“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.
In a letter to The Times, Brigadier-General Abdulellah al-Basheer, chief of staff of the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army, didn’t actually quote Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech on immigration but he said much the same thing, claiming that bloodthirsty British jihadists in Syria are responsible for a string of atrocities including beheadings and crucifixions.
He also warned that the British extremists could return the United Kingdom to “continue on their pernicious path of destruction”.
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The idea that our fellow Britons should top the grisly league tables for unspeakable violence in Syria should come as little surprise. We have tolerated savagery, even encouraged it, for nearly a generation; the authorities stood idly by in the 1980s and 1990s as Islamist extremism took hold in parts of London, the intelligence services rather fancying that they could control it.
Our political and judicial elite have long lacked the guts to protect us from terrorism. In a spectacular act of national cowardice they farmed out dealing with Abu Hamza to the United States. The British system did manage to convict Hamza of a number of crimes including soliciting murder and possession of terrorist related literature but the seven-year sentence was risible. As things stood Hamza would have been at large again in just half that time.
Luckily, the US authorities took a more austere view. On 9 May, a jury sitting in the federal court in Lower Manhattan deliberated for just two days before finding Hamza guilty of terrorist offences – something all of us have strongly suspected for years.
And there have been other instances of cultural cowardice, all helping to underpin the sadistic and arrogant worldview of British jihadists in Syria and elsewhere.
For years the authorities did nothing about gangs of men (overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin) raping vulnerable young girls (overwhelmingly of white British origin). Unworthy euphemisms like “grooming” and “honour killing” were brought enthusiastically into use by the media as they sought to ignore the brutal and uncivilised habits of some of the UK’s recent immigrants.
Even now little is being done about Female Genital Mutilation and other horrors like procuring an abortion because the child in the womb is a girl.
The immigration fundamentalists insist that all immigration is good. Somehow passing through Heathrow or Manchester airports makes a person suitable to live and vote in the UK. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Third World habits and attitudes are not wiped away but imported.
Take what happened in Lahore, supposedly Pakistan’s most civilised and advanced city last Tuesday.
Farzana Parveen, a pregnant woman, was beaten to death by family members outside the High Court in Lahore (a magnificent Raj-Gothic building less than a mile from Kim’s famous Gun) after marrying against their wishes. The frightening thing is not that such awful things happen but that her father, allegedly, looked on impassively and no passers-by intervened. Nor did the police, needless to say.
Powerful, atavistic forces seem to be at work in incidents of this kind. The most striking is a hatred of women so strong that it blots out any sense of family love.
Of course, fathers and daughters fall out and many brothers feel protective about their sisters. One of my favourite episodes of Friends depicts Joey (Matt LeBlanc) as he reacts with Sicilian outrage on discovering that his friend Chandler (Matthew Perry) has been canoodling with one of his attractive sisters. The comedy is multiplied by the fact that all the sisters look and sound much the same and poor Chandler can’t remember which one it was. No doubt even in the West such romantic complications can be the stuff of sadness, occasionally perhaps tragedy, but rarely the kind of bestial, hysterical savagery on display in Lahore earlier in the week.
There was something else going on in the twisted minds of Farzana Parveen’s family, even as they clubbed her to death with bricks and “blunt instruments”: a sense that they were doing the right thing according to both tribal and Sharia law. For them “justice” is a private, family affair – not something controlled, managed and regulated by the state.
No one is suggesting that such barbarity is innate to a particular nationality, ethnicity or religion. It is normally learned or indoctrinated, nurture rather than nature. But uncontrolled immigration means that we have to experience similar savagery in the homeland.
Events in Lahore touched a chord; it’s the town where my mother was born and where many members of my family are buried. But it touched another chord too. Forty-three miles away, just inside the Indian border, is Firozpur, birthplace of a man called Preet Bharara, the son of a Sikh father and a Hindu mother, not that it matters.
But what does matter is that Mr Bharara is now an American citizen and currently US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He prosecuted Abu Hamza, brilliantly. And he enthusiastically pursues without fear or favour suspected terrorists, corrupt officials and dodgy bankers – anyone who offends against the laws of the United States. He is the essence of the federal prosecuting attorney – proud of his country and its values.
We had to look to Canada for a Governor of the Bank of England. Let’s look to the United States for the next Director of Public Prosecutions.
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Today's political cartoons - April 17, 2024
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