A WEEK that began positively ended tragically. Despite the perverse resurrection of Count Dracula (aka Sir Tony Blair), Trump’s Gaza peace initiative was better news than we’ve had for a while. It certainly put that ghastly friend of terrorists who poses as our Prime Minister in his place, that irresponsible idiot who so dangerously acknowledged Palestine. At the time of writing Trump’s 20-point peace plan – worth reading – has been welcomed by everyone, even it seems, Hamas. If it works, the President deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. I refuse to share the Spectator Daily’s gleeful gloom that it is set to fail.
On Thursday all that feeling of wellbeing came crashing down. The Islamist terror that Trump is trying to end in Gaza reared its ugly head again in our own country. Ramming and stabbing, this time brutally targeting an already vulnerable and terrorised Jewish community. ‘Outrage is a much overused word today,’ Bernard Carpenter emailed me from Minnesota on Friday, ‘but I can think of no better word to express my reaction to the dreadful terrorist attack in Manchester yesterday. To think that British Jews now have to live in fear of their lives and worship behind metal gates, watched over by security guards and CCTV, disgusts me more than I can say and makes me ashamed of being British.’
Yes, I too feel ashamed and disgusted by the British establishment elites whose pro-Palestinian extremism has allowed this to happen. Elites whose woke ‘do not divide us’ cliches, multi-culti moral high ground and ‘far right’ labelling have obscured the reality of migration driven Islamism and Islamic fanaticism.
Take this woke headline in Friday’s Telegraph: ‘For decades, the large communities of Jews and Muslims in the suburb of Crumpsall have lived side by side in peace in the diverse Manchester neighbourhood’. No, they haven’t. This is a lie. The content of the article totally refutes its saccharine headline.
This is the ‘moral equivalence’ gaslighting we’ve been subjected to for at least two decades. ‘Diverse’ means ‘separate and non-integrated’. Further down the article we get to the truth. Manchester has been the scene of one Islamist terrorist attack after another for 22 years. Areas in the city including Moss Side, Levenshulme, Chorlton, Rusholme, Longsight and Burnage have all seen men jailed for extremism and terrorism, names I hadn’t heard of as well as names I had, including Salman Abedi and his brother, Hashem Abedi, who killed 22 people at the 2017 Ariana Grande concert and injured many more. No, there is no moral equivalence between openly jihadi-supporting Muslim communities and Britain’s non-evangelising peaceful Jewish minority, Jewish families who’ve been fleeing a Manchester they didn’t feel safe in. They weren’t.
It’s part of the grotesque lie pushed on us for years, that the answer to ‘division’ is more love. Unfortunately it only works one way. An endless turning of the other cheek, even when the knives are out, while pretending we are ‘one’ is all part of today’s surreal madness (like clapping for a closed-down NHS or calling crack pipes ‘safer inhalation devices’).
It’s the fear of being labelled a racist and a false moral high ground that allows the left to shrug off each terror attack until the next time; the diversity bias that runs from Home Office downwards, through courts and prisons to police constables, that interferes with any reality check, let alone any debate about the measures required – detention and mosque closures, for example – to deal with it.
It’s the same insanity that has shaped Prevent, the outfit that was designed to deal with Islamic terrorism, but which instead focused on a ‘far-right’ bogeyman.
It’s the same contortion that has Hope Not Hate employed by the Home Office to help design its Prevent strategies and briefings. This I discovered when I started searching the Prevent website to find out who was responsible for the Essex County Council Prevent briefing list that put The Conservative Woman on a list of far-right influencers on a par with Islamic extremists. I can share the download on request. So far the Home Office and Essex County Council have refused to say who wrote the briefing (which we got released to us by a Freedom of Information request) but have each pointed the finger at the other. The helpful Hope Not Hate however had already clearly designated us as conspiracy theorist website. As though we were the terrorist threat, not October 7 sympathisers like Faraj Al-Shamie or his son, the aptly named Jihad, who planned the murderous attack on the synagogue.
Al-Shamie senior is a trauma surgeon who openly believes in the destruction of Israel. What the Telegraph (forgiven for the time being) found he wrote on his Facebook page about October 7 perfectly encapsulates the religious madness and Jew-hatred that both multiculturalism and left progressivism have so dangerously obscured:
‘The scenes broadcast by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of a group of fighters storming an occupation army camp with simple means – balloons and motorcycles – prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel will not remain.
‘Men like these prove they are God’s men on earth, and regardless of who leads them, this is the true compass for men confident of their victory even if their means are limited . . . As for you, men of the Levant, the wicked among you and the good among you will soon be made clear, take good care of your weapons and aim them accurately at your brothers.
‘And don’t forget that you disobeyed your Lord’s command, so you did not hold together and you dispersed to the bottom of the abyss. May God protect Palestine and its heroic people. God bless you and may He bless you with true men from the lineage of true men.’
This is sheer fanaticism.
How many others like him with sons like Jihad are not on any counter-terrorism watch list? Why are men like him not targeted by the vigilante Hope not Hate? Why is the government going after Tommy Robinson on terrorism charges, a man who has never endorsed violence but challenged the Islamist ideology that endorses it, and not men like the young Jihad?
This is the insanity that has full government endorsement, that the great and good have so uncritically bought into. Like the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, who hasn’t missed a beat, pontificating that ‘hatred cannot be allowed to tear us apart’ – in The Times of Israel, of all places.
‘Mindful of the horrific violence of [Thursday’s] attack on a synagogue in Manchester, we are witnessing hatred that rises up through fractures across our communities,’ she spouted.
Are we, Archbishop Sarah? ‘Across our communities’? I don’t think so. The hatred has been pretty much one way. Who exactly is going round blowing other people up or knifing them to death? Not the people like me at last month’s Unite the Kingdom Rally whom the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has emotively declared to be ‘heirs to the skinheads’. Who, Archbishop Sarah, was doing the demonising and labelling after the Unite the Kingdom Rally? Your church, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister!
So whose hatred, Your Grace? Why the specious comment? Where is the moral courage or honesty in asking for niceness? What we are witnessing now, at last, is righteous anger – at the crocodile tears of our Prime Minister, and at the hypocrite David Lammy, who should have been hanging his head in shame after the Pandora’s Box of hatred against Israel and the Jews his administration has unleashed.
Heckling, words to express anger: that is the British way, not knives or bombs. Fearless righteous anger at the lies of the elites and the moral courage to express it – that is what we need more of, and that has to be the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
***
I haven’t called on readers’ generosity for quite a while. I am once again. If we are to continue to carry on unafraid, we need your financial support. We are a small voluntary and underpaid team – yes, we are on a mission, but love alone doesn’t deliver the goods. Costs abound and we badly need to be able to pay for more help. I don’t believe that going behind a paywall would raise more than we already get from voluntary donations. It would be an own goal, and anyway I am committed in the crazy world of substacks and paywalls for this site to remain free and accessible. We have some very loyal regular and long-term ‘donors’ to whom we owe so much and are so grateful, but they are not enough. So if you are a regular reader and can afford to donate a fiver or more a month, please do.
