Legal ace Andy McCarthy notes the cowardly refusal of the Brown government to allow Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders to visit Britain due to his having sponsored an anti-Islam film ("Fitta"--means "strife"). At the same time, militant Islamists are welcome in the House of Commons gallery, and Gitmo detainees repatriated to the UK have been released, with this incredible statement, as recounted by McCarthy:
Of course, extremism, hatred, and violent messages have found a comfortable home in the birthplace of Western civil rights, where “community harmony” means that jihadists talk and you listen. In 2005, Lord Ahmed hosted a book launch for Joran Jermas, one of Sweden’s most rabid anti-Semites, who predictably ranted about the “Jewish supremacy drive,” the Jews as the “one reason for wars, terror and trouble” in the Middle East, and Zionist “control” of Western mass media. The following year, his guest at Westminster, a building that happens to be one of al-Qaeda’s most coveted targets, was Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, who attended a session of the House of Commons. Before his release in 2005, Abu Rideh, a Palestinian, had been detained under Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2001 (an enactment later voided by the law lords as a violation of human rights) due to al-Qaeda connections and threats to carry out a bombing plot. Not to worry: Abu Rideh explained that he didn’t leave his family to go to Afghanistan for jihad, but to set up a charitable school for children. Next case.
Suspected al-Qaeda members are welcome in Parliament, but not a member of the Dutch parliament. Britain has a revolving door for Islamic radicals but a closed door for their democratic critics. In 2004, British authorities insisted that the Bush administration return to the U.K. all Britons who, having been captured fighting with the enemy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were held at Guantanamo Bay. After President Bush acceded, the former detainees were promptly released.
Not content with that, the Brits proceeded to demand that non-British detainees be shipped to England from Gitmo if they had any basis to claim legal U.K. residence. Despite the Pentagon’s protestations that these detainees were extremely dangerous, the Bush administration again relented. As night follows day, in late 2007, British authorities set the suspected terrorists free. And when this move aroused grave public concern, Lord Peter Henry Goldsmith, a former attorney general, gave voice to the Labour government’s dismissive party line: It did not matter whether the men were dangerous, because at stake was a “principle . . . which is more important.” “The principle,” Lord Goldsmith piously proclaimed, “is fundamental civil liberties.”
Indeed. Fundamental civil liberties for those committed to destroying the ever-diminishing British way of life. Cassandra has been shown the door.
Now, check out this untimed video of a January 2009 pro-Hamas rally in London (about 5 minutes) and see the stench of surrender in the air. (America is not without its culture war problems: an NY State Muslim--founder of a Muslim TV network, no less--was charged with beheading his wife in Buffalo, shortly after she had filed for divorce, prompting the local D.A. to say, in a masterpiece of understatement, "Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible." Meanwhile, President 44 has sent packing a bust of Sir Winston Churchill lent to Bush 43 for the Oval office as a sign of support after 9/11; seems Winnie was PM when Brits suppressed Mau-Mau uprising, and one rebel allegedly tortured was 44's grandfather--you can't make this stuff up, eh?)
John O'Sullivan, former senior adviser to Lady Thatcher and ever astute, sees more than political calculation in Brown's move:
The government, however, surely considered instead the different likely responses of British Muslims and other Brits.
When the average Londoner reads in The Sun about how Abu Hamza turned the Finsbury Park mosque into a terrorist recruiting office, he doesn't join a mob outside the mosque threatening to burn it down. He mutters that the world is going to the dogs and turns the page.
But mobs of extremist Muslims have marched through London in recent years inciting murder. And Labor peer Lord Ahmed's alleged threat of disorder in this case - to lead 10,000 Muslims to prevent Wilders from showing his film in Parliament - was very plausible. So Wilders was kept out.
O'Sullivan notes that the "hapless" (an apt term indeed) British foreign secretary has not even troubled to see the 15-minute film whose release is at the center of militant Muslim rage. O'Sullivan sees the roots of that rage in Britain--failure to defend the civilization whose values are now under barbarian siege:
The Muslim extremists who ended up planting bombs in the London subway or fighting British troops in Afghanistan began life as ordinary British kids who drank beer, played cricket and soccer and chased girls in short skirts.
But modern Britain gave them a vacuum in those parts of the soul where national identity, patriotism and allegiance take root and usually flourish.
Nature especially abhors this particular vacuum - and in places like the Finsbury Park mosque Islamo-fascism filled it.
Will the last free English citizen, as he (or she) departs, please turn out the lights?
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