There has been general shock at the attempted downing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over Detroit. It isn’t just that yet another aeroplane terrorist atrocity was averted only by luck and courage after US and British intelligence were caught with their pants down once again. Nor is it just the lax airport security. No, the real amazement has been that the perpetrator, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a Nigerian who apparently got his orders from al-Qa’eda in Yemen; that the genesis of the pants bomber’s radical journey lies not in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor in Israel/Palestine, but in Africa. It was while at school in Togo that Abdulmutallab reportedly adopted the most belligerent version of Islam. As a fully fledged Islamic extremist, he was naturally received with open arms in Londonistan, where he was further radicalised to terrorism before being kitted out in Yemen with the latest accessories of mass murder. He is first and foremost a religious fanatic — and the crucial context for his extremism is Africa. Radical Islamists in countries such as Abdulmutallab’s Nigeria, Somalia or the Sudan have been steadily butchering, ethnically cleansing or brutally converting Christians and other ‘infidels’, imposing sharia law at gunpoint and radicalising the continent to the cause of Islamic holy war. British intelligence has already warned that British Muslims are being recruited into terror in Somalia. Now we learn of a steady stream of Britons being trained in terrorist camps in Yemen. A group called ‘Al-Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula’ has vowed ‘all out war on the crusaders’ and the ‘enemies of God’. Countries such as Yemen with a close association with Africa have long had troubling jihadi connections. What has changed recently is that al-Qa’eda has transferred its centre of gravity there, along with Somalia and the Maghreb. Al-Qa’eda is resilient and adaptable. It settled in Afghanistan because, having driven the Soviet Union from its borders, euphoric Islamic radicals then organised similarly to defeat America and the West. For a while, the war in Iraq drew al-Qa’eda there to fight America; it was driven out eventually when local people themselves turned against it. Now Pakistan, having spent years turning a blind eye to al-Qa’eda’s activities on its border, has become sufficiently alarmed to inflict serious damage upon it through air strikes. So al-Qa’eda has now relocated from Afghanistan to Africa. This is likely to supply a new line to the ‘we’re fighting the wrong war’ chorus by the appeasement crowd. During the war in Iraq, the refrain was this was the ‘wrong’ war, while the ‘right’ war was neglected in Afghanistan. Now that the West is locked into a desperate war in Afghanistan, the Detroit plane bomb gives rise to a fresh canard: Africa shows that Islamic terrorism merely relocates, so every such war is the wrong war because we can’t fight this everywhere. Al-Qa’eda says the Detroit plane bomb was retaliation for the recent US-backed air strikes against it in Yemen. So all we’re doing by going after al-Qa’eda is recruiting still more to the jihad. Right? Wrong. Abdulmutallab bought his plane ticket to kingdom come before the US-backed strikes. What people still don’t get is that Islamic terrorism is not a response to one political grievance or another. This is a civilisational war on many different fronts, and the consequences of abandoning any of them would be lethal. So says Col Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and former head of international terrorism for the Cabinet Office emergencies committee COBRA, and the Joint Intelligence Committee. If we lose in Afghanistan, he tells me, the danger of al-Qa’eda returning there in force, heightening the risk that it will conquer nuclear-armed Pakistan, is acute because the Taleban are its natural Islamist soulmates. Even more devastatingly, a defeat there for the West would have a galvanic effect on the global jihad similar to the perception in the 1990s that the Islamists had defeated the Soviet empire. As for Iraq, says Kemp, although the war there turned it for a while into a hub of al-Qa’eda, the alternative would have been far worse. ‘I am in no doubt,’ he says, ‘that if we had ignored Iraq it would now be an important centre for al-Qa’eda which Saddam would have been using against us.’ So it’s not a case of ‘either or’. We’re in a global war on many fronts, of which Africa is but the latest to achieve prominence. And in every case, we’re between a rock and a hard place. Yes, the war in Afghanistan is awful — but the alternative is worse. Yes, military attempts to defend the free world may stoke up further hysteria among fanatics — but the alternative is to surrender to the violence they instigate. Yes, fighting them in Africa will further strain already stretched resources — but if we don’t, Africa will turn into a sub-Saharan Afghanistan. As Kemp says: ‘We have a choice. Either we accept that these people will continually be attacking us; or we put most of our energy and resources into fighting them.’ But the frightening fact is that Britain and the US are not unequivocally committing energy and resources to this war. On the contrary — despite the projected ‘surge’ in Afghanistan, Britain and the US have signalled they are getting out regardless of whether victory has been achieved. In doing so, they are responding to public opinion which seems not to understand why we are in Afghanistan — nor indeed about the wider defence against the global jihad. But that’s because politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have never told the public the truth. They refuse to say that this is a global religious war waged by militant Islam, because they are terrified of enraging Muslims at home and abroad. This gross failure of leadership has helped create the current mood of defeatism that threatens to bring about the eclipse of the West. Now Africa will doubtless become yet another front in this war for us to ignore, while being used to undermine still further the defence being undertaken on the others. And that’s before we even think about Iran. Which we certainly will do our damnedest not to do, except to use it to rubbish the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the non-war in Africa — not forgetting the non-existent domestic terrorist threat posed by the fictional jihadis of the non-existent global religious war against the free world who are merely reacting to our aggression against them. To identify our greatest enemy of all, therefore, we should not look to Afghanistan, Iran or Africa: we should look in a mirror. Through an oversight, this article originally described Yemen as an African country, which is incorrect. Daily Mail, 28 December 2009 So here we go again. Another international Islamic terrorist plot — and yet another British connection. The attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an American plane was averted only by luck and courage. The incident obviously raises alarming questions about gross lapses in security. In particular, how did Abdulmutallab obtain a U.S. visa when he had been on an American watch-list of people with known terrorist connections? But the deeper and more urgent issue for Britain concerns the key role this country has once again played in a Muslim’s trajectory to radicalisation and terror. Abdulmutallab, who claims to have been working for Al Qaeda, was an engineering student at prestigious University College London for three years until 2008. He was actually refused an entry visa to Britain earlier this year, but only because the institution at which he said he wanted to study turned out to be non-existent. How, people might well ask, could such a radical have been educated in Britain without the authorities jumping on him? Did MI5 know anything about him - especially since he was on a U.S. terrorism watch-list for two years? As yet, we still don’t know much about this man’s history. It appears he became a religiously extreme Muslim at a school in Togo, but was further radicalised while studying in London before apparently going to Yemen and linking to Al Qaeda. Who can be surprised? After all, this is ‘ Londonistan’ — the contemptuous term coined by the French security service back in the Nineties as they watched Britain become the central hub of Islamic terrorism in Europe. Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain’s toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech. Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are stillallowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and ‘human rights’. As a result, Britain remains — to its eternal shame — the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world. Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are stillrefusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their ‘human rights’ abroad. London boasts the shameful reputation of the world’s premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of ‘charity’ that the authorities choose not to challenge. Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres. More than four years ago, the intelligence expert Professor Anthony Glees listed 24 British universities which he said had been infiltrated by militant jihadists. Indeed, the long list of Islamic terrorists who were educated at universities in Britain should in itself have raised concerns about radical Islam on campus. Yet Professor Glees was instead undermined by university authorities determined to bury their heads in the sand. Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found — horrifyingly — that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law. The Centre also noted on campus the presence of extreme Islamist books in some prayer rooms, appearances by militant Islamist speakers, and links between extreme Islamists and the student Islamic Societies. Yet the government refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, one of the key groups that is radicalising students on campus by infiltrating and taking over these student societies and preaching its subversive message of Islamising the free world. But it’s not just in the universities that Britain seems unable to recognise, let alone deal with, highly manipulative Muslim extremists. Astonishingly, similarly radical speakers are regularly invited into the very heart of the defence establishment, on courses teaching intelligence officials as well as soldiers and police officers about radical Islam. The Government is funnelling money into extremist Islamist groups, and even employs Islamist radicals within government as advisers on — wait for it — ‘combating Islamic extremism’. All in all, Britain’s defences against radical Islamism now resemble nothing so much as one giant hen-house over which a pack of ravenous foxes has been placed in charge. The root cause of this madness is that British ministers and officials refuse to accept that what they are facing is religious fanaticism. They insist that Islamic extremism and terrorism have got nothing to do with Islam but are rather a ‘perversion’ of Islam. And they believe that the antidote to this is ‘authentic’ Islam — which they then use taxpayers’ money to promote. But what they fail to grasp is that ‘authentic’ Islam is currently dominated by a deeply politicised interpretation which promotes holy war to conquer ‘infidels’ and insufficiently pious Muslims. And although many such Muslims abhor this and have nothing to do with violence or extremism, it is an interpretation backed up by Islamic theology and history and currently supported by the major religious authorities in the Islamic world. That is what the government often ends up inadvertently funding — with catastrophic results. For when exposed to this, even many hitherto secular Muslims become radicalised. So it is hardly surprising if, when Abdulmutallab came to Britain, the country’s ostrich-like denial of Islamic fanaticism helped turn him from a religious extremist into a terrorist. If Britain is ever to get on top of its terrorism problem, it has properly to acknowledge and tackle this radicalisation process. That means giving no quarter to this politicised interpretation of Islam. And that means junking its current idiotic definition of an ‘extremist’ as merely someone who is committed to violence. It must outlaw instead the religious fanaticism that also threatens the British way of life. Certainly, it is important not to demonise those British Muslims who pose no threat to this society. So the Government should say that Muslims are welcome to live here on exactly the same basis as all other religious minorities - that they accept the principle of one law for all, and do nothing to threaten or undermine the prevailing culture. That means an end to the increasing toleration of Islamic sharia law as the effective jurisdiction in Muslim areas, which so badly threatens in particular the safety and well-being of women, homosexuals and converts from the faith. It means giving no quarter to the Muslim Council of Britain and all the other organisations and individuals who support Islamic extremism but are currently wooed by Whitehall. It means outlawing Hizb ut-Tahrir. It means prosecuting the anti-West fanatics in mosques and madrassas. It means profiling Muslim extremists at airports. None of these things is currently being done. Instead, radical Islamism is being appeased on the grounds that Muslims must not feel targeted in any way. But in fact, this merely cuts the ground from under the feet of genuinely moderate British Muslims. For it is their friends and relatives, and worst of all their children, who are being radicalised through such a wrongheaded strategy. The urgent question now has to be asked how many other Islamic terrorists in Britain are, like the quiet, studious, privileged Abdulmutallab, also lurking beneath the radar. For in the defence of Western society against militant Islam’s war of conquest, the activities of the Christmas Day bomber show that once again Londonistan is the weakest link in the chain. Jewish Chronicle, 22 December 2009 Since then, a steady stream of senior Israeli officials have either narrowly escaped similar arrest in Britain through diplomatic immunity, or have had to cancel planned visits because such an arrest was all too likely. In all that time, the government has sat on its hands. Only now that Tzipi Livni has had to cancel her trip to London following an attempt to arrest her over her part in Operation Cast Lead has the British government said it will change the law, probably by making the Attorney-General the gatekeeper for any such arrest attempts. Why is it only now that the balloon has gone up? One reason is that this is the first time the Israeli government has responded with unbridled fury at Britain. But also, for British diplomats, Livni is ‘one of us’. That is because, since she is one of the most appeasement-minded politicians Israel has ever produced, it is considered an affront to try to arrest her, of all people, for her part in warfare. ‘Livni supports a two-state solution. This attempt to secure her arrest has really set alarm bells ringing,’ a horrified senior Foreign Office source reportedly told the Guardian. The unpleasant implication is that the Foreign Office cares far less about attempts to arrest Israeli politicians with more hawkish views. This telling remark shows how the Foreign Office circles the wagons when one of its ideological soul-mates is under attack — and is wholly unable to see how the amoral and unprincipled view of the world it believes it shares with Livni may actually be contributing to the problem. The British refusal to see Israel’s predicament as an existential siege, insisting instead that the Middle East impasse is a boundary dispute, perpetuated by Israel’s refusal to compromise, is the false analysis fuelling the poisonous atmosphere giving rise to these arrest warrants. After all, Gordon Brown’s government has been displaying the most hostile attitude towards Israel that many in Britain have ever seen. It is leading a boycott of Israeli goods from the West Bank, singling out its democratic ally Israel for condign punishment that it dishes out to no other country, however tyrannical. It has similarly imposed a limited arms embargo on parts for Israeli warships. It refused to vote against the Hamas-leaning Goldstone report at the UN. It denounced Cast Lead as disproportionate, thus endorsing Hamas propaganda and effectively denying Israel the right to defend its people against attack. And it supported the vicious Swedish proposal pre-emptively to hand half of Jerusalem to Israel’s Arab attackers. It puts out the false view that Israel is still occupying Gaza and that the settlements are illegal — legally illiterate claims which derive entirely from Britain’s time-hallowed policy of sucking up to the Arabs. Whether or not they are wise or desirable, the settlements are legal, not least because the 1922 mandate for Palestine, whose provisions are still legally binding, laid down that the Jews should have “close settlement” of the land from the Jordan to the sea. The unpalatable fact is that, ever since the 1920s, when Arab terror first began against the Jewish presence in Palestine, the British responded by appeasing it and reneging on its own treaty obligations, thus giving such terrorism every incentive to continue. That despicable tradition continues today in Brown’s government, even as it claims that Israel is Britain’s “strategic partner and close friend”. In fact, its hostility has contributed enormously to the climate of rabid hysteria, irrationality and bigotry towards Israel now consuming British public debate and in which these arrest attempts are being made. With a ‘close friend’ like this, who needs enemies?
Five years ago, anti-Israel campaigners tried to arrest the then Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz for ‘war crimes’ while he was on a visit to London.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
January 1, 2010
Al Qaeda in Africa
December 28, 2009
‘Londonistan’ is still the weakest link
December 27, 2009
Israel’s false friend
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