Useful Idiots - posted without comment

[xmasdale]

Fundamentalism's "useful idiots"

Comment piece from The Times - For your information

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Guest contributors
The Times
August 01, 2005

Fundamentally, we're useful idiots
Anthony Browne

As the rest of Europe acts, extreme Islamists take advantage of
British naivety

ELEMENTS WITHIN the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic
to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it
was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is
left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may
not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West’s apologists
for the Soviet Union — useful idiots.

Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing
grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for
their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler,
decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided
the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide
the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their
Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate.
The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to
Amsterdam, Bali to NewYork, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to
do the same.

The two fascisms, one racial and one religious, one beaten and the
other resurgent, are evil in both their ideology and their
methodology, in their supremacism, intolerance, belief in violence and
threat to democracy.

The London bombings revealed only to those in denial the extent to
which Islamic fascism has taken root. But we have a long way to go
until we reach the level of understanding in mainland Europe. With one
of the smallest Muslim populations in Western Europe, just 3 per cent
of the total, Britain has been able to afford a joyful multicultural
optimism. Other countries, with far bigger Islamic populations, from
France to Germany to the Netherlands, have had to become far more
hard-headed.

The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain’s Left. The wacko
Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the Muslim Association of
Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting group, to form
the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George Galloway
created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won a seat
in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.

When I revealed on these pages last year both the fascist views of
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and the fact that he was being welcomed to Britain by Ken
Livingstone, the Mayor of London, it caused a storm that has still to
abate. Mr Livingtone claims that Sheikh al-Qaradawi is a moderate —
which he is, in the same way that Mussolini was.

The BBC and The Guardian regularly give space to MAB to promote
sanitised versions of its Islamist views. John Ware, one of the BBC's
most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on
Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by
senior editors who feared it was too sensitive. Last month it emerged
that The
Guardian employed a journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, who is a member of
the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that wants a global theocracy,
and is described by the Home Office as "anti-Semitic, anti-Western and
homophobic". The Guardian used Dilpazier Aslam to report not just on
the London bombings, but on Shabina Begum, the Luton schoolgirl who,
advised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, won a court case allowing her to wear
head-to-toe fundamentalist Islamic clothes.

The tale illustrates Britain’s naivety in many ways. Hizb ut-Tahrir is
still legal, despite being banned in many European and Muslim
countries, and despite President Musharraf of Pakistan pleading with
Britain to ban it after it plotted to assassinate him. The useful
idiots of the Left insisted that Ms Begum's victory was a victory over
Islamophobia, but even the Muslim Parliament of Britain gave warning
that it was a "victory for fundamentalism", bringing Shariah law one
step closer.

In France, by contrast, the government ban on wearing the hijab, or
Islamic veil, in schools was widely supported by the Left. It is
impossible in France for radical Islamists to dupe useful idiots into
supporting a pro-hijab campaign presenting it as pro-choice, as they
did in Britain — because in France, the Left knows that the Islamists
believe Muslim women should be compelled to wear the hijab.

Here the Government talks about deporting extremist imams, but does
nothing. In contrast, France has deported ten radical imams in the
past two years, with another one deported to Algeria last week, and
ten more are under police surveillance. In France, no mosque is off
limits to the police. While Britain welcomes Sheikh al-Qaradawi,
Germany last week deported an imam who simply supported the Muslim
Brotherhood. In Bavaria alone, 14 "hate preachers" have been deported
since November 2004, and a further 20 have received notifications of
deportation.

The Netherlands and Denmark, worried about the growth of ghettoised
Muslim communities, have promoted integration, with the Netherlands
insisting that those wanting to become immigrants take a test of Dutch
language and the nation’s values before they are even given a visa.
Both countries have clamped down on inter-continental arranged
marriages —
which are thought to comprise 70 per cent of Muslim marriages there,
as in Britain — on the ground that they promote the creation of
separatist communities. Such measures are barely on the radar in
Britain.

Even post-bombing, Britain has a long way to go in its understanding
of Islamic fascism. The tragedy is that we start daring to understand
it only when innocent lives are lost.

Anthony Browne is Europe Correspondent of The Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1716156,00.html

[Andrew Johnson]

Scary - just glad I don't buy Murdoch products....