Home-grown horror [updated]

“The Duke of Wellington famously said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the
playing-fields of Eton: and if that is the case, then the advance of the Islamic State was
begun in the nice, tolerant, liberal academies of Britain and other parts of western Europe.”
Mary Kenny, - 'Isis will never be defeated until Western societies
stand up for their own values,' – IRISH INDEPENDENT

Many folk otherwise supportive of allowing peaceful people to cross borders freely (a policy well-articulated here) argue this policy can’t survive Muslim immigration; they argue the policy is untenable since Muslims constitute an objective threat, to whom western borders must be irrevocably closed. But as many Britons are slowly realising, especially after the jihadi killer of journalist James Foley was revealed as a comfortably-off Briton from Maida Vale, the threat comes not from Muslim immigration: the threat is homegrown.

And as Daniel Murray points out in the Spectator, “This is not even the first beheading of an American journalist to have been arranged by a British man from London.” Daniel Pearl was the first to so suffer, at the hands of a north London-born graduate of a private school and the London School of Economics.

Locally-born too were the suicide bombers of the London Tube, the killers in cold blood of drummer Lee Rigby, and the bomber of Glasgow airport – a registered doctor born and raised in Aylesbury.

The threat they point to is not at the borders; it is being nurtured within. And not just a threat at home. 

4,000 people from Britain are thought to have gone to train or fight in Afghanistan. Estimates of the number of British citizens who have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq range from just over 500 to 1,500 …  significantly higher than the number of Muslims currently serving in Britain’s armed forces….. But it is now obvious that whether we like it or not, this is Britain’s problem…
    The country that brought liberty to much of the world is now exporting terrorism to large parts of it.

Britain needs to look to itself, and address this problem, if there are not to be many more videos like this week’s.

The old excuses don’t work.

For decades, we have been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty. Give them welfare, education, comfortable lives and you’ll dry the bog of hatred. Well, that’s not quite true…. [the] British citizen, … who beheaded the American journalist, came from an elegant Maida Vale home and a life of comfort.

And he left his life of comfort to kill, murder, and wage jihad.

The cause of these homegrown killers? As Ben Caspit explained in an open letter to the UK Foreign Secretary, you would have to be deaf, blind and dumb not to know.

If you are indeed familiar with the UK, and take the occasional walk in London and try to walk through the neighbourhoods and boroughs that Islamists have occupied in recent years, and try to understand what they are preaching to their congregations in those same mosques that are springing up like mushrooms after the rain, you really shouldn’t be surprised…. Thirty minutes of surfing the Internet, Mr. Foreign Secretary, will reveal to you the horrifying worlds that are flourishing in your backyard.
    You’ll see religious preachers, seeped in hatred for everything Western, for everything Jewish, for everything Christian, for everything that does not identify with them.
    You’ll see fury in the streets, violence toward everyone who comes to demand the freedom to live as they wish. I especially recommend a video of an ostensibly moderate Muslim preaching his creed to a congregation of seemingly moderate Muslims and, after they have all finished defining themselves “moderate Muslims” he asks all those who support the Islamic laws of punishment – in which women are stoned to death for adultery, for example – to raise their arms. All the hundreds of men present raise their arms as one. And these are moderates.

Some of these born and bred Britons will simply be psychologically susceptible to the nastiness of a violent religion. But what else are they hearing? Where are the voices proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty?  Where today will they hear these values proclaimed proudly and unashamedly? Where will they learn of thee superiority of reason over religion, of freedom over tyranny?

When Britain was exporting liberty to much of the known world, these values were unapologetically front and centre. These were the values that built western civilisation. These were values absorbed by immigrants and locally-born alike. People  moved to Britain and the west because of these values.

What happened?

In a word: multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism taught that the values of civilisation and those of barbarism were equal.

It taught that liberty and slavery were simply different choices.

It taught that if any culture should be shamed it should be western culture. That the west is responsible for all the world’s horrors, and the rest of the world simply a victim. This is the perversion now taught and promulgated in schools, in universities and in learned commentaries peddled by perfumed academics for the consumption of the self-anointed.

So for all the decades that we’ve been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty, leading westerners have been silent about the superiority of  western health, wealth and freedom over a stone-age theocracy in which beheadings, clitorectomies, slavery and crucifixions still play a part.

If leading westerners are apologetic about the values of their own culture, especially when the contrast is so stark, then why in hell would others take them seriously? Why wouldn’t they wonder if there isn’t something to be learned from the stone age?

What, then, can we do? asks Daniel Hannan.

Well, for a start, we can stop taking these losers at their own estimation. Let's treat them, not as soldiers, but as common criminals. Instead of making documentaries about powerful, shadowy terrorist networks, let's laugh at the pitiable numpties who end up in our courts. Let's mock their underpants bombs and their half Jafaican slang and their attempts to set fire to glass and steel airports by driving into them and their tendency to blow themselves up in error. Let's scour away any sense that they represent a threat to the state – the illicit thrill of which is what attracts alienated young men trawling the web from their bedrooms.
    At the same time, let's stop teaching the children of immigrants to despise the British state. Let's stop deriding and traducing our values. Let's stop presenting our history as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation. Let's be proud of our achievements – not least the defence of liberty in two world wars in which, respectively, 400,000 and nearly a million Muslims served in British uniforms.
    The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a better one. Few ideas are as wretched as the theocracy favoured by IS; few as attractive as Anglosphere freedom.
    I'm not saying that patriotism alone will finish the jihadis. Like the urban guerrillas in the 1970s, they must be treated primarily as a security problem rather than a political one. But what ultimately did for the Red Army Faction and all the rest was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the almost universal realisation that revolutionary socialism was no alternative to Western democracy.
    It comes down, in the end, to self-belief. Not theirs; ours.

Do you have it?

Because a war of ideas is more preferable to the other kind. And even that other kind amounts in the end to ideas.

Wars are not won just by military hardware or political re-arrangements [points out Mary Kenny]. They are won by ideas. They are won by men and women who have convictions and values which give them the impetus to pursue victory…
    There's nothing wrong with tolerance and a universalist outlook: these are good things. But if a host society is craven and defeatist about its own history and traditions, then it is asking for trouble. Western societies must uphold the achievements based on our values, and do so with fortitude…
    Isis will not be defeated by drones, military action or even politics alone, but by ideas and leaders who really and truly believe in their own values and traditions. After James Foley was beheaded, it was triumphantly announced that: "The sword is mightier than the pen."
    But ideas, and the conviction to carry them, are still stronger than all else.

UPDATE:

“Let's mock their underpants bombs and their half Jafaican slang and their attempts to set fire to glass and steel airports by driving into them and their tendency to blow themselves up in error…”