The Islamist Wind in Britain

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

Over the last weekend there have been two more street attacks on soldiers in Britain, one of which was fatal.

On Saturday, the Yorkshire town of Barnsley in northern England honored soldiers with parades and celebrations for its Armed Forces Day. One of the soldiers, who had returned from the Falkland Islands just hours before, was brutally assaulted at around midnight when he was getting home. He was jumped from behind, knocked unconscious and then repeatedly stamped and kicked in the head and face, and left with a concussion, injuries and bruises.

He is a 28-year-old corporal who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, 26-year-old newlywed ex-soldier David Ryding was attacked in the Warwickshire town of Rugby, in central England, suffering head injuries. He died in hospital almost 24 hours later. Three men have been arrested.

What is missing from these reports? Any information about the suspects, except their ages. The word “Muslim,” which, in view of the beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby by self-confessed jihadists, may spring to mind, is notably absent, and can only be found in the comments to the articles. Also noteworthy is that these incidents were only reported in local news.

Readers, judging by their comments, are suspicious of the media’s suppression of information: “If this were an attack by whites on a muslim it would be on BBC news, lead story – fact.” Another: “I bet it was Muslims who attacked him, but the media have left this part out because of community tensions.”

And:

It might be a random attack but the total lack of info in the rest of the media is pretty weird. After Drummer Rigby you’d think any incident with a soldier attacked the media would want to make sure everybody knew it wasn’t a jihadist attack if it wasn’t but this – total silence.

The media may or may not know more about the identities and religious affiliations of the suspects. But it is their reluctance to even mention the elephant in the room, the self-evident similarity with the previous, recent street killing of a soldier, that makes such coverage suspicious and, frankly, surreal.
The common excuse for this kind of censorship is the wish to avoid indirectly inciting anti-Muslim attacks, that have increased since Lee Rigby’s murder.

A noble intention, I’m sure. It’s a pity that these same media outlets don’t take the same prudential attitude when it comes to trumpeting, say, how “Islamophobic” the British government has allegedly been in its unjust wars against Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan, or how racist the UK police and public allegedly are. In those cases the media don’t seem to be so concerned about possible “backlashes” against non-Muslims or whites.

Nor is the mainstream media worried about having in the UK such a large, non-assimilated immigrant population from alien cultures (one of which, Islamic culture, could hardly be more antithetical to British and, indeed, Western civilization), which may at any moment instigate serious, even lethal, conflicts.

There is an increasing polarization between Britons and Muslims. A recent opinion poll compared answers given by respondents in November 2012 with late May 2013.

In 2012, 50 percent agreed that “There will be a ‘clash of civilizations’ between British Muslims and native white Britons”; in 2013, 59 percent did.

The number of those who agreed with “British Muslims pose a serious threat to democracy” rose from 30 to 34 percent.

In short, it’s not just the “far-right”  that is “Islamophobic” now in the UK.

Terrorism is not the only problem by any stretch of the imagination. The Brits are not too impressed by the Muslim pedophile rings which have become an epidemic, or the way mosques disrupt their own neighbourhoods — through parking jihad, general harassment, vandalism, etc. — and drive them to move out, or the de facto imposition of sharia law on them by the selling and serving of halal meat to unsuspecting non-Muslims.

The response of the Establishment to this rise in anti-Muslim feelings has been more of the same with a vengeance, intensifying, if anything, repression of the politically incorrect.

Following the Woolwich beheading, there has been a crackdown on several social network users who have been warned, charged, arrested and released on bail for making “inflammatory” and anti-Muslim comments on Twitter and Facebook. The police said people should be careful about what they write on Twitter as the “consequences could be serious.”

Two of the men detained were organising an anti-Islam protest in Bristol and made racist and “anti-religious” remarks. Anti-religious: I wonder if they would have been arrested for insulting Christianity?

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are now considered by the British Home Secretary to be public enemies, holders of opinions that are “not conducive to the public good,” and banned from even entering the country.

The English Defence League (EDL), an organization demonized under normal circumstances for daring to fight against the Islamization of Britain, has been more than ever targeted by authorities.
Two of its leaders, Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, have been arrested practically for attempting to walk too close to a mosque, although the official excuse was “for obstructing the police.”

The media, predictably, are doing their bit. The usual suspects, like The Guardian, RT and Sky News, are doing their best to create an association in the mind of the public between EDL peaceful demonstrations, a lawful expression of free speech, and attacks on mosques or Muslims, which are criminal acts.

Channel 4, one of the UK’s major TV networks, has gone even further. It has announced that it’s going to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer throughout Ramadan, which began Tuesday, 9 July.
Channel 4’s head of factual programming, Ralph Lee, has excellent reasons for doing so. He said:

And let’s not forget that Islam is one of the few religions that’s flourishing, actually increasing in the UK. Like Channel 4’s target audience, its followers are young. It’s recently been reported that half of British Muslims are under 25.

That nice bit of demographic information will cheer us all up, Ralph. He added that the broadcasting is “a deliberate ‘provocation’ to all our viewers in the very real sense of the word.” We are all grateful for that.

Unsurprisingly, Islamist preachers like Anjem Choudary and Abu Zakariyya applaud his decision as a step towards the implementation of sharia law in the UK.

Choudary ventured a prediction: “[B]y some accounts Britain could be a Muslim country by 2015.”
Not so fast. Hubris could be your downfall, Anjem. We may still have something to say on the matter.