On Planet Appeasement

By Melanie Phillips
MelaniePhillips.com
July 9, 2007

Further to my post below about the way in which the Muslim Council of Britain is trying to worm its way back into government favour by re-calibrating its language to sound more robust against the jihad on the west (despite an unfortunate lapse of concentration when its deputy general secretary, Daud Abdullah, when asked whether Muslim extremists might be behind the attacks, replied: ‘Let’s not create a hypothetical problem…it can be the work of Muslims, Christians, Jews or Buddhists’), word reaches me that there are people in the government now who want it to succeed and are simply ignoring its Islamist agenda. The two Cabinet ministers who are pushing for readmitting the MCB back into the fold are apparently Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, and John Denham, the Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Straw, whose Blackburn constituency contains the largest proportion of Muslims in the UK, has long been regarded as a captive of Muslim interests — never more dangerously so than while he was Foreign Secretary, when he was thought to seek approval from his community’s religious elders in Pakistan in order to secure support back in Blackburn (quite why it was nevertheless Straw who sparked last autumn’s debate on the niqab by suggesting that his constituents might remove it when coming to speak to him remains a mystery).

In 2002, Straw blamed many of the world’s problems on the legacy of British imperialism. In September 2005, he told the United Nations General Assembly that Muslims had given the world mathematics and the digital age, and that only ‘terrorists and the preachers of hate’ wanted people to believe ‘that Islam and the West are fundamentally different’. Theirs was a ‘philosophy of mistrust and despair’, which he rejected, but young and talented Muslims had been disillusioned by poor economic prospects and stunted political freedoms.

John Denham’s record on all this is, if anything, even more troubling. A former widely respected chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, he resigned from Tony Blair’s government over the Iraq war. Much more alarmingly, he believes that grievances against British foreign policy are why British Muslims turn themselves into human bombs, and that the way to stop such radicalisation is therefore for Britain to change its foreign policy. As I wrote in my book Londonistan, Denham told the Spectator in 2005 that after 7/7 he effectively blamed Britain for the atrocities. The alienation of young British Muslims, he said, was the government’s fault for failing to give the

issues and concerns raised within the Muslim community any priority till after the London bombings.

These issues and concerns were Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya. Startlingly, Denham suggested that foreign policy should now take into account the possible risk to British security:

We need to recognise that some foreign policy has now a very direct impact on domestic policy. And we may well need to give [these things] higher priority and more energy, and indeed be prepared to change the emphasis of our foreign policy in order to safeguard our own security… It is no exaggeration to say that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of foreign policy — it is a matter for British domestic security policy too.

In other words, according to Denham Muslims should determine Britain’s foreign policy — and if their agenda was to destroy Israel or take over the west, too bad. He said:

Terrorism is rarely defeated until serious efforts are made to engage with the political and social problems that give rise to it in the first place’ … ‘if a substantial section of the population believes that it is in any case subject to arbitrary injustice — at home or abroad — then it is much more difficult to win consent.

Small wonder, them that Denham is now pushing for the MCB to be brought in from the cold — despite the fact that the MCB subscribes to Islamist doctrines of British and global domination, and that although it speaks against violence in Britain it endorses those like Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi who issue Islamic religious instructions for the murder of coalition troops in Iraq, Israelis and Jews everywhere. It also has under its umbrella even more extreme jihadi organisations; and indeed, if one looks at the groups who came together with the MCB last weekend to ‘unequivocally’ oppose this terrorism that the MCB forbids us from calling I****ic terrorism, we can see that the MCB was joined at that conference by the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front organisation the Muslim Association of Britain and by other Brotherhood and Islamist groups.

This is all of a piece with Brotherhood strategic thinking, as exemplified by the position taken by its leading thinker and jihadi strategist Qaradawi, to oppose al Qaeda and to oppose terrorism on British soil as a tactical mistake because it threatens to slow down the Islamisation of Britain and the world. But the cultural jihad and the terrorist jihad are an unbroken continuum of jihadi extremism — which is why those who argue that the Brotherhood can be used as an antidote to al Qaeda are lethally misguided. Unfortunately, that suicidal ‘engagement’ agenda is now running strongly in Whitehall, and one can hear strong echoes of it in the push to ‘engage’ again with the MCB. A responsible government with its full complement of marbles must never ‘engage’ with the Islamists. It must fight them and destroy them — or else they will destroy it.

I am told that there is a shred of hope that sanity will prevail. The new Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, is apparently ‘sceptical’ about the MCB’s apparent change of heart. Her predecessor, Ruth Kelly, had got the MCB’s measure; indeed, it was she who finally told them to get lost — but alas, Ms Kelly is now stuck somewhere in the gridlock of British transport policy. There is a golden opportunity here for the Tories. Gordon Brown has planted his rhetorical banner on Mount Security — but his appointments are heavily drawn from Planet Appeasement. Despite his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi, David Cameron has made some remarkably tough statements about Islamism. He has already called for Hizb ut Tahrir to be banned. He should now direct the same logic against both the MCB and the government’s fatal and hubristic belief that it can turn the jihad against itself.