The Islamists are winning, because our elites are afraid of their violence and aggression. By Michael Deacon in The Telegraph.
On the evening of July 7, 2005, Tony Blair sought to reassure a shattered nation with the following promise. The terrorists, he vowed, would never win. “When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated,” declared the then prime minister. “When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.”
Stirring words. Sadly, however, they proved to be flatly untrue.
Two decades later, it’s becoming ever clearer that the terrorists are indeed winning, that we are indeed intimidated, and that they have indeed succeeded in changing our country and our way of life. …
Example:
Let me point out that we are about to pass the fifth anniversary of one of the most contemptible episodes in modern British history: the driving from public life of the Batley schoolteacher.
In March 2021, a Religious Studies teacher in West Yorkshire was said to have shown his pupils a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad during a class discussion. After furious protests and death threats, the teacher and his family were forced into hiding — where they remain to this day. Five whole years later.
What the teacher did may have been unwise. But it wasn’t illegal. So why was an innocent man deprived of both his livelihood and his liberty?
The answer is as simple as it is shameful. No, it’s not – or not primarily – to do with political correctness. It’s to do, above all, with fear. Whatever they may claim, the truth is that our elites, from politics to policing, are pursuing a policy of spineless appeasement towards Islamist extremists — because they’re utterly petrified of what will happen if they don’t.
A strong country — like the one Tony Blair tried to depict in his 7/7 statement — would have stood by the Batley teacher from the start. To anyone who so much as protested against what he’d done, let alone threatened him, it would have said: “In Britain, we believe in something called freedom of expression. If you don’t, then this sadly isn’t the country for you. Which is why we’ll be kindly escorting you on to the first plane out of here, to a country that better suits your taste for theocratic barbarity.”
But of course, no one in authority dared say or do anything of the sort. So much for defending our “values” (as Mr Blair proclaimed we would). The lesson, for the people of Britain, is that we must obey the rules of a foreign religion, or else.
Which is why I say the terrorists are winning. The aim of terrorism is not just to kill. It’s to gain and exert power – through fear of further terrorism. And it’s working.
Our elites, it seems, will do almost anything to avoid arousing the ire of Islamist fanatics — because they remember not only 7/7, but also the murder of Lee Rigby, the Manchester Arena bombing, the 2017 Parsons Green train bombing, the 2017 Westminster attack, the London Bridge attacks of both 2017 and 2019, the murder of Sir David Amess, the attack on the Manchester synagogue…
Feminists, Islamists, and several groups on the left, have learned to bully their way to winning. The Islamists are cultural masters at it — there are now 2 billion Muslims.
Can Anthony Albanese stand up to bullying? Not if they might vote against him.