Daily Express:

HOW THE TAXPAYER IS FOOTING THE BILL FOR MILITANT ISLAM
By Leo McKinstry, Daily Express columnist

RARELY in history has any society been as supine as modern Britain in the fact of a mortal threat.

The fabric of our civilisation is now at risk from militant Islam which aims to destroy our way of life. Yet instead of showing resolve in the face of this challenge, the political establishment vacillates between collusion and denial.

We are told that the Muslim zealots are a only tiny minority while we are also given constant assurances that there is no cause for concern in the rapid Islamification of our public culture.


That kind of destructive complacency was graphically illustrated in the aftermath of the trial of Roshonara Choudhry, the Muslim student convicted last week of trying to kill the Labour MP Stephen Timms.

Her deed, which led to a jail sentence of 15 years, was sickening enough. What was just as offensive was the enfeebled police response to the gang of Muslim demonstrators who gathered at the court to cheer Choudhry and denounce the verdict.

“British soldiers must die”, was one their poisonous slogans. “Stephen Timms – go to hell” was another. But the police, standing nearby, took no action. The double standards are breathtaking. Any British citizens resorting to this sort of hate-mongering abuse against Muslims would be instantly arrested.

But last week the police were paralysed by fashionable multi-cultural dogma which holds that ethnic minorities always have to be treated as victims. Even the Muslim demonstrators expressed surprise at the leniency of the police, having fully expected to end up in prison as a result of their abuse. Perhaps the most nauseating feature of this Islamic demonstration is the fact that the British taxpayer was forced to subsidise it.

For nearly all the protestors are benefit claimants sponging off the rest of us. They are hypocrites as well as parasites, since they are happy to grab cash from a society they claim to despise. Ludicrously, one of the demonstrators, Mohammed Shamsuddin, even has enough money to send two of his children to private school. It is the height of lunacy that we should be compelled, through our taxes, to provide comfortable lifestyles to our sworn enemies.

Effectively we are paying for our own demise. And if these fanatics had to go out to work instead of scrounging, they would have less time for their jihadist nonsense. Tragically, this is the pattern of modern Britain. It has emerged that the state is now paying for more work on the expensive west London home of the notorious Islamist hate preacher Abu Hamza, currently serving seven years in Belmarsh prison for incitement to murder and racial hatred.

Last week, in another example of the establishment’s pusillanimity, a Special Immigration Commission decided that this brute should be allowed to keep his British citizenship. Abu Hamza is already estimated to have cost the taxpayer an incredible £3.5million through welfare payouts, home improvements, prison and legal bills.

Only a sick political system would think it right to lavish millions on the family of a monster whose entire existence is predicated on our obliteration, while hard-working British citizens receive nothing from the state except bigger tax bills. Such a morally perverted approach represents a form of masochism. But this is the hallmark of Britain’s relationship with Islam, where fear is dressed up as tolerance. Our political leaders constantly prattle about equality, yet they allow Sharia courts to flourish in our midst, with all its nasty oppression of women.

They pretend that the burqa is a welcome form of Muslim selfexpression, though they would not dream of allowing British youths to go around public spaces permanently wearing black balaclavas. They do nothing to combat Muslim extremism on university campuses or in so-called faith schools and allow laws on human rights to be cynically exploited by those who only have contempt for humanity.

In this climate of denial, a number of myths are sedulously promoted to quell justified public anxieties about Islam.

One is the emphasis on the majority of Muslim moderates who have nothing to do with extremism. But in recent years, this majority has been distinguished only by its silence. In Britain, there have been no Muslim demonstrations against the catalogue of atrocities carried out in the name of Islam. The tone of community leaders has usually been one of grievance mixed with justification.

The only time Muslims have come out on the streets in large numbers is to protest against the Iraq war or the publications of cartoons in an obscure Danish magazine. The appeasers also try to draw a parallel with Northern Ireland, claiming Britain was never panicked by the terrorism of extreme Republicans. This is entirely false. The British security forces were ruthless against the IRA, even using shoot-to-kill tactics, while the normal functioning of justice was replaced by special non-jury courts.

It was this rigour that led to the defeat of violent Republicanism. Yet such toughness is largely absent today in the context of radical Islam. The denial brigade pretends that education is the key to thwarting extremism, but the truth is that most of the jihadists in Britain are well-educated.

Roshonara Choudhry, said to be a bright student, is a classic example. We are dealing with a dangerous, aggressive ideology, not some minor fringe problem. “Islam will dominate the world” read one of the placards at last week’s democracy. Unless we wake up, this will become a terrifying reality.