Britain - A Menace to the World?

It emerged today that America is blaming Britain for the rise in Islamic extremism. 

Leading policy makers in the American administration have accused Britain of being "a menace to the rest of the world" because of its failure to tackle Islamic radicalism within its borders. Is the accusation justified? Most certainly!

For years the British people and government have been pandering to the Islamic minority of the country for fear of being seen as anti-Islamic - Islamophobia. 

This sickness has found its way into every facet of British life to the extent that to utter a single word of criticism against Muslims or Islam, means you risk being   branded a 'racist', much the same as the sixties and seventies during the rise of 'Black Power'. English traditions going back centuries are slowly dying out because they may offend the Muslim population.

This criticism of Britain has come to light after the failed suicide bomb attack on a Detroit-bound airliner by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, it is said, was radicalised in London. For a time, he was president of the Islamic Society at the University College London (UCL) which has been severely criticised for allowing, and even actively encouraging, extremist Muslim preachers to give lectures on campus. 

There are many universities in Britain with the same lax attitude towards Muslim extremism, and these places of learning are a fertile recruiting ground for groups like al Qaeda. 

Evidence of this can be seen in the atrocities list of the past few years; Omar Sheik who killed Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 (London School of Economics); Asif Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif who blew themselves up in Tel Aviv in 2003 (King's College London); Abdullah Achmed Ali leader of the liquid bomb plot in 2006 (City University London), the list goes on. All received an education in British Universities, and all were most certainly recruited there by visiting 'lecturers' like Anwar al-Awlaki a well-known radical Yemen-based priest who has preached on various occasions at UCL among others, and gave spiritual guidance to both the failed Detroit bomber, and the Fort Hood assassin Nidal Hasan.

This institutionalised acceptance of allowing extremist and radical Islamic preachers to openly infect the minds of impressionable young men is beyond doubt a scandal, but all comes under the heading of Islamophobia. 

Another accusation, levelled by Marc Thiessen, former speech writer for George W. Bush and Pentagon aide, was that Muslim immigrants into the UK were marginalised, and segregated into 'ghetto's' instead of being integrated into society as in America. 

This I cannot agree with for the simple reason that Muslims in Britain do not wish to integrate into British society. They form these 'ghetto's' of their own accord by taking over entire areas, and even towns in their desire to live together as a separate community. This Islamization of towns is an on-going process and results, among other things, in them demanding Muslim schools, and British Schools teaching the National Curriculum in Arabic. This is wrong, but symptomatic of the failure of the government to ensure the immigrant population is spread wide across the country. How would Mr, Thiessen feel if Muslim immigrants in the States demanded High Schools taught their children in Arabic? 

Charles Allen, a recently retired CIA operative, claimed there is "a lack of assimilation, a great deal of alienation" towards Muslims in Britain, and to some extent he is correct, but not completely. 

When the immigrant population of Britain and the rest of Europe are ready to admit they should adopt the customs and language of their new country relations will  improve, but instead they demand we change our customs to suit them. If we do not, we are racist. 

The lack of willingness to assimilate on the part of most Muslims, coupled with the past failure of successive governments to ensure that ghetto's were not allowed to form in the first place, has led to a feeling of mistrust by many members of the British population which has of course been crystallised by the terrorist attacks in recent years. The one feeds off the other.

There is much to support the American feeling that Britain has become a 'hotbed' of extremism in the world, but the problem has gone too far for a simple solution. 

Britain, and indeed all European countries, need to stamp down hard on the  Imams who preach their hatred in the mosques, turning peaceful young men into extremists willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah. 

It is also imperative the European Union law enforcement institutions project a more robust attitude towards the threat of terrorism within its borders, and as suggested by the news article, treat the terrorists as enemy combatants instead of just criminals.

However, in the long term it is only the Muslim people themselves who can put an end to this hi-jacking of their Faith for the purposes of terrorism. 

May peace come to all - Inshallah!

Roy.