The enemy we welcomed
Part Five: Jihadism in the West.
This is the final essay in a five-part series responding to Jonathan Sacerdoti’s speech in the Oxford Union in which he – alongside Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox – argued that Islam was inherently hostile to the free world.
The previous four essays, which chart Islam’s relations with the Jews and the West from its earliest days to the present, as well as Sacerdoti’s original speech, can be found here.
To explore how this topic fits within the rise of the new radicalism, which in turn depends upon post-Cold War centrist fundamentalism, consider reading my latest book, Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.
As this is such an important subject, I have removed the paywall so these essays are free to read. Please share them widely and consider subscribing to support my work, for the price of a coffee a month. Just hit the button.
THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIOUS
The Islam Channel, Britain’s most successful Muslim TV channel, has been accused of glorifying jihadism and inciting hostility against the West. A complaint submitted in March 2025 by liberal Muslim scholar Dr Taj Hargey said it had repeatedly broadcast praise of October 7, compared Israel to the Nazis and gave airtime to extremists. Constitutionally, he said, the channel portrays Islam as under siege from an oppressive West and views Iran, Hamas and other jihadis as ‘resistance’ movements against the democracies. This wasn’t the first time the channel has been at the centre of such scandals; in 2023, it was fined £400,000 after airing a documentary that regurgitated a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that Israel was trying to take over part of Argentina and Chile, and earlier that year it had hosted former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said he was ‘glad to be labelled antisemitic.’ In 2020, meanwhile, the channel was forced to pay £20,000 after broadcasting a religious education series that contained ‘antisemitic hate speech.’ With two million viewers daily, the Islam Channel is watched by sixty per cent of British Muslims.
As we have seen in the previous four essays in this series, antisemitism is not inherent to Islam. Yet in addition to the Nazi poison that has been injected into so many Muslim societies, and in addition to the pernicious role played by the Brotherhood in subverting society from within, we need to accept a simple truth: In recent decades, the pace and volume of immigration into Britain and Europe has been so relentless that assimilation has been simply impossible. The evidence is all around us. Many parts of Britain, particularly in the Midlands and the north, are now home to parallel communities of first and second-generation immigrants in conditions of widespread welfare dependency. In one especially vivid example, in two dozen streets in North Evington, Leicester — where two mosques cater to 1,670 people — about forty per cent of residents are economically inactive and forty-three per cent of adults speak little or no English, according to census records.
How can nationhood survive in such circumstances? Nearly a million people in Britain either cannot speak the native language well or cannot speak it at all — which obviously affects their ability to become employed — while the government funds translation when they use public services. Frequent viewing of foreign language programmes on television has increased by twenty-four per cent in the last five years. In March, British government figures revealed that taxpayer-funded welfare was being claimed by over a million foreigners; forty nationalities were receiving greater benefits per capita than Britons, with Congolese, Iraqis and Afghans claiming four times as much. Travel across Europe, as I have done in my time as a foreign correspondent, and you will find similar scenes everywhere from the banlieue of Paris to the sprawling suburbs of Stockholm and Berlin.
The huge cultural upheaval this has heralded — which has neither historical precedent nor democratic mandate — is still playing out. On the one hand, the white British population in Dagenham has fallen by over half in the last quarter-of-a-century, while on the other, almost half of mothers from the Pakistani community of inner-city wards in Bradford were married to a cousin. There are almost a hundred Sharia councils in Britain, and it is unlikely that the Brotherhood is unaware of this. Reportedly, many such councils turn a blind eye to marital coercion, wife beating and rape in certain circumstances. As parallel minority communities grow, the Western instinct to denigrate its own Christian heritage while elevating Islam is accelerating the collapse.
Although the Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks in Gaza brought hundreds of thousands of activists onto the streets of democratic capitals across the world, the erasure of Christians in the Middle East has gone almost completely unnoticed. This has been one of the great global outrages of our times, doubly so on account of our indifference towards it. In 1894, up to a quarter of Turks were Christians. Today, after the massacres of Armenians ordered by the Ottomans and the Islamisation of the country, that number stands at just two per cent. Between 1955 and 2005, up to two million Christians and animists in southern Sudan were butchered by the country’s Muslim Arab government, without a single placard raised in the West. The population of Bethlehem was eighty-five per cent Christian in 1948; by 2016, that number stood at a mere sixteen per cent and is probably smaller today, as Christians continue to emigrate amid higher Muslim birth rates. Thousands of Christians and Yazidis were killed by Islamic State in the years leading up to 2020. Yet these outrages and many more have stirred few hearts in Christendom.
This has created a dark mirroring. Western Christians both turn a blind eye to the suffering of their coreligionists overseas and enthusiastically denigrate themselves at home. Many Muslim states, meanwhile, persecute Christians with impunity in their own lands while watching their cousins in Western societies enjoying increasing prominence and respect. One party has made a virtue out of weakness and self-loathing while the other prides itself on strength and dominance.
In his book Among The Mosques, the former Islamist turned intellectual Ed Husain, who remains a devout Muslim, visits places of Islamic worship all over Britain, providing a startling account of the norms behind closed doors. As if the Brotherhood wasn’t enough, an ultra-conservative sect called the Deobandis — the group that spawned the Taliban — control almost half of all Britain’s mosques, he reveals. They believe that women should leave the house as little as possible and frown upon listening to music. In one such mosque in Dewsbury, there is no area for women to pray. ‘This would be a temptation for many,’ he is told.
In Bradford, he meets parents who ban their children from drama classes, while in Manchester he fails to evoke a condemnation of those who would kill anybody who ‘insults the Prophet’ from the local Imam. This, he says, is a parallel society, a world within a world, populated by people who may live physically in Britain but culturally exist elsewhere. In an Islamic book shop in Blackburn, he even finds writings by none other than Sayyid Qutb and a text telling woman it was a sin to ‘enjoy dancing and listening to music’ or to partake in the ‘kuffar’ way of life. Is it any surprise that — at least when he wrote the book in 2021 — ninety-five per cent of leadership positions in British mosques were occupied by men? ‘In Gulf Arab states, you don’t find Qutb’s books being sold, and therefore you don’t have the propagation of those ideas of destroying Israel and destroying every Arab Muslim government,’ Husain told me on The Brink. ‘You don’t find the Muslim Brotherhood there because they’re banned, unlike in Britain.’
Allah sees everything
The last general election provided a grim watershed: for the first time, seats were won in Parliament based on a sectarian agenda. This was largely down to an insurgent force called the Muslim Vote, a pressure group that told Muslims around the country how to vote tactically. It stood candidates in vulnerable constituencies, all of whom owed their allegiances purely to religious and ethnic interests, and had a single set of demands, all related to Gaza. With no manifesto or pretence of appealing to the wider electorate, this was a non-party; yet in numbers, its five ‘independent’ MPs were equal to Reform. In its biggest achievement, shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth — who did not agree with suspending arms sales to Israel or the International Criminal Court case against Benjamin Netanyahu — was ousted in Leicester South by Shockat Adam, who was backed by the Muslim Vote. He reacted with the war cry: ‘This is for Gaza.’
Campaigning by these candidates was accompanied by intimidation, abuse and dirty tricks, all on the theme of Gaza. At one point, Ashworth was forced to hide in a vicarage from a mob of ‘screaming’ Palestine supporters. He had never known a campaign of ‘such vitriol, bullying and intimidation,’ he said. Defence secretary Wes Streeting — who managed to cling on to his seat with a majority of just 528 — was targeted by a fabricated recording in which the appeared to say, ‘I don’t fucking care’ about the deaths of Palestinians. His Labour colleagues Jess Phillips and Shabana Mahmood likewise just survived the onslaught and used their victory speeches to decry the harassment they had faced. Phillips’s speech was almost derailed by heckling from pro-Palestine thugs and had to be paused several times. ‘This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in,’ she said. Her campaign had been forced to make regular calls to the police, she revealed, speaking of party volunteers being filmed in the street and having their tyres slashed. Mahmood, meanwhile, described masked men disrupting a community meeting. This was ‘an assault on democracy itself,’ she concluded.
There were signs that the intimidation was working. Last May, a leaked video of Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, showed her pleading for votes with a group of Muslim men. ‘If me resigning as an MP now would bring a ceasefire, I would do it. I would do it,’ she begged. Should it be any surprise that in the eyes of the Muslim Vote, those five seats were only the beginning? Disclosing its ambitions on X after the results were declared, it vowed that Labour would suffer greater losses at its hands in 2029. ‘In Muslim-heavy seats, the seeds of our community’s future have been sown,’ the group wrote. ‘It will not be a landslide in the coming elections — and that is when the message sent today will really resonate.’
This is only the beginning. Eight months after the general election, Noor Jahan Begum was elected as a councillor in Ilford South, near where the MP David Amess was stabbed to death by an Islamic State jihadi in 2021, under the slogan ‘I stand with Palestine.’ A few weeks later, a campaign video which declared that ‘Allah sees everything’ suggested which local candidates voters in Wycombe should support based on whether they would back a boycott of Israeli goods if they were elected, ignoring the fact that exerting ‘undue spiritual interference’ before a vote is a criminal offence. The video was condemned by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch as ‘evil Islamist sectarianism’ that had no place in Britain.
As strong as the word ‘evil’ was, her instincts were sound. For a subset of British citizens to set aside all domestic concerns in favour of a foreign war three thousand miles distant, and to organise behind it along ethnic lines, is not just a profound indictment of our fraying social cohesion but a red flag about choppy waters ahead for British politics. One cannot help but wonder whether this would have been possible had the Brotherhood been banned in our society. As things stand, however, the continued rise of radical Islam in Parliament appears almost inevitable, raising the spectre of a sectarian influence upon our country’s leadership and policymaking. Once again, this is a worrying development for the vast majority of Britons and is especially worrying for the Jews.
The uncomfortable truth is that by investing so heavily in centrist fundamentalism, the West has set itself up to fail. Amid the radical diversity that our leaders have imposed upon our societies and the consequent loss of shared cultural norms, newcomers with hostile and subversive attitudes are placed under no pressure to adapt. Civic respect has declined and crime rates have increased, making people in certain regions feel that they no longer recognise their country. The child rape scandal that erupted in 2024 in Britain shone a spotlight on the mainly Pakistani gangs who had been subjecting thousands of mostly white girls to the most depraved abuse for decades, while the authorities looked the other way for fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia.’ In the first nine months of 2024, the most recent available data at the time of writing, almost fourteen per cent of grooming suspects were Pakistani, five times their share of the population. In March 2025, data from the Ministry of Justice revealed that foreigners, who comprise just 9.3 per cent of the population, had committed almost a quarter of sex crimes, as well as large proportions of violence, robbery, fraud and drug offences, between 2021 and 2023. Among the first victims of this social collapse have been the Jews. Rising antisemitism is a potent expression of the wholesale importation of other people’s bigotries to our shores.
The worst part is that this corrosion of our country served no useful purpose. For generations of politicians, loosening the borders was considered an easy solution to the economic conundrum of an aging, shrinking and workshy population. But the magic bullet has proved no solution at all, burdening the taxpayer, straining infrastructure and failing to boost productivity and growth. Meanwhile, the influx came with deep social problems. If it hadn’t been for the ideological myopia of the elites, this would have come as no surprise, given that newcomers from overseas added around seven million to the population of Britain — roughly equivalent to the number of residents of London — in the first two decades of this century, accounting for over four-fifths of total demographic expansion.
They remain unwilling to change course. Despite all the evidence of social and cultural strain, amid the political reluctance to find a better solution to our economic woes, the numbers continue to rise. Net migration into Britain hit a record high of almost a million in 2024; on current trends, it will grow to 72.5 million by 2032, entirely fuelled by a further five million migrants. According to the latest projection, by 2032, fourteen per cent of the population will have arrived in the preceding decade, almost all of them from Pakistan, India, Nigeria and China. At the same time, a quarter of Britain’s workforce is unemployed, with more than three million receiving sickness and disability benefits, a million more than before the Covid years. For a neutered and screen-addicted generation, the problem is only expected to get worse. A recent study revealed that Generation Z — those aged roughly between thirteen and twenty-eight — are giving up on work, with almost four in ten considering leaving their job to claim benefits, largely due to ‘mental health’ complaints. Economic inactivity was on course to rise further, it added, with 4.4 million workers, or a tenth of the workforce, ‘on the brink of leaving the labour market.’ So the demoralisation of Britain’s existing population and the surge in newcomers develop in tandem. None of this needed to happen. If both the numbers and attempts to undermine our values would have been kept in check, and measures taken to strengthen ordinary Britons to boost our economy and our confidence, the country would be a very much happier place today.
As the reaction to October 7 has shown, this betrayal of ourselves enabled the betrayal of the Jews. ‘We, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be,’ Sir Roger Scruton wrote more than a decade ago. ‘We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared civil culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere… We can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside or against it.’ Antisemitism has always been present in British life but its latest expression is largely imported. Sadly, as politicians recklessly continue to usher large numbers of migrants into the country, Sir Roger’s sagacity has been lost on the wind.
Thanks for reading. The previous four essays, which chart Islam’s relations with the Jews and the West from its earliest days to the present, can be found here. These are all free to read; do consider sharing widely and subscribing to support my work. It only costs the same as a coffee a month! –JWS