The Finsbury Mosque Attack. What’s Next?

What will be the result of the attack on worshippers outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London? Answer: It will almost certainly bring the total Islamization of England one step closer.

On Sunday night, a man who said he wanted to “kill all Muslims” drove his van into a group of Muslims, killing one man and injuring ten others. This is the long-awaited “backlash” that the media has been predicting for the last sixteen years. But up until now, they haven’t been able to produce much evidence for it aside from some angry words and bacon strips left outside mosques.

Now their narrative has seemingly been vindicated, and as Robert Spencer and Mark Steyn have already pointed out, the authorities and the media will take the incident as an opportunity to quash not just the extreme right, but also legitimate analysis of those elements of Islam that lead to terrorism.

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The process has already begun. Today’s Newsweek carries an article by Muddassar Ahmed which blames the right-wing press—by which he means The Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Star—for fanning the flames of “Islamophobia” which caused the attack on the Finsbury Park worshippers.

The trouble is, when the elite media refer to the “right-wing” and the “far-right-wing,” they include not only genuine neo-Nazis and white supremacists but anyone who is in the least critical of Islamists and immigration. For example, the Newsweek article includes Douglas Murray as an example of a “far-right activist.” Yet anyone who has read Murray’s columns or his new book The Strange Death of Europe would be hard-pressed to find anything extreme about his writing. Indeed, Murray’s views on Islam and immigration are shared by a great many people in the U.S. and Europe (cf. the recent Chatham House poll which reveals that a majority of Europeans want a complete and permanent halt to Muslim immigration). The Newsweek piece not only draws an equivalence between Islamist terror and “far-right terror,” it contains a hint that conservative media should be censored.

Which is likely to be the next step. In the wake of the “Islamophobic” attack, the British government will be tempted to shut down the conservative critique not only of Islam but also of the government’s failed policies in regard to Islamization and immigration.

The government will first lean on Facebook and Google, and other social media giants, but it won’t take much leaning since companies like Facebook and Twitter have shown themselves all too happy to suspend the accounts of Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders, and World Net Daily—those, in short, whose views on Islam and immigration lie outside the official narrative.

As Steyn points out, such censorship is a natural outgrowth of multiculturalism without assimilation:

The more multicultural you get, the more the authorities quite naturally see their role as arbiters between complex and competing group identities, deciding what counts and what doesn’t…

In other words, the governing class’s reaction to the “rich” diversity it has long encouraged is “everybody shut up.” As some of us have argued, the endpoint of a multiculture which lacks a common culture is tyranny. Some belated recognition of this fact can be found in Theresa May’s statement following the Finsbury Mosque attack. Among other things, she said:

And like all terrorism in whatever form, it shares the same fundamental goal: It seeks to drive us apart and to break the precious bonds of solidarity and citizenship which we share in this country.

Except, to a large extent, those “precious bonds of solidarity” no longer exist. Many parts of the Muslim community in Britain have already, in effect, seceded from the Union. They don’t care about British citizenship (except for the welfare benefits), they care about belonging to the worldwide ummah. They don’t care about British values, they care about Islamic values.

I began this piece with the observation that the revenge attack in London will eventuate in more Islamization. How? In two ways. First, there will be a shutdown of rational analysis of the current situation. No one will be allowed to say that immigration is a big part of the problem because that will be construed as Islamophobic. Moreover, no one will be permitted to discuss the phenomenon of stealth jihad—the process by which Islamic culture gradually replaces the native culture. The voices of Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders, Douglas Murray, Mark Steyn, and others will be silenced, and Islamic apologists such as Muddassar Ahmed will have the field all to themselves. The result is that the cultural jihad will proceed—probably at an accelerated pace—under the radar.

Second, backlash attacks like the one at Finsbury will be taken not only as an opportunity to shut up critics of Islam, but also as an opportunity to extol the benefits of Islam to society. The “Islamophobia” attack will be met by more efforts to show that Britons are not intolerant, and not haters. As a result, there will be more compromises, more concessions, and more submission to Islam.

The West loves victims—as long as they are not representatives of Western civilization. We quickly transform them from victim to martyr to saint. Take the Sexual Revolution. It was, perhaps, the most destructive revolution in history. It had a devastating effect on marriage, family, and children. Yet, despite its attacks on the foundations of society, the Sexual Revolution was transformed by the politically correct elites into a noble crusade for liberation. Many of its victims—AIDS sufferers, for example—became martyrs and then saints to be emulated. In addition, the victims of the Sexual Revolution came to be seen not as victims of a permissive culture, but as victims of puritanical repression. The damage wrought by the Sexual Revolution provided an opportunity for rethinking the direction the culture had taken. Instead, it provided an opportunity for the “liberationists” to push their agenda more aggressively.

Something similar—although on a smaller scale—happened with the Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando. What was obviously a case of Islamic jihad was quickly transformed into an occasion for bashing Christians, conservatives, and the Second Amendment. Orlando recently observed the one-year anniversary of the massacre, and the main takeaway from all the commemoration pieces is that the shooting had nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with Christian homophobia.

Whatever the facts of a situation may be, the media has the power to assign an opposite meaning to it. The attempted assassination of Republican congressmen on a baseball field? The attack on Republicans is already being cast as the fault of—you guessed it— Republicans.

The establishment elites have an uncanny ability to transform what should be setbacks into advances. And that will probably be the case with the jihad attacks in Europe. Whatever actually happens, it will be used to buttress the established narrative. Have there been Islamist terror attacks in Europe? Yes, many. But for the bien pensants it only takes one counter-example to prove that they have been right all along—that the real threat is not the Islamic jihad but the resistance to it.

So, despite a massive body of evidence that Islamization is the source of Europe’s problems, it will increasingly be proposed that Islam is the solution, not the problem. Thus far, only Muslim demonstrators carry signs with the message “Europe is the Cancer, Islam is the Answer,” but that thought is not alien to Europe’s elites. In one speech, Prince Charles suggested that “we need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts as well as our heads.” In another, he said “Islam can teach us a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost.”

We can expect to hear more of this Islamophilic talk in the near future. Only Islam, it will be argued, can provide the stability and structure to see us through difficult times. Only Islam, with its openness to different races, has the ability to unite diverse groups. And so on.

Just as the elites responded to the devastations of the Sexual Revolution by calling for more sexual revolution, they will respond to the disastrous Islamization of Europe by calling for more Islamization: more Muslim immigration, more Muslim consultants, journalists, and professors, more Muslims in public office, in government bureaucracies, in the police, in the army—whatever is necessary to prove once and for all that Europeans are not narrow-minded Islamophobes.

Within 24 hours of the attack on the Muslims outside the Finsbury Park Mosque, a Muslim terrorist in Paris drove an explosive-laden car into a police van. During the same time period, a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” attacked a police officer in London, a man armed with an axe and knives was arrested near an army reserve base in the West Midlands, and a crowd of several hundred supporters of the Hezbollah terror group marched through central London carrying terrorist flags.

Meanwhile, in Mali, jihadists killed two at a Western tourist resort, and in the Southern Philippines, Muslim terrorists continue to kill and kidnap Christians. But if the liberal media runs true to form, much more significance will be assigned to the mosque attack in London than to Church attacks in the Philippines or in Egypt. For the elites, the one attack by a non-Muslim extremist will outweigh the hundreds of attacks carried out by Islamic extremists. Whatever happens, the ruling class will try to twist it to the advantage of Islam. Here’s what historian Emmet Scott recently wrote apropos the situation in Europe:

In the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ debate the ruling elites are NOT neutral; they are firmly on the side of the Islamists. Indeed, every tool that can be employed to crush all opposition to the Islamization of Europe is being employed: Everything from the crude power of state compulsion to the more subtle and insidious power of blanket media propaganda. As long as the present elites remain in control, the Islamization of Europe will proceed—irrespective of how many atrocities the Islamists commit.

One hopes that that is an exaggeration, but as events unfold, one begins to wonder if he is not right.

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