By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, March 25, 2017
It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being
nothing if not careful. In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent
scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt,“Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not
sooner.
Listen carefully. He did not say that Muslims will be the
majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis
said “Europe will be Islamic.”
We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking
about Islam. Lots of individual
Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam’s aim is to
prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis’s foreboding has been brought to the
fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London.
As we go to press, five innocent people are dead after
Khalid Masood, a terrorist acting on unambiguous scriptural commands to war
against non-Muslims, rammed his rental Hyundai SUV into dozens of pedestrians
on Westminster Bridge, many of them tourists taking in the iconic views of
Parliament. About 50 people suffered injuries, some of them grave, so the death
toll may yet rise.
Masood, a burly 52-year-old weightlifter with a long
criminal record that included vicious stabbings, then crashed the car through
the gate at Westminster Palace, home of the West’s most venerable democratic
legislature. He alighted brandishing two long knives, which he used to kill
Keith Palmer, a police officer who, pursuant to British policy, was unarmed
despite being assigned to provide security at one of the world’s foremost
terror targets. Masood was finally shot dead by a protection officer attached
to England’s defense minister.
There immediately began the ritual media pondering over
Masood’s motive. Yes, what could it possibly have been?
I’m going to stick with the patently obvious.
Masood was born as Adrian Russell Ajao on Christmas Day,
1964, in Kent county, just outside London. His 17-year-old single mother
remarried two years later, and he was known as Adrian Elms (his stepfather’s
surname) until converting to Islam when he was about 40. Prior to that point,
while fathering three children with his wife, he had several arrests, some for
violent attacks. During at least one of the resulting stints in prison, like many
inmates, he began indoctrination into Islam.
Between 2004 and 2005 came the critical transition: the
formal conversion, marriage to a Muslim woman, and relocation to Saudi Arabia
(you know, be our “ally” against terrorism). For five years, Masood was immersed
in the kingdom’s Wahhabism — fundamentalist Islam rooted in scriptural
literalism. He became an English language-teacher working for the Saudi
government.
Masood returned to England from Jeddah about seven years
ago. By the time of Wednesday’s attack on Westminster Bridge, he had seamlessly
gravitated to Birmingham, a city increasingly enveloped by sharia enclaves
that, to varying degrees, have become “no-go zones” for non-Muslims and agents
of the state, including police.
There is diversity in Islam, including millions of
Muslims who adhere only to its spiritual elements or see themselves as more
culturally than doctrinally Islamic. But when we speak of Islam, as opposed to Muslims, we are not speaking about a mere
religious belief system. We are talking about a competing civilization — that
is very much how Islam self-identifies. It has its own history, principles,
values, mores, and legal system.
Islam, thus understood, is not non-Western. It is anti-Western.
Like the conversion of Masood, the conversion of
Birmingham has been a function of this defining Islamic attribute. Individual
Muslims may assimilate, but Islam
doesn’t do assimilation. Islam does not melt into your melting pot. Islam, as
Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna proclaimed, is content with nothing
less than political, cultural, and civilizational dominance.
As Soeren Kern relates in a comprehensive Gatestone
Institute report on Islam in Britain, the metamorphosis of Birmingham, along
with several other U.K. population centers, signifies this resistance. When the
Islamic presence in a Western community reaches a critical mass, Islam’s
hostility to Western mores and demands for sharia governance result in
non-Muslim flight. Marriages between Muslims resident in the Western community
and Muslims overseas tend to result in childbirth rates and household growth
that dwarfs that of the indigenous population. Arranged, intra-familial, and polygamous
marriages, endorsed by Islamic mores, drastically alter the fabric of
communities in short order. Birmingham, in particular, has been ground zero of
“Operation Trojan Horse,” a sharia-supremacist scheme to Islamize the public
schools.
Kern repeats an account of life in “inner-city
Birmingham” by the wife of a British clergyman, first published by Standpoint in 2011. She explained how
the neighborhood in which she’d lived for four years had become a “police no-go
zone,” in which the large number of newly arrived Somali immigrants now
approached that of Pakistanis already resident. Then she recalled her husband’s
encounter with an immigrant who had just arrived from Belgium — on an EU
passport, like an increasing number of Muslims these days. The migrant was
surprised when the clergyman asked why he had chosen to move into their
neighborhood. Finally, he replied, “Everybody knows. Birmingham—best place in
Europe to be pure Muslim.”
The memory moved the clergyman’s wife to a salient
insight:
Well, there must be many places in
Europe where Muslims are entirely free to practice their faith, but I suspect
there are few places in which they can have so little contact with the civic
and legal structure of a Western state if they choose.
To a London reader, born and bred
with multiculturalism, I know that my stories may come across as outlandish and
exaggerated. . . . When I recently told a friend how a large Taliban flag
fluttered gaily on a house near St Andrew’s football stadium for some months,
her cry of “Can’t you tell the police?” made me reflect how far many of our
inner cities have been abandoned by our key workers: our doctors and nurses
drive in from afar, the police, as mentioned before, have shut down their
stations and never venture in unless in extremis — they and ambulance crews
have been known to be attacked — even the local imam lives in a leafier area.
It is in that milieu that Khalid Masood made his
decision, rented an SUV, and drove to Westminster Bridge.
Naturally, the Islamic State terror network (ISIS) took
credit for the atrocity, as it has been wont to do since issuing its plea that
Muslims conduct attacks “in place” — i.e., against the Western societies where
they live. Western leaders have been content to accept these claims, at least
as inspirational, if not operational. It is easier to indulge the fiction that
ISIS catalyzes jihadism then to ask what catalyzed ISIS.
But the remorseless fact is that before ISIS and al-Qaeda
and the Khomeini revolution and Hezbollah and the Blind Sheikh and the
Brotherhood and Khalid Masood, there was the single thing that unites them all.
There was Islam.
Western political and opinion elites remain willfully
blind to this. They cannot help but project onto Islamic beliefs and practices
their own progressive pieties — which take seriously neither religion nor the
notion that there is any civilization but their own.
In their minds, and therefore ingrained in the media’s
coverage, is the notion that a Muslim community is just like any other
community. Same with the mosque — it is just a “house of worship,” no different
from a church, a safe harbor from worldly concerns and hostilities. Islam,
however, does not separate mosque from state; the mosque is every bit as much a
center for sharia indoctrination, assimilation resistance, and anti-Western
politics as it is a prayer venue. That is why al-Banna regarded the mosque and
the Islamic community center commonly attached to it as the “axis” of the
“movement” in every community where Islam takes hold.
The movement does not want cohabitation. It wants
conquest. It starts with assimilation-resistant enclaves that nurture sharia
supremacism today and thereby breed the jihadists of tomorrow. This week, it
took the campaign to Westminster Bridge.
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