Muslims who for one reason or another fall foul of the law in a Western society almost invariably claim to have been tortured. It’s standard procedure. I first came across it in Israeli military courts, where healthy PLO prisoners with broad smiles tried to explain why there wasn’t a mark on them when they’d just been hung by the wrists for twenty-four hours, or something equally physical.
The British government has fallen for it. It is paying out a million or more pounds to each of a dozen Islamists who say they were tortured in Guantanamo. As far as can be seen, there is no corroboration and not even checking of their stories. We, the public, are supposed to take it on trust. None of these men are in any real sense British, with among them an Iraqi, a Libyan, a Jordanian, and a Moroccan. Several were in the country illegally. On the face of it, all were Islamist terrorists, usually with direct connection to al-Qaeda.
No British person could expect to receive a tax-free cheque for a million pounds for honest work. A soldier who has lost a limb in Afghanistan will receive annual compensation of £8,780, not enough to live off. Insane pursuit of human rights has thus reversed the roles of the criminal and the victim. Nobody in public life seems prepared to address this monstrosity, and so the resentment it arouses is suppressed. One commentator, the spirited Douglas Murray, inescapably draws the conclusion that a society that behaves like this does not want to survive.
At the same time, the thirteen-year-old Darius Gill wrote on Facebook a Remembrance Day tribute to fallen British soldiers. He was a pupil in a school in Coventry where two-thirds of students are Muslim. A gang of Muslim boys his own age at once threatened to kill him, promising to “slit your throat so when you scream, only blood comes out.” They celebrate British deaths in Afghanistan. No prizes for guessing the consequences: The Muslim terror-juveniles have been suspended pending inquiries, but Darius has been removed from the school to keep him safe.
Also at the same time, the BBC announces that it no longer intends to show a three-part series, Murder in Beirut, about the death of the Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri when a bomb blew up the car he was traveling in. Either Syria or the Iranian proxy Hizbollah was responsible. A United Nations tribunal is about to report its findings, and Hizbollah is making it plain that it will go to any lengths to reject blame, if necessary overthrowing the Lebanese government of Saad Hariri, unhappily standing in for his father Rafiq. When a Hizbollah newspaper took the obvious propaganda step of attacking the BBC series before it was shown, the BBC instantly collapsed. So we have reached a stage when Islamist terrorists control what we may and may not see, in effect exercising the kind of lock on public opinion that they enjoy in their own Muslim society and which perpetuates violence.
Douglas Murray’s pessimistic conclusion can be taken further. The growing body of evidence shows that Britain won’t survive in the long run because it doesn’t deserve to.