There’s no big shock about what UK Muslims really think

By HUGH ASH
ALONGSIDE The Guardian and, naturally, that cradle of Orwellian newspeak, the BBC, state-owned Channel 4 television – as exemplified by it lead news anchor, Jon Snow – is among the usual suspects in Britain’s supercilious clique of lib-Left opinion-formers.
Israel and Zionism are regular hobbyhorses for C4, as it’s commonly known, and the station’s propensity for performing acrobatic contortions in pardoning Muslim excesses ought, rightly, to belong in a circus.
So it must have come as something of a shuddering wake-up call for its dwindling band of pious fans to have been confronted with an investigative program, which dug deep into the mindsets of the UK’s 3,000,000-plus Muslims and exposed their festering prejudices.
It also laid bare the naivety of the nation’s Establishment – akin to turkeys looking forward to Christmas – for long indulging in the delusion that Islam and Western values would somehow meld.
Normally, had any other broadcaster aired What Muslims Really Think, C4 would have trashed it, damned the methodology of its info gathering, smeared its dark truths and indignantly branded it ‘Islamophobic.’
So, hats off to C4, then, for commissioning such a provocative report and, as welcome relief from its usual radical pap, having the guts not to shelve it.
Because never before has there been such an explicit insight into a ‘nation within the nation’, one that has largely shunned integration and continually demanded rights no previous wave of immigrants had the temerity to even hint at.
Certainly not the Protestant Huguenots – 17th Century ancestors of UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage – escaping persecution in Catholic France; the impoverished Irish navvies, who built the UK’s railways and canals in the Industrial Revolution; the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing repressive, Czarist anti-Semitism at the turn of 20th Century, who found sanctuary in a land of liberty and opportunity; or the West Indians, who began arriving, post-WW2, as cheap and ready labor to man the country’s transport network and health service.
What put the documentary’s finding beyond reproach was that pollsters from ICM Research so thoroughly interviewed – face-to-face – a representative sample of 1,081 Muslims across Britain. And, when it came to really hot topics, like terrorism, respondents were granted the anonymity of a blank envelope in which to file their questionnaires.
Adding further credence to What Muslims Really Think was the impeccable credentials of presenter, Trevor Phillips. A former head of Britain’s Equality & Human Rights Commission, he is a descendant of West Indian immigrant, a squeaky-clean pillar of the liberal Left and the man who helped popularize the term ‘Islamophobia.’
By his own admission, for the last two decades, Phillips has peddled the ideology of multiculturalism, but now agrees it is a busted flush.
‘Our findings will shock many people,’ Phillips warned in advance. ‘Everyone who has pinned their hopes on the rise of reforming and liberal British Muslim voices are in for a disappointment.’
And, in an article for the Sunday Times, Phillips wrote that the poll reveals ‘the unacknowledged creation of a nation within the nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future.’
He added: ‘I thought Europe's Muslims would gradually blend into the landscape. I should have known better.’
This was a damning mea culpa, even before Phillips recited the survey’s stats, which must have come as a stinging rebuke to the apologists for the so-called Religion of Peace.
In the words of British Muslims:-
·         52 per cent think homosexuality should be illegal (nearly half believing it is unacceptable for a gay or lesbian to teach their children);
·         31% think polygamy should be legalized, 39 per cent think a woman should always obey her husband and one in three refuse to condemn the stoning of women accused of adultery;
·         18 per cent sympathize with people who take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet;
·         4 per cent – equating to about 100,000 UK Muslims – have ‘sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombing to fight injustice’.
·         Only one in three would report someone they knew to be involved in jihadi terrorism in Syria.
Meanwhile, mainstream UK Muslim attitudes towards Jews are just as provocative.
More than 25% subscribe to the view Jews are ‘responsible for all wars’; nearly 40 per cent said Jews had ‘too much control over global affairs’; a third believe Jews talk too much about the Holocaust; 30 per cent believe Jews ‘think they are better than other people’ and 40% consider Jews ‘more loyal to Israel than to the UK’.
Jews also have too much power over financial markets said 40%, while 39% allege Jews control the media.
However, as appalling as the ICM poll’s evidence revealed to live-and-let-live liberals about Muslim antipathy towards Britishness, many ordinary Brits are not in the least surprised by the findings.
As The Spectator magazine columnist, James Delingpole, noted, ‘I think the general public have known for some time what Phillips’ documentary professed to find surprising: that large numbers of Muslims don’t want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more than a few of them sympathize with terrorism. It’s only the Establishment elite that has ever pretended otherwise.’
The real shock, then, is not the survey's shocking results, but the shock that the vast majority of Britons weren’t shocked by it.
In fear of being branded Islamophobic or xenophobic agents of the detestable far-Right, Brits have kept shtum for too long about what they could see emerging in their midst – ‘a nation within the nation’ and a community pushing the envelope well beyond the boundaries of free speech, liberty and cherished Western values.
Maybe, had the Establishment’s PC reigns slackened 30 years ago and public opinion been allowed the voice to express itself more freely, today’s Britain might not be facing the dilemma of what to do about integrating a ‘nation within the nation’.
And Muslims, too, would have been all the better for that.

 

 

 



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