Daniel
Greenfield article: Afghanistan Comes to London
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Posted: 22 May 2013 10:32 PM PDT
After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make
the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon
observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to
the mountain.”
Americans,
Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to
turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead
Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad
and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.
Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British
soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has
happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.
In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those
are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their
place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city.
Woolwich
Common, adjacent to the area where the attack too place, is
described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that
it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent
crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of
its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated
in that same dreadful decade.
Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a
Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the
streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and
Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the
borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside.
Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out
between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London
Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the
Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new
generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little
piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.
The two men who butchered a British soldier are believed to be
Somalis. Last year it was reported that dozens of Muslims in the UK were
being trained to fight for Al Qaeda in Somalia. There were concerns over what
those men would do once they returned to the United Kingdom.
Al-Shabaab, the
local Al Qaeda franchise, subsists on tens of thousands of pounds from the
hundreds of thousands of Somali settlers living in the United Kingdom. In
2012, Al-Shabaab terrorists had threatened a terrorist attack against the UK,
saying, “The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound
to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined.”
That nightmare
still looms. It is the nightmare of the savage wars of the Muslim world being
exported to the United Kingdom.
Last year, Shabaaz
Hussain was sentenced to five years in jail in Woolwich Crown Court for his
fundraising activities on behalf of Al-Shabaab.
Five years earlier, Osama bin London and his followers had been sentenced at
that same court for the 21/7 plot which attempted to set off bombs in a
number of London Underground stations.
The majority of Bin London’s followers were African immigrants.
Ramzi Mohammed, a
Somali, turned to face a young mother with a baby in her stroller before
trying to detonate his bomb.
Muslim fighters
have torn Somalia apart. And importing 200,000 of them into the United
Kingdom is beginning to have the same effect. There are an estimated 70,000
Somalis in Greater London. That makes London the 12th largest city
in Somalia. Nearly 2 percent of Somalia now lives in the UK.
80 percent of
Somalis in the UK live in public housing. They have the lowest employment
rate of every immigrant group in the country. And within four years, they had
managed to rack up over ten thousand arrests. Every effort to integrate them
has failed. Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have
become little Mogadishus.
The Somalis are
not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms
of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts
of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all
these cases. This is a culture of violence.
Islam sanctifies
that culture of violence. It takes tribal killings and endows them with the
status of a religious duty. Jihad is simply gang warfare, no different than
the kind practiced by the Woolwich Manz, given theological meaning. Men have
been butchering other men with machetes throughout Africa. But when a Muslim
mutilates a British soldier with a machete, then he is engaging in a
religious ritual.
This is no clash
of civilizations because there is hardly anything resembling civilization on
the other side. Islam began with a gang raiding caravans. It now persists in
gangs raiding across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
What happened near
Woolwich Commons would not have been considered extraordinary in Afghanistan,
Somalia or Syria. It is only extraordinary because it has been a long time
since rampaging Vikings were disemboweling the locals. It is only
extraordinary because the nation is hobbled by the assumptions of
civilization. And one of those basic assumptions is that murderers with red
hands will not carry out beheadings in your streets.
The United Kingdom
has become a civilized place. Unfortunately its practice of importing savages
makes that civilization of climbing roses and social progress unsustainable.
If you import millions of people who follow a religion that sanctifies tribal
violence, then you must expect tribal violence to tear apart what you have
built. And if you do not wish that to happen, then you must close the gates
on the barbarians.
There is no need
to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not when they are already living in
London in public housing and screeching diatribes about the coming conquest
while treating themselves to all the luxuries of the welfare state. And as their
numbers grow, ignoring them will become impossible.
The butchers who
perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen. They wanted to break
through the media boycott to tell the peoples of the United Kingdom that they
were being murdered in the name of Islam. The story is already being met with
the usual cognitive dissonance and being swept under the rug, but that just
means that the next bunch will try even harder to convey the message that the
war is here.
The immediate
shift to focus on the backlash that is somehow never nearly as bad as the
thing it is lashing back at, the waves of meaningless condemnations from
Muslim leaders who say one thing at press conferences and another in their
mosques and the deployment of the sickening litany of "tiny minority of
extremists" rhetoric are all delaying tactics. But they can only delay
for so long.
Every Muslim country is either in a state of
oppression or a state of war. Does any European country that populates its
cities and towns with Muslims really believe that it can escape the
inevitable trajectory of this cultural history? The Arab Spring isn't only a
lesson in the futility of trying to combine popular elections with human
rights in the Middle East. Ir's a lesson in the hopelessness of expecting
those same failures to work any better when cultures that choose tyranny over
freedom migrate to the United Kingdom or the United States.
The only thing
standing between the United Kingdom and Somalia, Pakistan, Syria and a dozen
other charming places like these is another two decades of immigration. And
long before the irreversible demographic turning point is reached, life in
the new Cool Britain will be flavored with regional events like public
beheadings, honor killings and religious bombings.
There is no use in
proposing that the United Kingdom withdraw from Afghanistan only to come home
to another Afghanistan.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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