The American Spectator

br> Some of the moderate Muslim leaders told Miss Kelly that important days in Ramadan and Eid-ul-Adha should be made public holidays for Muslims. Some (not all) the Muslim leaders attending also said Sharia law should also be introduced in Britain. While this specifies stonings and amputations as criminal punishments, Dr Pasha said moderately that he wanted it only for family, not criminal, law.

“We are willing to co-operate but there should be a partnership,” Dr Pasha was quoted as saying. “They should understand our problems then (sic) we will understand their problems.”

There was apparently no suggestion that countries like Saudi Arabia should in return publicly recognize and celebrate Christian festivals and holidays, or that Westerners or Christians in Islamic countries should be given their own courts too.

A statement by three Muslim MPs, three peers, and 38 community groups said the alleged “debacle” of Iraq, combined with the recent failure to do more to bring about an immediate end to the Middle East conflict — presumably a reference to the Israel-Hezbollah fighting — had encouraged Muslim extremists in Britain.

In another development, Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, has blamed racial profiling at airports for adding to tensions and Muslim resentment — this at a time when, according to the Telegraph, British police are involved in more than 70 anti-terrorist investigations involving more than 100 suspected Islamic extremists.

Let us step back and consider briefly what Britain has apparently done in the way of foreign policy to earn the homicidal, suicidal hatred of so many Moslems who have been born in Britain and lived their lives with the protection, benefits, and opportunities it has provided.

Well, Britain has supported the U.S. in Iraq in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a ruthless, aggressive dictator who threatened to destabilize the whole region. Since then it has, like the U.S., spent lives and treasure keeping the peace and preventing or attempting to prevent massacres and genocide between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and in trying to build a more normal civil society. Many Iraqis have expressed very emphatic thanks.

It has likewise supported the U.S. in Afghanistan in overthrowing the Taliban, a medievalist regime, utterly intolerant of the rights of women, minorities and other religions, which sheltered the most dangerous terrorist movement on Earth, and again it has supported the U.S. in trying to build a more normal civil society there.

In regard to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah the case against Tony Blair is apparently along the lines that he has not denounced or denied Israel’s right to defend itself against enemies bent on its annihilation (though many of his party and government have).

Supporting the U.S. is, apart from other considerations, a legitimate and indeed vital British diplomatic objective in itself. Looked at in even the most cynical light, Britain’s support for the U.S. can be seen as an insurance payment for its own security (Britain won the Falklands War only because of U.S. help, which was given even though the U.S. paid a heavy diplomatic price in alienating Argentina and other Latin American countries). Britain is also acting in no more than its legitimate national interest if it is trying to safeguard oil supplies.

Whether or not any of these actions and objectives are mistaken or impractical or badly carried out (I have been very critical of many aspects of the Blair Government’s policies) is here beside the point: they are decisions made by Britain as an independent and democratic sovereign state. In any event, Islamic terrorism against the West and the Anglosphere was well under way before these particular foreign-policy initiatives were embarked on. The U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, did not provoke 9/11 but resulted from it. Muslim terrorist leaders at other times and places have frequently made pronouncements along the lines that the West will be destroyed not for anything in particular that it does but for what it is.

Nor is the point whether these spokesmen for moderate Islam are acting as advocates of Western capitulation or are truly and objectively setting out the facts as they see them. I have no doubt many Muslim leaders are genuinely horrified by what is happening, want to find ways to stop it, and are giving the best advice they know.

No, the real point is that they — or at least many of them — claim or imply that the only way to stop Islamic terrorism in Britain is for Britain to very largely surrender, to abandon its friends and allies and those who share its values and share a willingness to defend them, and to move a long way towards becoming a quasi-Islamic State, allowing its policies to be determined by threat.

One might think of the lines of ‘Allo! ‘Allo! regarding the cafe owner in occupied France and the German garrison commander: “We have a good working relationship.” “Yes, you do what he says and in return he doesn’t shoot you.”