The headline above violates just about every rule of political correctness. And you should know that the mayor of London totally opposes its sentiment: He is, after all, one of the primary forces behind the proposal that a 17-acre mosque complex—the largest outside of the Middle East—be built for 70,000 Muslims in London. His intention is to provide an Islamic quarter for the 2012 Olympic Games—one that will hold only 10,000 fewer people than the Olympic stadium itself.
Consider the mayor’s view carefully because no one has shown more understanding of the Islamic cause than he: Mayor Ken Livingstone has publicly embraced the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who openly supports suicide bombings in Iraq. Once a supporter of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, the mayor now backs the Palestinian cause and has identified Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. Livingstone has expressed his concern with calling Muslim suicide bombers terrorists: “If a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate,” he said at a press conference in July 2005. “But for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think, I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist.” He maintains that the Islamists “only have their bodies to use as weapons.” That, and whatever explosives are strapped to them.
Perhaps the mayor of London is not the best backer for this project after all.
Look also at the mega-mosque’s Muslim backers: an Islamic missionary group called Tablighi Jamaat. The fbi identifies it as a recruiting ground for al Qaeda. Two of the bombers on 7/7 were associated with Tablighi Jamaat, as was shoe bomber Richard Reid. Counterintelligence officer Alex Alexiev calls Tablighi Jamaat “the first step on the road to extremism.” Is allowing a terrorist-backing organization to build a fortress in London intended for use during the Olympic games such a super idea?
Put another way: What are the British thinking? The signs that radical Islam is out of control in Britain are not subtle. In a poll last year, nearly a quarter of Muslims living in Britain said they felt the July 7, 2005, London terrorist attacks were justified. The estimated Muslim population in Britain is 1.6 million people (not accounting for a widespread illegal immigration problem), which amounts to nearly 400,000 Muslims living in Britain with sympathies toward those who indiscriminately set off bombs.
A major mosque in London has sold copies of a dvd that prophesies “mass extermination of Jews around the world on a ‘day of judgment’ and attacks Christian groups,” according to Arutz Sheva (January 12). London has become an epicenter for radicalized anti-West thinking.
What Mayor Livingstone is offering is a symbol—a symbol that Islamist thinking has taken permanent root in British culture. A mosque isn’t the same as a bomb in the subway, but the same groups that recognize the effectiveness of terror recognize the value of a 17-acre symbol of Islam in the heart of London. But opposition among non-Muslims is feeble. Right now the British are involved in a great debate over how deeply involved they should be in the “war on terror.” Britain is barely able to maintain its determination to oppose active terrorism. How much effort will Britain exert to stop a mere symbol?
Even as Mayor Livingstone and his ilk preach tolerance of Islam in Britain, they seem oblivious to the lack of reciprocation in Islamic countries. If the Church of England tried to build a cathedral, even one the size of a snow-cone stand, in Saudi Arabia, it would quickly discover how one-sided Britain’s tolerance is. There are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia; in stark contrast, there are 300 mosques and 500 madrassahs in London alone. In Britain, multiculturalism is official doctrine, and citizens are bullied into investing their faith in it with no explanation for how it truly benefits Britons or strengthens the state, and much evidence to suggest exactly the opposite effect.
Britain has been hamstrung by political correctness, an entrenched belief that whatever the minority does is justified by virtue of its having been supposedly oppressed by the majority. In this case, that means tolerating this particular minority’s goal to live within Britain’s borders but not under its laws and, ultimately, to wipe out the British majority’s way of life.
This delusional reaction to predatory Islam is a sickness, a homegrown infection that was prophesied over 2,700 years ago. For more information on the cause of that illness and where this situation is headed, please read “The Sickness in Britain’s Heart” in the November-December 2006 issue of the Philadelphia Trumpet.