We Have a Problem With Radical Islam

We have a problem with radical Islam in the UK. This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say. After all, we’ve had countless lives snuffed out by its militant tendency over the last three decades. But in today’s society – in Starmer’s terrifying woke tyranny that is Britain – stating the obvious really is a dangerous act of resistance.

We have our very own morality police – as poor Allison Pearson, the brilliant Daily Telegraph columnist, found out to her cost on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. Armed with the righteous certainty of fanatical neophytes recently graduated from the school of Woke, and smugly self-satisfied with their grasp of esoteric doctrine, Chief Constables deploy their officers to police tweets rather than our streets.

Back in 2021, Allison’s tormentor, the absurd Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington of Essex Police, listed hate speech as one of his force’s top priorities. Apparently, it’s one of the biggest threats to community life in the UK, he claims. Perhaps that’s why his officers perform so badly when it comes to the metrics that really matter to the public. Only 13.35 per cent of crimes were solved by Essex Police last year, an overall statistic that includes 3.5 per cent of rape cases. These numbers are tawdry as well as shaming. Harrington’s priorities are egregiously skewed, and, consequently, in any sane society, his head would roll.

But we don’t live in a sane society. We live in one infected with what Gad Saad calls the ‘woke mind virus’. Saying the bloody obvious is therefore a risky endeavour – an endeavour we must nonetheless be bold enough to undertake.

Despite the British state’s determination to cover up the truth, the reality is empirically incontrovertible: we have a problem with radical Islam in the UK. There have been almost 100 murders at the hands of Islamists since 2001; 75 per cent of the individuals on MI5’s terror watchlist are Islamic fundamentalists; and, according to some sources, Britain is currently home to 35-40,000 radical Muslim fanatics. And if these figures inspire dismissive shoulder shrugs from the great and the good, remind them of the grotesque spectacle of thousands of Jew-hating, Hamas-supporting Islamo-fascists marching through the streets of London on an almost weekly basis over the past year: first they openly celebrated the anti-Semitic pogrom that slaughtered 1,200 innocent civilians on 7^th October 2023; then they whined when the hated Jew had the temerity to fight back.

Such symptoms are alarming products of the extremist preaching that takes place in many of the UK’s mosques. A recent Talk Radio investigation highlighted seven such mosques, including the Redbridge Islamic Centre in east London, that were preaching, among other things, Jew hatred, even inciting violence against them. Some of these places were in receipt of taxpayers’ money, too.

And this sample is not some kind of obscure aberration. The academic Ed Husain estimates that over 40 per cent of the 2,000 mosques in Britain are run by the extremist Deobandi sect. In his book, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, he raises concerns about the lack of patriotism on display in many of these Muslim places of worship (in contrast to synagogues, Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras and Catholic churches, they do not say a prayer for the King, for example), the extension of Sharia Law within Muslim communities, and the segregation of the sexes.

Indeed, in a mosque in Dewsbury, he found incredibly degrading and regressive literature about how women should be viewed and treated in the House of Islam. He was also shocked to find the presence of extremist literature in a mosque in Manchester, previously frequented by Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber. It really is a sobering and deeply depressing read – especially if you, like me, have daughters and an awareness of demographic projections.

On current trends, this problem is likely to get worse. Muslims are not only having more children than the native population, but, year-on-year, more and more are arriving in Britain, either legally or illegally, from countries like Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are coming in their tens of thousands. Moreover, according to Ed Husain, these newcomers – largely from war-torn countries – are much angrier and more resentful than the existing and settled Muslim population – a characteristic ripe for exploitation by hate-preachers poisoning the minds of their congregations. Finally, this year, the striking election of five MPs who appealed to a distinctive Muslim identitarian preoccupation in the form of Gaza, should worry us all, as should the intimidatory electioneering that accompanied their campaigns. It is, I fear, a sign of things to come.

This should not need saying, but, lest my words are subjected to deliberate misinterpretation, I feel compelled. A large proportion of British Muslims are decent, law-abiding and valuable members of society, preoccupied with bringing up children, working hard and advancing their careers, just like their Christian kin. Indeed, I personally know many who are wonderful people – and one, in particular, who saved my life when I was admitted to hospital some years ago. They need to be cherished.

We also need to be optimistic. If the government gets a grip, and the state finds some self-confidence, hate preachers could be replaced by those with a more accommodationist and assimilationist approach. In addition, our schools and cultural institutions could stop the self-flagellating and give our Muslim brethren a more positive national story to tell – something that inspires a sense of belonging. However, this looks unlikely, especially under this socialist shower of government ministers.

They need to first accept that a significant number of Muslims in Britain have been radicalized, and that they pose a threat to moderate Muslims as well as the non-Muslim majority. When only one in four British Muslims believe that Hamas committed murder and rape on 7^th October last year, almost 50 per cent think that Jews have too much power over UK government policy, and 52 per cent say that it should be illegal to show a picture of the Prophet Muhammed, you know we have a problem. Rather than arresting people for what they say on X, perhaps our prime minister should focus on keeping us safe, moderate Muslims included.

Joe Baron is a teacher and a writer, published in The Spectator, The Sun, the TES, Breitbart, Conservative Home, The Conservative Woman and The Daily Telegraph. His blog can be found here.

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