By Peter Hitchens
21 April 2012
Theresa May, one of nature’s soppy liberals, is struggling to seem decisive over the deportation of the Bethlehem-born windbag Abu Qatada. The trouble is, Mrs May isn’t even any good at pretending to be tough.
Labour and Tory politicians love this sort of charade. It makes them look as if they are guarding the nation against the Islamist threat. Like so much of what they do, it is a noisy, empty fraud on the public.
They exaggerate hugely. Like several other furry-faced old blowhards, Qatada is said to have been Osama Bin Laden’s closest henchman. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he wasn’t. He isn’t now.
He cannot really be much use as a Terrorist Godfather now that he has been on TV, and MI5 and the police watch his every movement. Well, can he? Think about it.
It has all gone wrong for Mrs May because she and her department are not very good at what they do. But really the British people ought to have seen through this fake controversy by now.
The real Islamist threat to Britain and the rest of Europe comes from uncontrolled mass migration from Muslim countries. Combined with our national refusal to defend our British, Christian culture, this is rapidly creating a powerful and influential Muslim vote which will increasingly change our country.
Given a few more decades, it will have profoundly altered this country. I have long suspected that this island will be more or less Muslim within a century, and it will be the fault of this generation. It would be perfectly legitimate for a respectable, law-abiding and civilised political party to act now to prevent this.
But instead they leave the subject to steroid-swallowing nutcases like Anders Breivik, or creepy opportunists like the BNP.
[ed. Attacking the "BNP" with slanderous statements like this do nothing to stem muslim colonisation either...]
Millions reasonably worry about this. But they are dismissed as extremists by a liberal establishment which views robust defence of Britain’s culture as bigotry.
[ed. I guess that makes you one of the liberal establishment then, Peter?...]
In Labour’s case this comes from a genuine loathing of Britain as it was. For the Tories, as in so many other matters, it is cowardice, combined with total lack of principle.
They recoil like salted snails from the simple idea that immigrants should be expected to accept the customs, morals, language and traditions of their host country. They cannot explain why this idea is wrong, because it is not wrong.
The migrants have come here voluntarily. While they are welcome to follow their faith and maintain their culture, by seeking and continuing to live here, they and their descendants have accepted that our culture should remain dominant, our religion remain established and our language and laws remain supreme.
It is the opposite of ‘intolerant’ for any British person to say that he does not want to see Sharia law or polygamy in operation here. Nor should we be embarrassed to condemn forced marriages or the horribly misnamed murders known as ‘honour killings’.
As for ‘racism’, the statements of some Muslim leaders about Jews are among the nastiest examples of prejudice in the modern world. It is interesting, in a bitter way, to see how reluctant the politically correct Left are to attack this, or even admit the problem exists.
As a Christian who is grieved by many features of modern Britain I often find myself allied with British Muslims. I have yet to meet a Muslim I don’t like.
But that doesn’t stop me saying that I do not want this to be a Muslim society, which is the likely long-term result of the liberal elite’s twin policies – of open borders and multiculturalism.
Bundling bearded mullahs on to aeroplanes doesn’t actually make any difference to this. It is a crude attempt to seem tough while actually being weak.
Anyway, Mrs May cannot even bundle mullahs efficiently – because she and her Government insist on revering and obeying the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.
This court would have no actual power, if our ruling class had not willingly given it that power. If Britain withdrew from the entire Council of Europe tonight, nobody could or would do anything about it.
But we don’t withdraw, because our governing class long ago discovered that, in the name of ‘Human Rights’, it could override our old laws without any need for a vote or a debate.
Our allegiance to the court exists only because of a well-intentioned blunder by our grandfathers. When they adopted the European Human Rights Convention more than 60 years ago, they never thought it would apply to us.
In those days we were rightly confident that our liberties were guaranteed by safeguards forged over seven centuries, from Magna Carta of 1215 to the Bill of Rights of 1689.
On the far side of the Channel things were profoundly different. Despotism, fanaticism, organised hatred and aggression were never far away.
Take Strasbourg itself, where the Human Rights Court sits. In 1950, that lovely, haunted place had only recently got rid of its own Gestapo office, complete with torture chambers. National Socialist pseudo-scientists at the perverted Reich university there had been working on setting up a mad, grotesque museum of Jewish skeletons.
These medieval horrors were taking place in a modern city as late as 1944. Had events turned out slightly differently, they would still be going on now.
No wonder it seemed a good idea to set up some sort of mechanism to stand in the way of such things.
But we never needed it on our side of the Channel, and we do not need it here now. We only continue to obey it because our establishment finds it useful in its unrelenting campaign to stamp out common sense, and abolish Britain as we have known it.
[ed. You know the problem, you see the solution, but you insist on waiting for your favourite establishment party to pick up the pieces...enjoy the wait!]
