timeimmortal

This is the question that bothers Peter Hitchens this week, and it’s a good one to reflect on given the recent confrontation with police had by Christian preachers Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, who were told by police officers that the area in which they were handing out literature was a Muslim community, that their evangelism was a “hate crime,” and that if they returned to the area ever again and were perchance beaten…well, they’d already been warned.

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

It comes amid growing concern over the development of Islamic ‘no-go areas’.

The preachers, Americans Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, are demanding an apology and compensation from West Midlands Police.

They say their treatment breaks the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religious expression.

The preachers, who have the backing of the Christian Institute pressure group, say they will take the force to court for breaching their human rights if they don’t receive an apology.

They have accused the officer, PCSO Naeem Naguthney, of behaving in an ‘aggressive and threatening’ manner. A complaint by their lawyers said he interrupted as they spoke to Muslim youths about their beliefs.

Mr Abraham, 65, who was born a Muslim in Egypt and is a convert to Christianity, said: ‘He told us we were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and that that was a hate crime.

‘He was very intimidating and it concerns me that somebody holding his views can become a police officer, albeit at PCSO level.’

Mr Cunningham, 48, a fellow American Baptist missionary, said: ‘He realised we were Americans and then started ranting at us about George Bush and American foreign policy.

‘He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said he was going to take us to the police station.’

At any rate, Peter Hitchens — the sane Hitchens brother, mind — muses thusly:

Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born and raised in Muslim Pakistan, to remind us that, as he put it, ‘the beliefs, values and virtues of Great Britain have been formed by the Christian faith’?

Just as important, why did we have to wait for him to urge us to do something about restoring that faith before we either sink into a yelling chaos of knives, fists and boots, or swoon into the strong, implacable arms of Islam?

Most of our homegrown prelates are more interested in homosexuality or in spreading doubt about the gospel or urging the adoption of Sharia law.

Then again, why did it take the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to explain to us that our parliamentary system was the best guarantee of liberty in the world and to remind us of the courage and valour of our people in war?

This is not what British leaders say or even think, not least because they are busy pulling the constitution to pieces.

It is not what our children are taught in schools.

In fact, any expression of national pride is viewed with suspicion by the state, by the education system and above all by the BBC.

It was not always so. Half a century ago, we had churchmen, broadcasters, academics and military men who thought it normal to love their own country, normal to support the Christian faith which made us what we are, and were willing to defend it.

The question of what happened in the years between is one of the most interesting in history.

I suggest reading the whole thing — it isn’t terribly long, but is a good summation of just what has gone wrong with modern Britain.

There was a time when the British had the gumption and courage to stand up to all manner of menaces, internal and foreign alike, and when the British people took pride in their nation. Those days would seem to have expired, as Britain sinks more and more into two separate chasms: that of rampant, primitive and violent Islam in its immigrant communities, and that of demoralized, nihilistic secularism everywhere else. And the latter does not have the desire, strength, or courage to resist the advance of the former.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The venerable Mark Steyn has not been overly kind to Tony Blair or the government of the United Kingdom in recent weeks, since the bombings early in July. And it’s not a stretch to say that there’s good reason for that — how serious can a nation be in its denunciations of terrorism when that same nation does not come down like God’s Holy Wrath on the mayor of a certain large English city (which we will call “London“) who entertains and allows to speak in a public forum a radical Muslim imam who openly supports the terrorists and their agenda?

Not serious at all, right?

Steyn, and others, have also observed (again rightly) that many Western governments seem in many respects paralyzed by, or wilfully blind to, the terrorist threat. Consider:

It’s not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there’s a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they’re the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

There’s something to this order of things, really. When you consider that in Leedsyou can buy jihadist video games in which you too can slaughter the infidel and become a holy martyr, or when you consider the blatantly foolish edicts coming out of English police adminstration — remove your shoes when storming the house of a suspected Islamist terrorist, out of respect, are you at all surprised that (much!) less than a week after the initial bombings in which over 50 people died, there were more attempts that the police didn’t catch?

Yet the bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight - pests in a street full of pests, in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where the Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he’s a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of “militants”, even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the corporation’s own Tube station at .

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

And as various quarters sound in with talk of a backlash against Muslims in Britain, which to my knowledge is still pending, radical imams continue to denounce Western governments, including the British government under which they live and which they ostensibly claim legal protection (and, in the case of some of the bombers, publically funded fiscal support) from, and you can still buy those damn games in Leeds. But everywhere, the spirit of appeasement seems alive and well.

Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it: “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.”

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 09, 2005

It’s not unreasonable to expect Tony Blair, and indeed all Western governments, to take measures, however drastic, to protect their respective populations from harm. That’s one of the reasons the government is there, right?

Tony Blair talks a good talk, explaining the rationale for war far better than President Bush. But he now needs not just to talk but to act. In France, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has just expelled another dozen Islamists. By contrast, Mr Blair seems paralysed. In the weeks after 9/11, Mr Bush rethought 40 years of US policy in the Middle East. The Prime Minister has a more difficult task: he has to rethink 40 years of British policy in Leicester and Bradford and Leeds and Birmingham.

Taken from: The Daily Telegraph, August 02, 2005

So it is encouraging to see things like this coming out:

British prosecutors said yesterday they would consider treason charges against any Islamic extremists who express support for Terrorism.

Taken from: The Vancouver Province, August 08, 2005

Islamic extremists who incite violence or praise suicide attacks in Britain could face charges of treason, it emerged Sunday.

Taken from: Victoria Times Colonist, August 08, 2005

And hopefully, there is less to this article than there seems to be:

Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist drive was in disarray Monday after rapidly retreating from threats to invoke treason laws against extremists.

Taken from: The Windsor Star, August 09, 2005

One of the key strengths of the American, and to an equal degree the Austrailian, counter-terrorism initiatives, and indeed their relief initiatives related to the Indian Ocean tsumani, was and is quick, decisive action that they committed to and stuck to. This same quick-minded and unflappable determination has been seen in a number of smaller applications as recently as a week ago, when in ninety seconds flat, 309 people were able to evacuate from a burning airplane that skidded off the runway at Pearson Airport in Toronto — from a plane crash that was rated as “low survivability”, not one fatality was suffered. Nations need to work on the same principle when dealing with the terrorist threat — act quickly, decisively, and take care of the problem. If that means detaining imams that advocate for and profess support and praise for bombings, so be it. If that means profiling, so be it. If that means “no fly” lists, so be it. If that means, Heaven forbid, stricter immigration laws, or even temporarily suspending immigration, so be it. How many more Londoners, Iraqis, Americans, and Spaniards need to get blown up before people get this through their skulls?