May 16, 2007
Why Londonistan?
Christopher Hitchens examines how his childhood home in England has become a breeding ground for sharia, jihad and Jew hatred.
The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi.
The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.
Surprising no one, Hitchens finds that the multi-culti left has a hard time dealing with the reality of what has been happening in the liberal heart of the nation. Sure to discomfit sensitive, tolerant, We-Are-The-World types, Hitchens also tells us where to find the source of the poison: in the mosques.
Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority.
And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States.
My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain's Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet).
And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and "deficient" women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed.
"You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically," as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it.
This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad's youngest spouse.
Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse.
It's not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles's friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia.
According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan," and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity.
It's a sobering read. And don't miss the Q&A with the author when you're done.
He's not exactly a supporter of Israel (that's dry, understated humor, if you can hear me), but he does have an interesting take on the need for surveillance by the police.
Vanity Fair: From your story this month, I get the feeling you think extremists such as Abu Hamza, the former Finsbury Park Mosque imam, should not go unnoticed. Would you eavesdrop on suspected extremists in Britain?
Hitchens: You don't have to eavesdrop on someone who gets up in public and says, "Kill the Jews."
VF: True—
CH: Someone who's bellowing racism and malice through a megaphone, I don't need to tap his fucking phone.
VF: But you might want to tap the phone of the people who are listening to him.
CH: If the Metropolitan Police are not listening to his phone and the phones of people like him, then they should be impeached and removed from office. I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting that warrant.
Like I said, interesting.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 16, 2007 10:31 PM
| TrackBack