The demonstrations that sprang up in the United Kingdom after the Hamas attack on Israel shows that the response to jihadism has shifted. The last three weeks have seen the open proclamation of Islamic jihad on the UK’s streets and the intimidation of its Jewish population.
This has confirmed the comfort that sections of the political Left in the UK draw from the revolutionary potential they detect in Islamic fundamentalism. It is no longer unequivocally seen as a criminal movement but one through which ‘resistance’ is being carried out. This description is seductive not only to Muslims but also to sections of the Left and supported by superficially attractive claims of decolonisation.
On issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, Islamic jihadism and Leftist movements are diametrically opposed, but their soldering has occurred at the focal point of the Palestine question. Together, they have taken the genie of jihad out of the bottle. The menace of Islamic fundamentalism and the criminality it espouses have not gone unnoticed since the burnings of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in the late 1980s. Iran had called for the author’s execution. Even if the extent is difficult to verify, Iran today provides support and succour to Hamas. Although now a mere footnote in history, the Iranian revolution violently eliminated the Left in that country.
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Rise in antisemitism
It is just over a year since Hindus in Leicester and Birmingham saw up close that jihadis can operate almost without restriction with what appeared to be the collusion of the local police authority and municipality. With a large spike in reports of antisemitic crimes, British Jews are now considering their options. It is curious that the spike in reports of Islamophobic attacks doesn’t lead to Muslims making emigration plans. It is instead accompanied by calls to jihad from mosque pulpits across the United Kingdom, reported The Jewish Chronicle.
If the number of jihadis on the British Security Service watchlist, as per a Daily Mail report, was not already indicative of the jihadist problem, the scale of it has been shown in the demonstrations since the 7 October Hamas attacks. Groups of protestors have openly waved jihadist flags and shouted for the massacre of Jews. Although MI5’s director general confirms that the current national threat level remains substantial, London’s police stood by. Adding insult, the police initially announced through their social media accounts that the flags and chants of jihad were not criminal. If one treats the police claim generously one might be forgiven for concluding that the police too think that calling for jihad by Muslim armies is a legitimate expression of Islamic beliefs. The Islamic movements that now inhabit Britain’s mainstream certainly believe that.
A 2018 report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims indicates how institutionalised the rot has become. It cites as an example of Islamophobia, “Denying Muslim populations the right to self-determination e.g., by claiming that the existence of an independent Palestine or Kashmir is a terrorist endeavour.” How then could Hamas possibly be a terrorist organisation? The report’s definition of Islamophobia has since been adopted by many local authorities.
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Targets of violence
As with Leicester last year and London this year, we might be forgiven for hypothesising that these movements have penetrated police forces. Similar police indulgence of Muslim attacks in London, accompanied by the waving of Pakistani and Turkish flags, has been shown during the several occasions when the Indian High Commission has been attacked. While successive Home Secretaries—then Priti Patel and now Suella Braverman—might outrage about such police indifference, operational matters lie with London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, who has been in office throughout these events. In a seeming attempt to secure his return after the next mayoral election, Khan’s call for a ceasefire is an effective demand that the Israelis stop their pursuit of Hamas. He is not alone, with over 300 Muslim Labour councillors signalling in a letter that the party adopt the same approach. Some have resigned from the party. Couched in the form of a plea from a ‘community’ they ostensibly represent, one cannot help thinking that this is international Islamism at play.
Much of the culturally emasculated political Right points to the failure of multiculturalism as the explanation for both Leicester and the events in October 2023. If multiculturalism entails a broad policy of tolerance of different cultures and creeds, Britain and its diverse society have largely lived up to the ideal. It is Muslims who have outstandingly failed to do so. It is a pointless expectation for all immigrants to live up to the ideals of liberalism of which the political Right has now become the defender. However, at least the varied segments of British society have not undermined the fabric of liberalism by open hostility to it. Again, it is the Muslim exception that stands out as the most vociferously hostile to liberalism. It is unfortunate that Braverman did not make this clear when she went on to blame recent immigrants, which can be read as referring to Hindus, for last year’s events in Leicester. If immigration has been instrumental in helping undermine multiculturalism, it isn’t all immigration but the specific sort from which the now mainstreamed Islamic fundamentalist movements derive support and following. Neither their advocacy of the submission of non-Muslims to Muslim dominance nor any other aspect of Islamification has any cognitive appeal, and it is thus expectedly imposed through violence.
Some of the causes are to be found in Mark Curtis’s Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, where the author vividly describes the extent of the United Kingdom’s encouragement of Islamic fundamentalist movements. The chickens have now come home to roost, but you do not find those chiming into the chorus of international Islamism complaining or resigning on those grounds. Years of intelligence gathering and academic research, hugely costly anti-radicalisation policies, and several laws on terrorism have strangely not controlled the problem. Largely dominant in all cultural institutions such as the media and universities, the collusive and deliberate blindness of the Left has been noted already. Besides, this is not the old Left, but a new social justice Left that turns blindness into an article of faith, debilitating Britain’s ability to respond to jihadism.
This leaves Britain with no clear way out and a bleak future. The obvious targets of jihadist violence, prominently among which are Jews and Hindus, will have to be ever more afraid about the safety and security, which they have largely been able to take for granted until recently.
The writer is a reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary, University of London. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)