Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman sounded an ominous warning on Friday: “The Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now.” This was politicians’ hyperbole, and couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Unfortunately, every day brings new confirmation of the fact that truer words have seldom been spoken.
Braverman made her chilling statement after events on Wednesday in London, when members of the British Parliament debated motions calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. A vote for a ceasefire is really a vote for Hamas, for if Israel stopped fighting, Hamas would escape annihilation and survive to murder more Israeli civilians on another day. As the debates went on, pro-Hamas protesters projected the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” which is a veiled call for the total destruction of Israel, something that would almost certainly involve a new genocide of the Jews, onto Big Ben. This was widely seen as a veiled threat to the members of parliament, and with very good reason.
Konstantin Kisin noted in The Free Press on Friday that the parliamentarians certainly felt threatened. Their fears led to a change in the established rules of the Parliament, so that members of the leftist Labour party could escape having to vote for an anti-Israel measure that even many of them thought was too extreme, or voting against it and risking the wrath of the Muslim protesters outside the parliament building.
Nor was this the first time that members of the British parliament have faced threats from Muslims who were inclined to violence. It was only a few weeks ago, Kisin points out, that Conservative MP Mike Freer, “who represents a constituency with a significant Jewish population, announced that he would not be seeking reelection because of threats to him and his family over his support for Israel.” On Oct. 15, 2021, “another Conservative MP, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death by an Islamist at such a meeting. In 2017, an Islamist terrorist mowed down pedestrians before stabbing an unarmed police officer to death outside the gates of Parliament.”
In light of all this, Braverman’s statement Friday made perfect sense. Beyond parliament there is a great deal more evidence that “the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now” in Britain. In London in December, a policeman ordered pro-Israel protesters to take down an Israeli flag after repeatedly allowing multiple Palestinian flags to be flown. In early February, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, wife Nava and their two children were forced into hiding after they received numerous death threats, including a phone call from someone who said: “Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist motherf***er.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have become so brazen that they flew ISIS flags at a mid-February demonstration in London.
A housing association official was fired for pointing out that Hamas was operating under UNRWA headquarters. Signs pointing to Mecca have been installed on hiking trails after the British countryside was declared “racist.” Gangs of Muslim rapists escaped arrest and prosecution for years, and some are still operating, because British officials were afraid of appearing “racist” and “Islamophobic.” And Khairi Saadallah, a Muslim migrant from Libya who admitted to being a member of an ISIS-linked jihad terrorist group there, was nonetheless allowed to stay in Britain. He demonstrated his gratitude to British authorities by murdering three Englishmen in 2020.
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Saadallah’s case is particularly egregious, but it is not singular. In January, a Bangladeshi Muslim preacher, Abdur Razzak Bin Yousuf, who called foes of child marriage “Satan,” went on a UK speaking tour. He was only the latest in a long line of pro-jihad preachers who have been allowed to enter Britain and speak to Muslims there. Meanwhile, the British government, in an attempt to show that it opposes “extremists” of all kinds and to appease Muslim leaders who claim counterterror measures are “Islamophobic,” has banned a large number of foreign critics of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women (including me) from entering the country, despite the fact that none of the people who have been banned advocated or approved of any violence or vigilantism.
So are the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites really in charge now in Britain? Certainly. The question now is this: what, if anything, are Britain’s ostensible authorities going to do about it?