Mark’s column this weekend is on the mulish and all too familiar refusal of the West (in this case, Britain) to grapple with the unyielding fact that barbaric attacks (in this case, the savage murder of Lee Rigby on Wellington Street in Woolwich) are driven by an ideology rooted in Islamic scripture. I discuss some of these scriptures, cited by Rigby’s brazen jihadist killers, in my own column about President Obama’s national security speech this week — particularly, about the president’s willful blindness to Islamic supremacist ideology.
As part of his conclusion, Mark observes:
One in ten Britons under 25 is now Muslim. That number will increase, through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those of the Woolwich killers, British-born and -bred. Metternich liked to say the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in southeast Vienna. Today, the Dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London. . . .
Exactly right. It is worth emphasizing how this is happening. The West’s cravenness has invited an aggressive immigration strategy the Muslim Brotherhood and their fellow Islamic supremacists designed specifically for non-Islamic societies that won’t defend themselves (as in, have decided they are not worth defending). I described it in an essay on the Boston Marathon bombers — the Tsarnaev brothers – for the May 20 issue of NR:
The strategy has been called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is to provide Muslim immigrants in the West — particularly, energetic young Muslims like the Tsarnaevs — with cultural, psychological, and even physical insulation from Western mores, traditions, and institutions. It was the bedrock of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s framework for ground-up revolution. In every city and town, the Egyptian academic taught, Muslim leaders must establish a mosque-cum-community center. These, he explained, would become “the axis of our movement,” serving as the “House of Dawa” — that is, of Islam’s particularly aggressive form of proselytism — and providing “the base for our rise . . . to educate us, prepare us, and supply our battalions.”
It is working. A friend reminds me of an excellent analysis of “no-go zones” across Europe by Soeren Kern for the Gatestone Institute. Here’s the part about Britain (and note that it was written almost two years ago — and the strategy has only picked up steam since then):
Islamic extremists are stepping up the creation of “no-go” areas in European cities that are off-limits to non-Muslims.
Many of the “no-go” zones function as microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law. Host-country authorities effectively have lost control in these areas and in many instances are unable to provide even basic public aid such as police, fire fighting and ambulance services.
The “no-go” areas are the by-product of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.
In Britain, for example, a Muslim group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.
The Islamic Emirates Project names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.
In the Tower Hamlets area of East London (also known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets), for example, extremist Muslim preachers, called the Tower Hamlets Taliban, regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with posters declaring “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced.” And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.
In the Bury Park area of Luton, Muslims have been accused of “ethnic cleansing” by harassing non-Muslims to the point that many of them move out of Muslim neighborhoods. In the West Midlands, two Christian preachers have been accused of “hate crimes” for handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. In Leytonstone in east London, the Muslim extremist Abu Izzadeen heckled the former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area.”
These enclaves are not just swelling concentrations of resistance to assimilation. They help fortify the resolve of the “battalions” of violent jihadists.