On a sunny afternoon on a London street an unarmed young man is murdered in the most brutal way imaginable. First his assailants frenziedly hack at him with meat cleavers then yelling "Allahu akbar" (God is great) they try to slice off his head.
By: James Delingpole
24 May 2013
Can you spot what's wrong here? I would have thought it was obvious. I'd say it's one of the vilest crimes committed in Britain since at least the 7/7 London terrorist bombings. But clearly I'm a bit eccentric because lots of people disagree with me - as I discovered when the horrific story first broke.
Some thought the worst aspect of the case was that BBC political reporter Nick Robinson had described the suspects on the news as "of Muslim appearance". Others were mightily exercised that the alleged murderers had been shot by police (rather than politely escorted to the nearest cell with full access to Sky Sport, presumably).
Still others seemed determined not to draw any "unhelpful" conclusions about the murderers' religious motives. All right, so they might have shouted "Allahu akbar" and given an interview afterwards saying: "We swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone."
But this was no reason to suggest that this sordid crime had anything to do with the "Religion of Peace", now, was it?
Not for the first time I find myself wondering what madness has seized our culture.
Have we been so brainwashed by political correctness that we no longer know how to respond honestly to a crime of near matchless barbarity and evil? For me - and no doubt you too - it couldn't be more clear cut.
What happened to that young soldier on the streets of Woolwich on Wednesday was wrong if you're white; wrong if you're black; wrong if you're Christian; wrong if you're Muslim; so wrong from every conceivable angle that it seems a crime against decency and logic for anyone, however wellintentioned, to try to make excuses for it.
Indeed I'd argue that the people mouthing these inane pieties are Islamic fundamentalism's useful idiots - they make it more, not less, likely that there's going to be another atrocity like this just around the corner. What their attitude shows is that we as a society don't have the gumption to tackle this problem head on.
So what exactly should we be doing to prevent home-grown atrocities such as this? Step one, definitely, should be to acknowledge that the problem actually exists rather than burying our heads in the sand for fear of causing offence.
At the moment - as we saw with the Boston marathon bombings - our default response to any Islamist terrorist incident is first to worry about how the "Muslim community" might feel.
What ought to be a story about the very real menace of militant political Islam instead becomes a story about how we must all try to be nicer to the Muslim community at this difficult and embarrassing time.
But we knew that. Hardly anyone - save the odd crackpot - seriously blames Muslims generally for incidents such as this.
It would be nice, though, if on these occasions a few more members of that peaceful Muslim majority came forward and condemned the deed outright rather than using it as another excuse to play the oppressed minority victim card.
This is symptomatic of a broader problem with Islam in Britain: that all over, in ghettolike pockets, there are immigrant communities that feel no loyalty to the traditions and values of their host country, only to the broader Islamic world known as the "umma".
While it's true that the vast majority of them will have been properly appalled by the barbarity of the Woolwich murder many will yet have sympathised with the killers' line that: "We must fight them as they fight us."
Yet almost no one in our political class (at least not outside Ukip) will admit this. "We will defeat violent extremism by standing together," announced David Cameron. But actually that's just not true, we need to show that the limits of our tolerance for this enemy within have been thoroughly exhausted.
We need to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights, which for years has denied us the chance to deport Islamist hate preachers and terrorist sympathisers such as Abu Qatada.
We need to stop giving benefits to those who abuse our hospitality and generosity by plotting to destroy us. We need to clamp down on specialist Muslim schools and madrasas that use Saudi textbooks preaching that Jews are lower than pigs and that "kuffar" (non-Muslims) are inferior.
We need to stop Islamist extremists targeting vulnerable groups such as prisoners and university students. We need to stop turning a blind eye to honour killings, female circumcision and the grooming of young girls by organised Asian gangs.
Above all we need to realise that there will never be peace or social cohesion in our divided land so long as we go on playing this ridiculous game where one section of our population has to be treated with kid gloves and special rules in case they're offended.
Fundamentalist Islam is not a problem we should be trying to sweep under the carpet, it is a problem we should be striving to defeat. So far we're not doing a very good job.
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