I watched the BBC’s “The New Al-Qaeda: jihad.com” programme last night, and was suitably appalled at the repellent Mohammed Al-Massari, who hosted a website from his London home specialising in videos of infidels being blown up and beheaded, as propaganda for the recruitment of young Muslims to the jihadist cause. Similarly Babar Ahmad, the young IT expert from Imperial College currently fighting extradition to the US and using all the liberal legal traditions of this country which, it’s pretty clear, he’s spent most of his recent life planning to destroy.
When people talk about Londonistan, I’ve always had a sense of pride about the openness of this country, and our tradition of harbouring dissenters, but of course, as we’ve now learned and should have realised years ago, it can’t go on. The French, despite the fact that their Muslim population is the largest in Europe, and has more reason, economically and socially, to feel alienated from their host society, seem to have got some things right:
The French Government clamped down on radical Islam in a way that no other country has. No mosque or Islamic prayer hall is off limits to police. Imams preaching hate are regularly deported. France stopped giving asylum to Islamic extremists wanted in their home country, and was disgusted when many of them were given refuge in Britain. As a result of France’s draconian anti- terror laws, the country is thought to be comparatively free of terrorist networks.
I’m curious as to the response to the BBC programme. Currently the relevant have-your-say page hasn’t been updated. “There have been a large number of e-mail comments about the programme. This page will be updated shortly. The e-mails published will reflect the balance of opinion received.”
What stuck with me was the classic BBC twist at the end, when Mike Sheuer, former head of the CIA Bin Laden unit (at least I believe it was him), was allowed the final comment – the thought that we would be taking to bed with us – which was to the effect that there could be no solution to the problem as long as our governments didn’t tell people the truth, and lied to them about how these terrorists hated us for what we were and wanted to destroy our liberal societies. No, it was our policies which were the problem. Eh? Without wishing to discount the effect of US and British foreign policy, I thought the previous hour had pointed in exactly the opposite direction.
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