wait for it — ‘combating Islamic extremism’.

All in all, Britain’s defences against radical Islamism now resemble nothing so much as one giant hen-house over which a pack of ravenous foxes has been placed in charge.

The root cause of this madness is that British ministers and officials refuse to accept that what they are facing is religious fanaticism. They insist that Islamic extremism and terrorism have got nothing to do with Islam but are rather a ‘perversion’ of Islam. And they believe that the antidote to this is ‘authentic’ Islam — which they then use taxpayers’ money to promote.

But what they fail to grasp is that ‘authentic’ Islam is currently dominated by a deeply politicised interpretation which promotes holy war to conquer ‘infidels’ and insufficiently pious Muslims.

And although many such Muslims abhor this and have nothing to do with violence or extremism, it is an interpretation backed up by Islamic theology and history and currently supported by the major religious authorities in the Islamic world.

That is what the government often ends up inadvertently funding — with catastrophic results. For when exposed to this, even many hitherto secular Muslims become radicalised.

So it is hardly surprising if, when Abdulmutallab came to Britain, the country’s ostrich-like denial of Islamic fanaticism helped turn him from a religious extremist into a terrorist.

If Britain is ever to get on top of its terrorism problem, it has properly to acknowledge and tackle this radicalisation process. That means giving no quarter to this politicised interpretation of Islam.

And that means junking its current idiotic definition of an ‘extremist’ as merely someone who is committed to violence. It must outlaw instead the religious fanaticism that also threatens the British way of life.

Certainly, it is important not to demonise those British Muslims who pose no threat to this society.

So the Government should say that Muslims are welcome to live here on exactly the same basis as all other religious minorities - that they accept the principle of one law for all, and do nothing to threaten or undermine the prevailing culture.

That means an end to the increasing toleration of Islamic sharia law as the effective jurisdiction in Muslim areas, which so badly threatens in particular the safety and well-being of women, homosexuals and converts from the faith.

It means giving no quarter to the Muslim Council of Britain and all the other organisations and individuals who support Islamic extremism but are currently wooed by Whitehall.

It means outlawing Hizb ut-Tahrir. It means prosecuting the anti-West fanatics in mosques and madrassas. It means profiling Muslim extremists at airports.

None of these things is currently being done. Instead, radical Islamism is being appeased on the grounds that Muslims must not feel targeted in any way.

But in fact, this merely cuts the ground from under the feet of genuinely moderate British Muslims. For it is their friends and relatives, and worst of all their children, who are being radicalised through such a wrongheaded strategy.

The urgent question now has to be asked how many other Islamic terrorists in Britain are, like the quiet, studious, privileged Abdulmutallab, also lurking beneath the radar.

For in the defence of Western society against militant Islam’s war of conquest, the activities of the Christmas Day bomber show that once again Londonistan is the weakest link in the chain.