Introduction

The recent trial and sentencing for attempted terrorism of three British-born Muslims should cause few surprises. A whole generation of Muslim youths, often of Pakistani origin, has grown up in this country. It has been profoundly disaffected by the profoundly anti-Muslim attitudes and policies of British governments – even to the point of planning or committing murderous terrorist attacks. Obviously, such dangerous individuals have to be imprisoned in order to protect the public, Muslim and Non-Muslim alike. What errors have British governments committed in order to create such disaffection?

Errors

The first error is historic, in fact going back many centuries to the Crusades. These were in fact Catholic or Western holy wars – anti-Muslim jihads. The Crusades themselves began a ‘tradition’ of racist attitudes and ignorance towards Islam, highly visible in the British Empire. Given such a historical background, it seems extraordinary that governments should have invited Muslims to come and live in Great Britain. It is almost as if they desired to create friction. After 1945, when British factories needed immigrant labour, governments could have invited immigrants from European backgrounds to come and work here. This surely would have created far less cultural friction.

The above error was compounded by secularism. Secularism had no understanding of religion and the fact that culture is moulded by religion. Therefore it had no understanding of Islam and Muslim culture. It presupposed that Islam would die out, just like British Protestantism has died out. In its supreme contempt for and ignorance of genuine religious belief, secularism promoted so-called ‘tolerance’ – actually indifference – and called it ‘multiculturalism’. Obviously, multiculturalism could never work and the ruins it has created are visible throughout Western Europe. Here, Islam is set to become the main practised religion, replacing the dying Western denominations.

Solutions

The solution to historic hostile attitudes to Islam is to spread knowledge about Islam and its historic contributions to, for example, technology and medicine. A shift in the teaching of medieval history in British schools would be welcome. Western ethnocentrism has taught generations that the Crusaders, e.g. the cannibal French King of England Richard the ‘Lionheart’, were not the barbarians, but Muslims were! All those who have lived in countries with large Muslim minorities or majorities for centuries, for instance Russia or Syria, have always practised respect towards Islam, not racism. In this way, those peoples have been able to live side by side with Muslim neighbours in peace.

Such respect must be strengthened by realism. Realism means not mythical ‘multiculturalism’, but separation. Wherever Christians and Muslims have lived together in the same country in peace, it is because they have lived in separate areas. They have been good neighbours, but no more than this. Thus, at the time of the Crusades, militant Westerners arrived in countries where local Christians and Muslims had been living side by side in peace for five centuries or more. It was the foreign and alien violence which they brought which destroyed the peace. Similarly, today, it is the new militant Islam, Islamism, which is destroying peace in Egypt, Libya, Syria and a host of other countries.

Conclusion

Most sadly, there is little doubt that more and more British-born Muslims, most frequently the sons of Muslim immigrants, will be attracted to the new Islamic extremism. There are, it is said, some 500 of them among the foreign Islamists fighting at present in Syria. We can only hope that the security services of this country will protect us from the evil which these Islamists scheme, as has now happened. Most sadly, however, this disaffection has been directly caused by the extremism of recent British governments, which have undertaken invasion