Posted on 07/07/2005 10:59:24 AM PDT by SJackson
The mainstreaming of anti-Semitism and demonization of Israel is felt most acutely, however, in the public culture of the capital city of London. In the past decade, the United Kingdom’s undisputed political, economic, and cultural center has also become a major world center of political Islam and anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American activism.
Through its Arabic-language newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, not to mention its flourishing network of bookshops, mosques, and community centers, radical Islam has taken full advantage of what British democracy has to offer for its anti-Western goals, reaping the benefits of London’s significance as a hub of global finance, electronic media, and mass communications technology.
The effect of this with regard to anti-Semitism and virulent anti-Zionism has therefore been quite different from that found elsewhere in Europe: Although Britain’s Muslim population of about 1.5 million is only a quarter of that of France, the growing influence of London’s Muslims has given the most inflammatory of ideas a greater legitimacy in the capital’s political and cultural discourse than they enjoy virtually anywhere else.
Much of this energy has been directed at mobilizing Muslims to fight against Israel and America. The impassioned calls of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a leading Muslim cleric in London, to “celebrate” the September 11 attacks as a great moment in history and recruit Muslim youth for “holy war” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, have struck an emotional chord in the Muslim ghettos.
This is less surprising when one recalls that 40 percent of British Muslims surveyed in a Sunday Times poll after 9-11 believed Osama bin Laden was “justified” in his war against America. They even supported those of their coreligionists from Britain who volunteered to fight with the Taliban against the Western allies.
'Filthy Jews'
At the same time, Islamists like Al-Muhajiroun (“the Exiles”) spokesman Anjem Choudary regard Britain and the West as mere pawns, controlled by the “Zionists.” Israel is invariably portrayed as a “cancer in the heart of the Muslim world” to be eliminated only by radical surgery.
Sheikh Bakri himself has warned Jews in Britain to avoid any support for Israel lest they “become targets for Muslims.”
Al-Muhajiroun combines calls for “the black flag of Islam to fly over Downing Street” with demands for the liberation of Palestine and the Jihadist demand to “de-Judaize the West.”
This highly inflammable cocktail embracing Palestine, jihad, the dream of a worldwide caliphate, Koranic indoctrination, and classical Judeophobia, was exposed by the Old Bailey trial of Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, in February 2003.
The cleric, a Jamaican convert to Islam educated in Saudi Arabia, was found guilty of inciting to murder and racial hatred on the basis of his lectures and videocassettes - some of them on sale at specialty bookshops in Britain - and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Overwhelming evidence was produced at the trial to demonstrate his encouragement for a violent jihad to kill non-believers. Particular venom was reserved for the “filthy Jews.” In a spine-chilling speech which seemed to anticipate the May 2003 suicide mission of Hanif to Tel Aviv, el-Faisal ranted:
People with British passports, if you fly into Israel it is easy…. Fly into Israel and do whatever you can. If you die, you are up in Paradise. How do you fight a Jew? You kill a Jew.
Mayor compares Jewish reporter to Nazi camp guard
Such sentiments have long ceased to be limited to Muslim self-expression; the politics of London have begun to internalize the discourse of hate. In February of this year, the city’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, angrily compared a Jewish reporter for the Evening Standard to a concentration camp guard.
Instead of later apologizing, Livingstone criticized the reporter’s employer for what he said was its history of racism, scare-mongering, and, oddly enough, anti-Semitism.
Shortly thereafter, Livingstone published a piece in the Guardian claiming that Ariel Sharon “is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office,” adding that “Israel’s own expansion has included ethnic cleansing.”
Subsequently, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, responding to Jewish critics of the mayor, published an article on its web site entitled “Zionists Want Their Pound of Flesh.”
Given the legitimacy that such rhetoric enjoys in Britain today, it should not surprise us to discover the emergence of efforts among the intellectual elites to convert their rhetoric of hate into action - principally through the boycotting of Jewish and Israeli products and people.
It is these which have turned the public atmosphere in Britain into perhaps the most uncomfortable for Jews in all of Europe.
Excerpted from an article in the upcoming edition of Azure , published by Shalem Center, Jerusalem
Robert S. Wistrich holds the Neuberger Chair in Modern European History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is director of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism
I'd say the solution is Airbus.
I think the article you are referencing referred to Sweden?
BTTT! ...good post. We in the USA need to know.
TELL US ANOTHER LIE, YOU BARBARIC, UNCIVILIZED, MURDERING MOHAMMEDAN SCUM!!!
Maybe if you keep repeating the lie about islime being "a religion of peace" often enough, we'll believe it.....
IF WE CAN EVER FORGET ALL THE BOMBS YOU'VE DETONATED AND PEOPLE YOU'VE SLAUGHTERED TO SHOW US HOW PEACEFUL YOU ARE!!!
BURN IN HELL, YOU MOHAMMEDAN BA$TARDS!!!
Yeah, Britain, like most of Europe, is well along the way to self-destruction (not that America is very far behind, either). Their out-of-control immigration policies let in all these suicide bombers and throat-cutter types. They should never have allowed immigration from the Muslim lands, just as we should not have. If they were not allowed in, it would make it extremely difficult to pull off the sort of thing they did today in London. However, the elitist leaders choose political correctness over the safety of their own people.
Sadly, I think the British no longer have the backbone to resist. I saw a man just off the London sub on TV this morning give his experience in the blast. His bottom line: The terrorists are to be pitied! His reaction was not that the terrorists should be despised. It was not to retaliate by bombing the neighborhoods where the terrorists were breeded, raised, and had their minds poisoned. But pitied!
Until deportations are initiated and immigration from militant countries halted altogether, there will be no safety in any western country, not even with totalitarian measures imposed on their law-abiding citizens.
Though this is hardly from an unbiased source, I don't deny the truth in these words.
If these crazies are planning, and plotting, attacks against innocents...they should be brought to justice.
I think we agree there.
By the way, can I "help" with the mosque problem? (see tagline)
For the same reasons why crazies advocating that "W" is the antichrist are allowed to remain in ours.
Why Dick Durbin is still in the Senate.
"Free Speech" has it's pluses and minuses. This is definitely a minus.
Until they commit a crime...hard to do anything against them. Now, if we made such thing a crime...then I'd be thrown in jail for all my rants against islamofacists, Nancy Pelosi, and the democratic party...you know?
Brick Top: You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.
Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?
Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".
You are right that silence is consent. These acts should be condemned by Muslims aeound the world, but I'm afraid that it will carry only so much weight. Any observer has probably realized that it's not what the Muslim says (taquiah) but what he does that counts.
There are several problems with treating Muslim terrorism as a criminal act instead of an act of war. 1) The issue becomes a political football. 2)Suddenly these hyper-protected politically correct terrorists are covered by all kinds of legal and civil rights. 3)Protecting the nation and the people becomes reactive rather than proactive.
I have no problem with treating the "terrorists" as war criminals...and pursuing "them" through military means, but we can't just go around jailing every muslim that spews some volatile rhetoric.
I realize it may be hard to draw a distinction, and where it is...I say err on the side of caution then, but....we need to be careful in defending liberty, so we don't sacrifice what we're defending IMHO.
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