Fundamentally, we’re useful idiots

Elements within the British establishment were notoriously sympathetic to Hitler. Today the Islamists enjoy similar support. In the 1930s it was Edward VIII, aristocrats and the Daily Mail; this time it is left-wing activists, The Guardian and sections of the BBC. They may not want a global theocracy, but they are like the West's apologists for the Soviet Union -- useful idiots.

Islamic radicals, like Hitler, cultivate support by nurturing grievances against others. Islamists, like Hitler, scapegoat Jews for their problems and want to destroy them. Islamists, like Hitler, decree that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Hitler divided the world into Aryans and subhuman non-Aryans, while Islamists divide the world into Muslims and sub-human infidels. Nazis aimed for their Thousand-Year Reich, while Islamists aim for their eternal Caliphate. The Nazi party used terror to achieve power, and from London to Amsterdam, Bali to New York, Egypt to Turkey, Islamists are trying to do the same.

The two fascisms, one racial and one religious, one beaten and the other resurgent, are evil in both their ideology and their methodology, in their supremacism, intolerance, belief in violence and threat to democracy.

The London bombings revealed only to those in denial the extent to which Islamic fascism has taken root. But we have a long way to go until we reach the level of understanding in mainland Europe. With one of the smallest Muslim populations in Western Europe, just 3 per cent of the total, Britain has been able to afford a joyful multicultural optimism. Other countries, with far bigger Islamic populations, from France to Germany to the Netherlands, have had to become far more hard-headed.

The support of Islamic fascism spans Britain's Left. The wacko Socialist Workers Party joined forces with the Muslim Association of Britain, the democracy-despising, Shariah-law-wanting group, to form the Stop the War Coalition. The former Labour MP George Galloway created the Respect Party with the support of the MAB, and won a seat in Parliament by cultivating Muslim resentment.

When I revealed on these pages last year both the fascist views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the fact that he was being welcomed to Britain by Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, it caused a storm that has still to abate. Mr Livingtone claims that Sheikh al-Qaradawi is a moderate -- which he is, in the same way that Mussolini was.

The BBC and The Guardian regularly give space to MAB to promote sanitised versions of its Islamist views. John Ware, one of the BBC's most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive. Last month it emerged that The Guardian employed a journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, who is a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that wants a global theocracy, and is described by the Home Office as "anti-Semitic, anti-Western and homophobic". The Guardian used Dilpazier Aslam to report not just on the London bombings, but on Shabina Begum, the Luton schoolgirl who, advised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, won a court case allowing her to wear head-to-toe fundamentalist Islamic clothes.

The tale illustrates Britain's naivety in many ways. Hizb ut-Tahrir is still legal, despite being banned in many European and Muslim countries, and despite President Musharraf of Pakistan pleading with Britain to ban it after it plotted to assassinate him. The useful idiots of the Left insisted that Ms Begum's victory was a victory over Islamophobia, but even the Muslim Parliament of Britain gave warning that it was a "victory for fundamentalism", bringing Shariah law one step closer.

In France, by contrast, the government ban on wearing the hijab, or Islamic veil, in schools was widely supported by the Left. It is impossible in France for radical Islamists to dupe useful idiots into supporting a pro-hijab campaign presenting it as pro-choice, as they did in Britain -- because in France, the Left knows that the Islamists believe Muslim women should be compelled to wear the hijab.

Here the Government talks about deporting extremist imams, but does nothing. In contrast, France has deported ten radical imams in the past two years, with another one deported to Algeria last week, and ten more are under police surveillance. In France, no mosque is off limits to the police. While Britain welcomes Sheikh al-Qaradawi, Germany last week deported an imam who simply supported the Muslim Brotherhood. In Bavaria alone, 14 "hate preachers" have been deported since November 2004, and a further 20 have received notifications of deportation.

The Netherlands and Denmark, worried about the growth of ghettoised Muslim communities, have promoted integration, with the Netherlands insisting that those wanting to become immigrants take a test of Dutch language and the nation's values before they are even given a visa. Both countries have clamped down on inter-continental arranged marriages -- which are thought to comprise 70 per cent of Muslim marriages there, as in Britain -- on the ground that they promote the creation of separatist communities. Such measures are barely on the radar in Britain.

Even post-bombing, Britain has a long way to go in its understanding of Islamic fascism. The tragedy is that we start daring to understand it only when innocent lives are lost.

Anthony Browne is Europe Correspondent of The Times

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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