Britain continues to give free speech rights to terror supporters

According to the Scotsman, Tony Blair and the entire British political establishment, both Labor and Tory, are reacting to the London bombings not like George W. Bush, but like John Kerry, that is, they are treating the attacks as a crime at most, not as an act of war. So passive and pathetic are the British that they won’t even criminalize people who publicly call for terrorist acts.

And here, arriving in my e-mail at the same time, is an example of Britain’s continuing refusal to outlaw the advocacy of terror. A British-born Muslim who has previously promoted terrorist attacks in Britain continues to opine that such attacks, while not tactically wise, are morally ok. He is quoted in the paper saying these things, and nothing happens to him. In today’s Britain, publicly calling for terrorist mass murder of British people and the jihadist destruction of the country is as normal as criticizing the National Health.

Recently a reader characterized me as saying that the British, given their weak response to their terrorist enemies, “deserved” to targeted by terror. I replied that if the British failed to defend themselves, they were in fact opening themselves to attacks, not that they deserved it, which I thought would be wrong to say. On second thought I must amend that. A country that opens its doors to a mass immigraton of Muslims and then allows its Muslim residents and citizens freely to give moral sanction to a jihadist terrorist campaign against the country, a country that does not make such statements a crime, a country that does not put the persons who say such things in prison or strip them of their citizenship and deport them, that country does deserve to be attacked by terrorists.

A reader in England writes:

It’s actually worse than an act of inciting terror. It’s a case of actively recruiting people within the country to fight the country’s army in a war zone (Afghanistan—and this goes back four years, it didn’t begin with the attacks of July 7). That amounts to treason and the traditional punishment for treason was the death penalty.

It is astounding that people such as this Butt fellow can organise people to fight AGAINST British troops on behalf of an enemy and walk around in the country carefree. The equivalent would not be Lord Haw Haw but Lord Haw Haw going around the country and organizing people to fight against British troops and on behalf of Nazi Germany.

That such acts bring no fear of law in the minds of these fundamentalists tells us that the British are basically dead as a nation. A nation is a nation if it has a “spirit.” The British have no “spirit” left other than to wallow in self-congratulation over their magnificent Tolerance.

Leo Strauss once wrote that it was the permissiveness of the Weimar Republic that caused Nazis to gain power (even though the Nazis openly advocated destroying the Regime itself). We have something similar happening in Britain.

My reply:

Yes, and it’s so bad it drove me to say something I had never said before, that the English are not only opening themselves to terrorist attack, but deserve it. Their behavior is not a mere failure to take appropriate action against evil. It is an active cooperation with and surrender to evil.

The reader continues:

I believe there is also another thing to consider—and I have no way of measuring this. The British are not known for engaging in “bluster” politically—which is why they have no equivalent of Free Republic type blogs. But this does not mean automatically that there is no outrage within the country.

If we only follow the pronouncements of establishment politicians and the mainstream British media, then it would seem that the British seem to have been taken over by insanity. I believe this is true of a large section of the population. But, there is also, I think, a growing minority of people in the country who are getting very angry with what is happening. Unfortunately, the elections just concluded in May so we won’t have another election for four years (and so we cannot really measure the true extent of the outrage).

But I do believe that for many people these events are already a turning point in their political perception. And their numbers are probably growing. But, because of the fact that they think they are still a minority and because the county is still extremely tense, they have not come out openly.

A rough measure of the extent of the outrage would be a straw poll asking people if they would consider voting for the BNP. My guess is the numbers would show a significant jump from about a year ago. But we won’t hear about any outrage in the media except endless stories about the inherent “peacefulness” of Islam.

There is also a great tragedy here in that a party with a history that the BNP has would end up occupying all the space on the anti-jihadist right. But that is inevitable considering that Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats haven’t changed an iota in their pro-multiculturalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 31, 2005 11:13 AM | Send