Meanwhile In The UK: Going About Our "Normal" Lives?

Authored by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

• One of the most striking images from the night of the London Borough Market terror attack was of drinkers being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity.


• Contrary to all our public statements, we have become terrorised, just as the terrorists want.


• It is a glimpse into the soul of a city; and like all such ugly glimpses, we will turn away from looking at it, rather than considering it and wondering what it truly suggests.

Whenever Britain suffers a terrorist attack -- and it has suffered four Islamist attacks this year alone -- the British public responds the same way.

Twelve years ago, when four suicide bombers detonated homemade bombs on the London underground and on a red-top bus in central London, there was much talk of "Blitz spirit". After 7/7, the media erupted with boasts of wartime echoes. Some people who lived in London noticed a rather different atmosphere. Of course people "got on with their lives" (what else could they do?) but in the days and weeks after the attacks it was not really "business as usual". Especially not after another four suicide bombers went onto the tube a fortnight later, on July 21, and attempted to repeat the exercise. Fortunately, on that occasion the bombs failed to detonate. But during the period that ensued, it was certainly easier than usual to get a seat on the London Underground.

Of course, political leaders relish the opportunity to accentuate and exaggerate these echoes. If the British public are the citizens of London in the Blitz, then the politicians are Winston Churchill. After attacks like the 2013 daytime slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London, then-Prime Minister David Cameron stressed from the steps of Downing Street that "One of the best ways of defeating terrorism is to go about our normal lives. And that is what we shall all do." These themes are thought to play deep to the spirit of the British people.

But the more this conspicuous, self-conscious egging-on of such attitudes is stressed, the thinner it seems to get. In March, after Khalid Masood ploughed a car across Westminster Bridge, mowing down locals and tourists, and crashed the car and stabbed policeman Keith Palmer to death inside the gates of the Palace of Westminster, one prominent British journalist took to the pages of the New York Times to pour out the clichés.

"By Thursday morning, London was, if not quite back to normal, then certainly back in business. As I traveled through the south of the city, up to Chelsea and later over to King"s Cross, Londoners really were going about their lives as on any other day.

 

"This behavior reflects something deeper than conscious defiance, I think. It would simply not occur to the 8.6 million citizens of this megalopolis to allow one man to send them into hiding. As they say in the East End, you"re having a laugh, aren"t you?"

One wonders when the author last went into an East End pub to have a pint, and whether he honestly believes such honest cockneys still reside there? Nevertheless, he went to boast of the "stoicism" and "ancestral pride" that still exists there and to insist that, "The only way to proceed is -- in the much-loved British slogan -- to keep calm and carry on." Quite why this spirit is meant to reside in the bones of a city in which most of its current residents (according to the last census) have arrived in the decades since the Second World War is never clear.

Similar clichés spilled out after the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena in May. They came out yet again after the London Bridge attack in June. Yet one of the most striking images from that night was of drinkers in Borough Market, where the terrorists finished their assault, being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point, at any rate, looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity. Still the clichés continued. The day after the attack, in her address to the nation, Prime Minister Theresa May assured the public that "Our response must be as it has always been when we have been confronted by violence. We must come together, we must pull together."

One of the most striking images from the June 3, 2017 Borough Market terror attack was of drinkers being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

So it is interesting to consider, beneath all the talk of business as usual, and Blitz spirit, and keeping calm and carrying on, what, in fact, are the British public actually feeling? Last month provided a sobering demonstration.

Early in the evening on Friday, November 24 there were reports of shots having been fired at Oxford Circus station. A crowd stampede occurred, with people fleeing in terror down Oxford Street and other parts of one of London"s busiest shopping areas. Terrified crowds barricaded themselves into local shops. A celebrity singer and television presenter called Olly Murs tweeted to his millions of followers that he was in Selfridges department store. "F**k everyone get out of Selfridges now gun shots!! I"m inside." That was his first unwise tweet, followed up shortly after with, "Really not sure what"s happened! I"m in the back office... but people screaming and running towards exits!"

The police announced that they were responding to events as though they were a terrorist incident. Social media and some early national media reports said that not only gunshots had been heard but that a vehicle had ploughed into pedestrians on Oxford Street and that there were bodies and blood everywhere.

Within an hour, however, all this turned out to be nonsense. Not only had there been no vehicular attack -- there had been no gunmen. Reports that the incident may have been sparked by a gang fight rather than a terrorist attack were themselves later quashed. The next day two men who thought they might have been responsible for the panic voluntarily came into a police station and were released without charge. The only casualties from the incident were 16 people injured, one seriously, as a cause of the mass stampede out of Oxford Circus station and through the neighbouring area.

Incidents like this one in London last month easily flow by in the news cycle, and are easily forgotten. They will not be referred to in the speeches of any politician and they immediately fell away from even the "News in Brief" sections of the nation"s media. But they are in fact extremely telling. They suggest that rather than being this persistently stoical, unbending and resilient people, the citizens of London have absorbed the lessons of the terror attacks of the last year and the terror attacks across Europe that have occurred in the years preceding them, in Paris and elsewhere. Contrary to all our public statements, we have become terrorised, just as the terrorists want. So much so that a minor altercation on an average evening can lead to a mass panic, a crowd stampede, and terrified public figures bleating to their followers about wholly imagined horrors. It is a glimpse into the soul of a city. And like all such ugly glimpses, we will turn away from looking at it, rather than consider it and wondering what it truly suggests.

Of Queen & Country, God And Guns

Authored by "Revanchist" via The Burning Platform blog,

Though our stars tend to rise and fall in opposition through the years, your reputation for adventure, fearlessness and a legendary hunger for more lingers, and for the most part we find that admirable—no, more than that—we find it astonishing.

We may denigrate your American whisky (as well as your tendency to spell it with the Irish ‘e’) as you joke about our pasty faces and reliance upon dentures, but we are cousins—if not always kissing—and share a rich common language, culture, customs and cuisine. We are more alike than different in nearly every respect but these: One, we are a constitutional monarchy and Two, despite what you may have heard we really, really envy you your guns.

America has always seemed the dangerous, glamourous older brother. You were the cowboy, the gangster, the astronaut and the comic book hero of our collective imaginations. You were the captain of the debate team, dating the homecoming queen and cruising through life in your ’55 Chrysler, one hand on the wheel, elbow on the door, working on that car tan.

The 40’s, 50’s and 60s were perhaps your finest hours. During World War II you were overpaid, oversexed and over here, breaker of hearts and hymens. The winds of heaven tousled with a loving hand your perfect hair, the sunlight glinted off your straight, white teeth. After the war you invented rock and roll and corn dogs and forty-seven million things to do with sugar including LSD, and we were dazzled.

While we were washing under our arms from basins of cold water in cold rooms in a bitterly cold country, you were inventing the hot tub. At the cinema, we would bask in shimmering visions of your highways and high fashions, your Endless Summer California culture, your glittering skyscrapers and flawless pavements, then trudge home and tune in the wireless for a Parliamentary debate on whether or not we could afford to clean centuries of coal smoke from our cracked and blackened buildings.

While you were bringing Caesar Salad, Martinis, Bananas Foster, Baked Alaska and the almighty, sacred Hamburger into the world, we anticipated the prospect of instant mashed potatoes finally becoming available down the local shops. We were unimaginably insular; it is within living memory that people in Britain believed spaghetti grew on trees.

Despite pretensions to polite behaviour we relished your films and television programmes like The Godfather, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man and White Heat; more recently The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Deadwood—the more violent the better. We admired Clint Eastwood’s entire oeuvre. We devoured books like Lonesome Dove and the works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mark Twain and Raymond Chandler. Some of us even like bluegrass but those people are mainly in the looney bin. We treasure pretty much everything about you, but we’re British so you don’t hear us mention it very often.

Some Britons flinch when one suggests ever needing a gun in Old Blighty but don’t believe the lukewarm protestations. As the past few years have unfolded any remaining hesitation is apt to change, and soon. What we are beginning to remember is that for thousands of years everyone on this island was armed at all times with daggers—with swords if you could afford them, with throwing axes and longbows for truly special occasions. Personal defence was not just a choice, it meant accepting full responsibility for individual safety beyond city or castle walls. Defending ourselves with grace and strength and skill was something we once took great pride in.

Our downfall can be charted in three separate events:

Two hundred years ago, give or take a couple of decades, Sir Robert Peel established a full-time, professional and centrally-organised police force with the passing of The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. It was not well received at the time; the public felt they did very well already with night watchmen and personal vigilance and besides, who was expected to pay for it? And why hadn’t the people been consulted? As things usually go between governments and their subjects, government had its way. We turned our weapons over to legally-sanctioned protectors and began to soften as a people.

 

In the midst of austerity after The Second World War, universal healthcare for all was rolled out to tremendous fanfare, followed by a steadily increasing system of welfare for mothers and children, later for pensioners, then veterans and civil servants. There was in the early days some shame associated with taking a government handout but practice makes perfect and before long anyone with a doctor’s note affirming a sprained wrist or dodgy knee could sign on and be supported for life. No one asked this time who would pay—no one wanted to hear the answer anyway. And we grew softer still.

 

Simultaneously, the government threw open its doors to the former colonies. Indians, Pakistanis and Caribbean Islanders answered the call to serve as a labour force and in short order became a demographic who never actually seemed to leave. Politicians had discovered the lucrative stand of virgin timber that was the immigrant class and promised them anything, even citizenship, in exchange for their vote. And vote they did, until their children grew up, stood for election themselves and were voted in by their own people on the colour of their skin. When native Britons asked why they were never consulted on allowing this flood of immigrants they were called racialists. Since Britain had just finished dealing Jerry a bally good hiding, any accusation of holding Nazi sentiments was social poison. Hence we softened our principles and muffled the warning of our hearts.

This is how we joined the invertebrates.

Now we are facing Islam, though not many know that what is happening today is just another battle in a very old war.

From the 16th to the 18th centuries upwards of two million Europeans were captured and sold as slaves in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli. These weren’t people who were taken at sea but from their beds, in the dark of night in coastal towns and villages in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, up into Wales and along the west coast of Ireland, as well as throughout the Mediterranean. Why who would do such a thing, you may ask—the Barbary Pirates, of course—Muslims.

This carried on for two hundred years with only sporadic and half-hearted interruption. England talked a good game and now and then ransomed a lord or two out of slavery, but what’s a few missing Cornish fisherman, their wives and children here and there? It wasn’t until American ships began to be attacked and raided for goods and slaves that investors studied the situation and concluded, “You know, this could be bad for business,” and went to war.

First though, in the interest of fair play, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams made the perilous journey across the Atlantic to London for a sit-down with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, the envoy from Tripoli. When asked what right the Barbary pirates had to force Americans into slavery, Jefferson recorded the ambassador’s answer in two letters and his personal diary:

“He replied that the right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise”.

So, not a lot’s changed then.

In an Anglo-Dutch-American alliance three campaigns of The Barbary Wars were fought and the Muslims were at last subdued and colonised. Client kings and strong men were installed and until the present day Muslims have remained a benign tumour on civilised society.

It was a stunning victory and Francis Scott Key composed a song to mark the occasion. The original verses included:

And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d
By the light of the star-bangled flag of our nation.
Where each flaming star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare.

It wasn’t a huge hit at the time though after the War of 1812 he dusted it off, rewrote some of the more laboured lines and it eventually became the American National Anthem.

Were you taught all this in school? No? Nor I. Why is it that where our history intersects with Islam it always seems to either vanish like morning mist or become corrupted into making the Christian world into the bad guys and aggressors?

This brings us to the current mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the platitude-puss Pakistani with links to Hamas, Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. When he’s not scurrying along the baseboards he’s raring up on his two hind legs and sporting the most punchable, weapons-grade constipation face this side of the Atlantic. It doesn’t take an adept in Texas Hold’em to ascertain that Khan’s tell is one of a man who is eternally biting back what he really wants to say.

Within an hour of the latest cultural enrichment, Khan is on hand with fair-minded and reassuring statements like, Terrorism is part-and-parcel of living in a big city or London is one of the safest cities in the world. Meanwhile, the poisonous flood of piety and bloodlust threatens to drown us all.

What people in Britain are gradually coming to grips with is that Islam teaches that this life on earth is merely a stepping-stone to Paradise and that Muslims must stop at nothing to attain it. To paraphrase Kyle Reese, they can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, they don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until all non-Muslims are dead or enslaved.

For politicians, though, hope springs eternal; just fire the old PR firm and hire a new one. Hence, the RUN•HIDE•TELL campaign is off to a rocketing start. Of course, scruffy young tearaways were quick to deface the posters by substituting the last word to read RUN•HIDE•SUBMIT but the kings of PR, the Americans, have gone us one better with DRAW•AIM•SHOOT as the only viable response. We respect this, of course, because we love your guns.

In other news, on 28 May 2017, police sent a helicopter and combat-ready police to confiscate a karaoke machine from a backyard BBQ because the hosts played a song mocking Osama bin Laden. Bear in mind this was four days after bomb and bloodshed at a concert attended by teenaged girls in Manchester Arena. Several days after the karaoke caper, the horrific massacre on London Bridge took place. Clearly, prioritising threats could do with some work.

Our current PM, Barren Cat Lady, famously stated upon her election, “Brexit means Brexit.” We’re still waiting. After the London Bridge Massacre she said, “Enough is Enough.” At this rate she’ll probably say,”Potatoes are Potatoes,” next and the media will still stand up and applaud it.

But now I am just lobbing outrage darts at the page so I’ll wind this up.

Governments which no longer guarantee the security of their citizens are worthless, and those that disallow the right to defend oneself are worse than negligent, they are clearly dangerous to support in any way. People here are beginning to get this, but I still feel it’s too late to prevent the rivers of blood alluded to by the brilliant Enoch Powell, king of ‘racialists,’ true patriot and martyr.

As I write this it’s less than twenty-four hours till we march once more unto the polls to vote in an election that probably won’t make a bit of difference except to take our Brexit away for good. And yet it could also upset the entire apple cart as well. Such are the times we live in.

My American friends, you are surely aware that you don’t have to own a gun to fight like hell to retain your right to bear arms, as well as the freedom to play anything you damn well please on your karaoke machines. Preserve those rights, defend them, they are more precious than you know. Never sell them. Never soften.

They say a falling knife has no handle and yet our British politicians keep snatching it in mid-air, then expressing astonishment and dismay at the cuts on their hands.

Based upon past experience they’ll just carry on trying to catch it while the rest of us bleed to death.

We Know What Inspired The Manchester Attack, We Just Won't Admit It

Authored by Patrick Cockburn via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

In the wake of the massacre in Manchester, people rightly warn against blaming the entire Muslim community in Britain and the world. Certainly one of the aims of those who carry out such atrocities is to provoke the communal punishment of all Muslims, thereby alienating a portion of them who will then become open to recruitment by Isis and al-Qaeda clones.

This approach of not blaming Muslims in general but targeting “radicalisation” or simply “evil” may appear sensible and moderate, but in practice it makes the motivation of the killers in Manchester or the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015 appear vaguer and less identifiable than it really is. Such generalities have the unfortunate effect of preventing people pointing an accusing finger at the variant of Islam which certainly is responsible for preparing the soil for the beliefs and actions likely to have inspired the suicide bomber Salman Abedi.

The ultimate inspiration for such people is Wahhabism, the puritanical, fanatical and regressive type of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, whose ideology is close to that of al-Qaeda and Isis. This is an exclusive creed, intolerant of all who disagree with it such as secular liberals, members of other Muslim communities such as the Shia or women resisting their chattel-like status.

What has been termed Salafi jihadism, the core beliefs of Isis and al-Qaeda, developed out of Wahhabism, and has carried out its prejudices to what it sees as a logical and violent conclusion. Shia and Yazidis were not just heretics in the eyes of this movement, which was a sort of Islamic Khmer Rouge, but sub-humans who should be massacred or enslaved. Any woman who transgressed against repressive social mores should be savagely punished. Faith should be demonstrated by a public death of the believer, slaughtering the unbelievers, be they the 86 Shia children being evacuated by bus from their homes in Syria on 15 April or the butchery of young fans at a pop concert in Manchester on Monday night.

The real causes of “radicalisation” have long been known, but the government, the media and others seldom if ever refer to it because they do not want to offend the Saudis or be accused of anti-Islamic bias. It is much easier to say, piously but quite inaccurately, that Isis and al-Qaeda and their murderous foot soldiers “have nothing to do with Islam”. This has been the track record of US and UK governments since 9/11. They will look in any direction except Saudi Arabia when seeking the causes of terrorism. President Trump has been justly denounced and derided in the US for last Sunday accusing Iran and, in effect, the Shia community of responsibility for the wave of terrorism that has engulfed the region when it ultimately emanates from one small but immensely influential Sunni sect. One of the great cultural changes in the world over the last 50 years is the way in which Wahhabism, once an isolated splinter group, has become an increasingly dominant influence over mainstream Sunni Islam, thanks to Saudi financial support.

A further sign of the Salafi-jihadi impact is the choice of targets: the attacks on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015, a gay night club in Florida in 2016 and the Manchester Arena this week have one thing in common. They were all frequented by young people enjoying entertainment and a lifestyle which made them an Isis or al-Qaeda target. But these are also events where the mixing of men and women or the very presence of gay people is denounced by puritan Wahhabis and Salafi jihadis alike. They both live in a cultural environment in which the demonisation of such people and activities is the norm, though their response may differ.

The culpability of Western governments for terrorist attacks on their own citizens is glaring but is seldom even referred to. Leaders want to have a political and commercial alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states. They have never held them to account for supporting a repressive and sectarian ideology which is likely to have inspired Salman Abedi. Details of his motivation may be lacking, but the target of his attack and the method of his death is classic al-Qaeda and Isis in its mode of operating.

The reason these two demonic organisations were able to survive and expand despite the billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars spent on “the war on terror” after 9/11 is that those responsible for stopping them deliberately missed the target and have gone on doing so. After 9/11, President Bush portrayed Iraq not Saudi Arabia as the enemy; in a re-run of history President Trump is ludicrously accusing Iran of being the source of most terrorism in the Middle East. This is the real 9/11 conspiracy, beloved of crackpots worldwide, but there is nothing secret about the deliberate blindness of British and American governments to the source of the beliefs that has inspired the massacres of which Manchester is only the latest – and certainly not the last – horrible example.