And not only in there…

Islamism in Britain

Parts 1 & 2

27 February 2024

By David Robertson 

Reprinted from Christian Today [in the U.K.]

The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman is in trouble. She recently wrote that Britain was “sleepwalking into a ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted. Where Sharia law, the Islamist mob and anti-Semites take over communities…Islamists are bullying Britain into submission.” Cue outrage.

A few days later Conservative MP Lee Anderson told GB News that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had given “our capital city away to his mates”, before adding, “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London.” The uproar and cries of racism and Islamophobia have been so loud that Anderson has been suspended by the Conservative Party and the hunt is on for Braverman.

Once again, the noise on both sides is overwhelming, but is it possible to have a more balanced, Christian perspective?

Firstly, let’s begin with some basics.

To critique Islam or Islamism is not racism

Islam is not a race. As most Muslims will tell you, there are Muslims from all different races. I have asked numerous commentators and politicians if they would regard Christophobia as racist and not one of them would. So why does one religion get this privileged status? When politicians such as Sadiq Khan, Anna Soubry and David Lammy claim that being critical of Islam is racist, they are playing a very dangerous game.

Islam and Islamism are not the same

All Muslims are not Islamists, although all Islamists are Muslim. What, then, is Islamism? Wikipedia defines it as “a political ideology which seeks to enforce Islamic precepts and norms as generally applicable rules for people’s conduct; and whose adherents seek a state based on Islamic values and laws (sharia) and rejecting Western guiding principles, such as freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, artistic freedom and freedom of religion”.

I have known Muslims in the U.K. who came to this country precisely because they wanted to escape Islamist regimes, although most would be too scared to say that such is the reach of Islamism in the U.K.

This distinction is vital. In a pluralist society we welcome Muslims to the country and support their right to freedom of worship. That is why I wrote this article on Christian Today in defence of Muslims being permitted to build a mosque in Stornoway.

But there is an enormous caveat to that. Muslims who come to this country must realise that this is a country built on Christian principles which include the very freedoms they may exploit, and which do not exist for most Christians in Islamic countries. If we do not wish to live under Sharia law, or have an apartheid society where Muslims have separate laws from the rest of us, then we should be free to say so – without being silenced by the cry of ‘Islamophobia”.

Lee Anderson was foolish in his remarks not because he warned about Islamism, but rather because he accused Sadiq Khan and London of being controlled by Islamists. That is a serious charge which without evidence is both harmful and stupid – playing right into the hands of the real Islamists.

But was Braverman correct in her analysis that Islamism is a clear and present danger in the U.K.? I believe she was.

Firstly, it’s important to note that this whole situation arose out of an astonishing week in Parliament. The SNP, seeking to put forward a motion in Parliament calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, put forward one that was so extreme that many Labour MPs could not have supported it. The trouble was that those same Labour MPs were coming under such pressure from Islamists and left-wing supporters (Hamas and the Socialist Workers make strange bedfellows!) – a pressure which included physical threats to themselves, their families and their staff – that the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, changed parliamentary procedures, in order to allow a Labour amendment instead. Cue uproar. If you want to read more on this, Konstantin Kisin summarises the situation well.

But the key point is that such was the Islamist threat to MPs that our parliamentary procedures had to be changed. As the journalist Stephen Daisley tweeted: “The Islamist threat to MPs is so severe the Speaker had to upend parliamentary procedure to appease it, but also the Islamist threat is being overblown by the right, but also MPs need more protection. From Islamists. Whose threat is overblown. Gotcha.”

Was Sir Lindsay right to be concerned? Absolutely. Private security firms are being deployed to protect MPs after the Hamas attack on Israel – and they are not being deployed to protect them from Jewish extremists!

The Islamist movement has already killed one MP, launched a deadly car and knife attack on Westminster, forced the Jewish MP Mike Freer to resign and killed 94 people in Britain in the past couple of decades. The Far Right are cited (rightly) as a threat, but there is not an equivalence. The Far Right have killed three people. Ironically the Far-Right flourish when mainstream society refuses to take the threat of Islamism seriously.

It’s incredible how the threat of being accused of racism or Islamophobia silences people. Take for example this article on the BBC from Laura Kuenssberg. It has no difficulty in mentioning the Far Right, Brexit etc, but not a word about Islamism. Why? Could it be fear of being accused of blasphemy?

We always hear about ‘extremists’ but unlike others, Islamic ones are rarely named. Singer Morrissey summed it up with a biting remark after the Manchester Arena bombing (where 22 people, including children, were murdered by Islamist Salman Abedi): “Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an ‘extremist’. An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?'”

The doctrine of equivalence is such a dangerous one. The organisation Hope Not Hate made a great fuss this week about having access to the private tweets of Paul Marshall, one of the owners of GB News. They seemed greatly excited about a few tweets (not written by Marshall) which he passed on, warning about the dangers of Islamism. This was proof of being ‘Far Right’ and ‘racist’.

Hope Not Hate is a hopeless and hate-filled organisation that once issued a report claiming that writers such as Douglas Murray, Rod Liddle and Melanie Phillips were far-right extremists. Meanwhile they give a free pass to the hatred regularly being expressed in some (thankfully not most) mosques in the UK and on our streets.

What concerns me the most is not these bigger issues but how they are played out in our society. I could give you many examples that I have experienced but here are just a few – and for obvious reasons I won’t name names. I think of the homosexual activist in Scotland who told me he was leaving the country because of the hatred. When I asked if it was homophobia, he said, “Oh no, I am a Jew, and for the first time in Scotland we now have serious antisemitism.” The fact that this has come with the arrival of more Muslims is not a coincidence.

Or another homosexual couple in a Yorkshire town who had bought their own house and were living together. As the neighbourhood became more and more Muslim, they got ‘offers’ encouraging them to sell their house. When they refused, they faced a campaign of harassment – excrement through the door etc. They complained to the local council and an official came round, who was himself a Muslim, and in effect told them they should sell, because the area was now Muslim and they were offensive to Muslims.

Or the female Asian Islamic teenager who came to see me because she had become a Christian and had a white boyfriend. She was facing considerable harassment from her family and the local council and police had told her to go to her local Asian community group for help. She couldn’t because some of her extended family were officials in that particular organisation. She ended up having to go into a protection programme of sorts where the police removed her to another area of the U.K., anonymously for her own safety.

What astounded me about that incident several years ago was that there already existed a special unit in the police for protecting Muslims who converted. I thought then, as I do today: why are we not prosecuting those who threaten, abuse and harm in the name of their religion, rather than just removing the victims out of harm’s way? Why not deal with those who would cause the harm? Is this because the authorities have already lost control?

In Sydney after the Hamas attacks last October, the New South Wales government decided to project the Israeli flag onto the Sydney Opera House. A demonstration was arranged by Islamists, and unbelievably Jews were ordered to stay away from the city centre. Anyone who waved an Israeli flag was in danger of being arrested while witnesses reported hearing chants of ‘F*** the Jews, where are the Jews, gas the Jews”. The waving of Palestinian flags was permitted, but fly an Israeli flag and you would be arrested – for your own protection! That is a situation that could and is being repeated in many UK cities and towns.

The situation is clear. Islamism is a real danger in Britain and it is the number one danger in terms of social cohesion, terrorism, and religious and political freedom.

And where is the Church in all this? Pathetically silent – except to join in the general warnings about Islamophobia. Has the Church of England or the Church of Scotland, or any denomination, warned about the dangers of Islamism? A taxi driver in a northern English town told me that in his area which was now largely Muslim, two churches had been burnt down and nothing could be done about it. Maybe he was lying or wrong, but the fact is that many who live in areas where Islamism is a problem share those fears, while those who live in areas where it doesn’t exist, decry from the safety of their gated communities anyone who complains about it as racist and Islamophobic.

If the Church does not speak up for freedom and democracy in this once Christian country, who will? The politicians? The media? Or the far right? When people become desperate, as they see their neighbourhoods and their country going down this direction, it is little wonder that they turn to real extremes.

We should speak out now – while we still can. Because once the strange alliance of Islamists and progressives get their way, a new hate crime bill will be passed and any criticism of Islam or any Muslim will be considered Islamophobic and racist.

Is there a solution to all this? Yes – and in part two we will see what it is.

PART 2

In Part 1, I delved into the question of whether there was a problem with Islamism in the U.K. and concluded that there is.

Before I begin with Part 2, it is important to remind ourselves that it is Islamism and not Islam that is the problem. And to remember that there are many Muslims who are not Islamists and who are fine citizens and welcome members of the community. But now we need to ask what can be done about Islamism?

The head in the sand approach which seems to be the majority position of the elites in the U.K. will not do. Either because they do not understand Islamism, or they do not perceive it as any threat to themselves, or they have just become scared.

It seems that much of the establishment would rather talk about the danger of Islamophobia than the danger of Islamism. Take for example the now unfunny comedian Frankie Boyle, who proves the mantra, ‘go woke, lose your sense of humour’, who this week tweeted: “If I see the word Islamist, I just assume I’m about to read the incoherent rambling of a crazed racist.”

What is Islamophobia? The term is a recent one, invented by the Runnymede Trust in 1997. It was meant to refer to an “unfounded hostility towards Islam”. But now it is being used as a de facto blasphemy law to silence all criticism of Islam and Islamists. In passing I note that there is no attempt by any politician to establish a crime of Christophobia, or Hinduphobia. Why?

In 2018, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims defined ‘Islamophobia’ very broadly as a “type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”. All except the Tories adopted this definition.

In its proposals for what in effect amounts to a new blasphemy law, the APPG included a large number of offences, among them claiming Muhammad was a paedophile (because of his marriage to a 12 year old), blaming Muslims for the actions of Muslim states, or claiming that Islam was spread by the sword. The latter would make it impossible for historian Tom Holland’s book The Shadow of the Sword to be published nowadays.

It also proposed that accusing Muslims of inventing or exaggerating the term ‘Islamophobia’ would be against the law, as would suggesting that any Muslim was more loyal to the Ummah (the transnational Muslim community) than to this country – even if they were!

The result of this is that freedom of speech, labour and movement, are already being severely restricted in the U.K. Again, there are numerous examples but let me cite a few well-known ones.

In 2007 extremism, which included misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism and anti-democracy, in a few British mosques was exposed by the Channel Four documentary Undercover Mosques. But instead of dealing with the actual hate from the hate preachers, the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service attacked the documentary makers, claiming they had distorted the imam’s words and taken them out of context. In 2008 Channel Four were vindicated with a public apology and a six-figure libel settlement from the police and CPS. But I doubt they or any other mainstream media would dare to make such a programme now. Nobody wants to be accused of blasphemy when you have to face both the mob and the police!

In one of the most ironic moments in modern Britain, the Mall Galleries in London withdrew a piece called ‘Isis Threaten Sylvania’, by the satirical artist Miriam Elia, from its ‘Passion for Freedom’ exhibition in 2015. The piece portrayed the fictional land of Sylvania where some animals gathered to celebrate Pride. In the distance are three little figures, squirrels or hedgehogs, in black masks with a machine gun. The police sent e-mails to the gallery saying it could cause offence and that it was not art.

Elia’s response is as relevant today as it was nine years ago: “The decision to censor shows that our establishment is more threatened by satire, clarity and truth than by young men willing to kill, rape and pillage in the name of Islam. Apparently, my images were ‘potentially inflammatory’ to terrorists. This is the equivalent of saying an anti-Nazi cartoon in the late 1930s was offensive … to Nazis. Those who justify and protect barbaric totalitarianism, in whichever form, are on the fast track to becoming totalitarian themselves.”

If you want to measure how far fear of Islamism has gone in the U.K., just consider that while photographer Andres Serrano’s grotesque ‘Piss Christ’ was permitted to be exhibited in the UK without any police interference, a satirical piece about terrorist organisation ISIS was in effect banned by the police.

Another example can be found in the Muslim-made film Lady of Heaven which was pulled by Cineworld after demonstrations from some Muslims. The trouble was that the film was made by the wrong sort of Muslim – Shias – and so the Sunni hardliners campaigned against it and because Cineworld could not guarantee the safety of their staff, it was pulled. The police said and did nothing, while politicians were silent. Not a word from those now complaining so loudly about Islamophobia.

Or take the infamous case of the teacher in Batley who was forced into hiding because he showed his pupils an image of Muhammad. The school suspended him. The police reassured ‘the community’ and the Huffington Post referred to the picture as a ‘racist caricature’. Again the vast majority of the establishment commentariat were silent. And where is the teacher now? Still in hiding three years later, fearing for his life.

My final example (there are many others) is of an autistic boy in Wakefield who scuffed a Quran. He had brought one to school with three of his friends, and apparently dropped it. As a result, he received death threats. The boys were suspended and their behaviour was logged by the police as a ‘hate incident’, whilst those who actually made death threats were left untouched. This is modern Britain and soon it will be illegal to say so.

The answer to all of this is firstly to ensure that we have free speech and that the irrational and illiberal desire to censor on behalf of one religion must be stopped. Instead of pandering to the Islamists, maybe part of the answer is for the U.K. to take the approach of our French cousins who this week deported an imam, Mahjoub Mahjoubi, for hate speech after calling the French flag “satanic”.

In Germany the government will now no longer allow imams from Turkey to preach in its mosques, and Denmark, one of the most left-wing progressive countries, now has harsher laws for this than any other country in Western Europe.

Melanie Phillips, in her controversial bestselling book from 2006, Londonistan, detailed how the U.K. in general and London in particular had become a haven for Islamism in the West. At the time I wondered if her book was exaggerated, but her argument, that administrative incompetence and cultural weakness permitted this to happen, has largely been demonstrated to be true.

I doubt that any of our governments or many of our political leaders will take this seriously because the administrative incompetence and cultural weakness have only increased in the past few years – a gift to the far right (or indeed the far left).

But there is another way.

Take the amazing story of Spencer Fildes, former chair of the Scottish Secular Society (SSS). He and I were, for a while, enemies until one day something changed. The SSS had been bitterly and publicly opposed to any public display of Christianity and were especially angry with public Christians like yours truly. But Spencer, to be fair to him, was an equal opportunities anti-religious person.

Spencer wrote: “It came to a head when I wanted to do something on Dundee University forcing the female teaching undergraduates to cover their arms and legs on a trip to the local mosque. Then holding a ‘who looks best in a hijab’ competition … then photographing the students wearing it … One of my secular colleagues said I was ‘no better than the far right … This unreasonable hyperbolic nonsense was relentless, all secularists ever want to do is Christian bash, it’s not about separation of church and state, it’s a deeply embedded leftfield political hatred of the Christian right. This is why they make curious bedfellows with Islamists. I wanted no part in it.”

For his interesting thoughts on why the ‘progressive secularists’ argued for a Muslim candidate to become Scottish First Minister, while bitterly attacking a Christian, I recommend his recent blog post. Several years later Spencer is now a Christian brother and friend.

And therein lies the answer.

We need the freedom to share the gospel, without being accused of Islamophobia. And people need to have the freedom to choose their own religion, something which exists in hardly any Muslim country.

I once gave a lecture at a Muslim college which had been set up by Middle Eastern money with one aim being to try and establish a more ‘liberal’ form of Islam. I spoke on the Islamic doctrine of tolerance and in the course of the lecture I asked, “If someone apostatises from Islam and becomes a Christian, should they be punished by the State, or should they be given freedom to choose?”

To my complete astonishment almost all the students argued apostasy was punishable by death, imprisonment or fines. At that point I realised that the view that somehow a liberal Islamic version of separation of church and state would develop was an illusion. But I did not foresee that a time would come when the U.K. would reintroduce a blasphemy law – this time on behalf of the Islamists. The government and state authorities need to speak up for the victims, not defend the oppressors.

When I was pastor of a then very small congregation in Dundee my sister came to visit and witnessed a young Pakistani boy being beaten up on the street in what was clearly a racist attack. She came home and asked what I was going to do about it. I shrugged my shoulders. What could I do? “Typical Christian – all talk and no action.” She convicted me. So, we set up an Asian ministry to share the love of Christ with the Asians in our city and among other things there was for a time a joint Urdu Quranic/Bible study led by a multilingual colleague.

The local imam asked me to come and see him. He was from Pakistan but there was a man with him who was a white convert from Manchester. He was furious – how dare we try to convert Muslims! I explained that as a good biblical Christian, I never tried to convert anyone, because I couldn’t. We only wanted all people without discrimination, including Asians and Muslims, to hear the Good News of Jesus. Before the convert could answer, the imam spoke up: “I agree with my brother, David. He is not being racist or against Islam. God is sovereign. Let him decide.” Maybe our politicians should listen to the imam. Let God decide – not them!

There is only One who breaks down the dividing wall of partition. Christians should never be ‘Islamophobic’ – if by that you mean ‘afraid of Islam’. Nor should we despise Muslims, who like us, are human beings made in the image of God. But we should take the opportunity to love our Muslim neighbours. And the best way to love them is to share Christ with them, who brings a life and relationship with God that Islam never can.

David Robertson is the minister of Scots Kirk Presbyterian Church in Newcastle, New South Wales. He blogs at The Wee Flea.