I don’t know if I was the first person to joke — no, to observe — that there had been more rallies against Hamas in Gaza in recent days than there had been in London over the last 17 months. But the point has now been widely made and with each passing week it only becomes more alarming.
Yesterday, the luxury radicals were out in force yet again to express their support, whether overt or tacit, for the Strip’s jihadi overlords. In Manchester, they chanted “globalise the Intifada”. In Cardiff, a speaker ranted through a microphone, “I’m sick of being told to condemn Hamas when Hamas are fighting for freedom”.
In Gaza, meanwhile, those very freedom fighters kidnapped 22-year-old activist Odai Nasser Saadi Al-Rubai, one of the leaders of the uprising, and tortured him for four hours before dumping him on the doorstep of his family. He later died of his wounds.
So while a brave young man in Gaza is gruesomely murdered for standing up to jihadism, men and women of his own age — who would be killed just as quickly should they ever set foot in the Strip — are taking to the streets to express their support for his murderers.
London, meanwhile, is the foremost hub of funding for Hamas in the West, even though the group has been proscribed in its entirety since 2021. Our national broadcaster showcased Hamas propaganda in a documentary and not a single senior executive smelt a rat before giving it the rubber stamp.
At middle-class dinner tables all over the country, hackles will rise at the mention of Israel but there will be a palpable sanguinity — in both senses of the word perhaps — if you talk about its enemy. When asked about the Gaza war on Sam Harris’ podcast, Rory Stewart said: “There are lies from both sides, there are truths from both sides, and nobody is giving a fair hearing to any of it.”
Britain has a problem.
To make matters worse, our Muslim community is largely dominated by activists from the Muslim Brotherhood, the source of all Sunni jihadism around the world, from Islamic State to Hamas.
Whereas several Gulf states confronted the jihadis after 9/11 in no uncertain terms, arresting them, suppressing them and rooting them out, in Britain we have been so blinded by our own cultural relativism that even acknowledging jihadi tendencies in certain segments of society has been seen as taboo.
In an interview with Camilla Tominey earlier this month, the Emirati analyst Amjad Taha made the point that Britain has more extremists than in his own country. “The Muslim Brotherhood is banned in my country, the UAE,” he pointed out. “It is allowed in the UK.” As the late Christopher Hitchens once remarked, “the barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them”.
This happened, Taha said, because we were so concerned to uphold “free speech” that we tolerated what should have been intolerable. In fact, the cause of this debasement was more deeply rooted than that. It stemmed from the way we vacated our own identity and made its expression taboo, leaving us unable to call a spade a spade for fear of being branded toolophobic.
It is not difficult to see how our own liberal orthodoxy has brought us down. As Karl Popper famously put it: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
As a result, at the last count, only one in four British Muslims believed that Hamas had committed murder and rape on October 7, while 46 per cent expressed sympathy for the jihadi group. Coincidentally, that same proportion believed that Jews had too much power over British government policy.
More than half wanted to make showing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed illegal, while a third wanted to see Shariah implemented in the country. Such radicalism has been dominating the community for some time.
Ten years ago, after the massacre at the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, nearly eighty per cent of British Muslims said depicting Mohammad was offensive and twenty-seven per cent had “some sympathy” for the motives of the jihadi butchers.
But as we have seen, it isn’t just radical Muslims who have been disfiguring our streets with unabashed support for one of the most barbarous forces facing the West today. It is also the cretinous progressives who are so blinded by their decolonisation dogma that they are simply unable to look at things plainly.
Sometimes I wonder what these idiots would say if they were forced to have a conversation with a real-life Gazan like Odai who had been suffering under the jihadi yoke their while life, been deprived of their future and forced to endure war after war. Would that be enough to change their mind? Or would they still wish to globalise the Intifada?
This alliance can be traced to the Algerian war, when the militants of the National Liberation Front (FLN) drove the colonial French helter-skelter out of their lands with a campaign of a thousand cuts. This was the landmark moment for decolonisation ideology, making icons of men like Frantz Fanon.
Present in Algiers for the final battle was a diminutive Egyptian by the name of Yasser Arafat, who later shamelessly harnessed the Palestinian cause to the same bandwagon. To have persuaded the global Left that a ragtag bunch of Jewish refugees, most of whom were not white, were the ultimate expression of white supremacy and Western imperialism, was quite the move. But it worked. In the decades since, Arafat’s slight of hand has proved an act of enduring and manipulative genius.
Fast-forward through the digital revolution and our screen-addled and morally bereft youth are to the Muslim Brotherhood as putty is to the plasterer. Ironically, the cleverer they are, the more likely they are to support the men who, given half a chance, would behead them. To wit: the Palestine encampments grow in scale and vitality the further one travels up the university rankings.
Solving this problem will not be easy but the way forward is obvious. As a society, we must rediscover our sense of self and remember our values (which do not include support for jihadism).
We must arrest, prosecute and in some cases deport those who support our enemies with the same enthusiasm as the police currently investigate parents who complain about a school on WhatsApp. And we must embrace moderates from minority communities who stand firmly with us against the extremists.
Is any of this likely to happen under Labour? You and I both know the answer to that. But if our leaders carry on kicking the can down the road for much longer — and most of the kicks came from previous Tory governments — sooner or later we’re going to run out of road.
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