07/09/2005
The bombings in London are a result, not of the recent War On Terror and invasion of Iraq, but of two decisions made by British intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century.
The first was to allow mass immigration, from the former British Empire. When Enoch Powell made his famous speech about the dangers of immigration, he said "Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.
That was the money quote, and led to the speech being miscalled the "Rivers of Blood" speech. But a more important point was Powell’s opening line:
"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils."
The conventional wisdom is that Powell was run out of his party, (the nominally Conservative one) for saying that immigration was a bad thing and could lead to bloodshed. But history has proved him right, over and over again, in terms of street crimes, murder, riots, and now terrorism.
The idea that some enemy aliens, on your own shores, will side with your enemy during wartime seems obvious, but people continue to deny it.
The other decision that the governing classes made in England was that crime was no longer going to be punished.
In 1965, when the population of England was almost entirely English, when the IRA had hardly started their campaign of murder and intimidation, when the murder rate was much lower than it was almost anywhere, the English abolished the death penalty.
If the men who did these bombings are caught, they will not be executed. In fact, the British Government said in 2001 that it wouldn’t even let Osama bin Laden be extradited, if there was any danger of him getting what he deserved.
Those two ideas, that unrestricted immigration is a good thing, no matter who is entering, and the idea that crime should not be punished, are what led to these murders.
Mao spoke of Communist guerillas being a fish in a sea of peasants. Islamic terrorists need a sea of Muslims to swim in. That’s what they now have in the West.
After 9/11, Peter Brimelow wrote "It’s the Immigration, Stupid!"
People wouldn’t listen, but …
Today, Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times that
Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists — if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings — or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way — by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent. [ [If It’s a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution ]
Friedman thinks that would be a "disaster". I think it’s the most sensible thing that New York Times has said in years.
Unlike some of my VDARE.COM colleagues, I think it’s clear that there’s nothing that anyone can do in terms of foreign policy or domestic appeasement that will keep Muslims from committing terrorism. Not abandoning Iraq, not turning against Israel, nothing. These people just want to kill us.
The Islamic states of the Middle East do all that and more, Saudi Arabia being the most obvious example, and they get bombed.
But there is one thing that Kuwait did, after the first Gulf War. Half the population of Kuwait was Palestinian, doing work that Kuwaitis wouldn’t do. The Palestinians, for reasons of their own, decided to support the Iraqi invaders.
After the war, the Kuwaitis kicked them out.
They apparently don’t have any illusions about the dangers of a large enemy alien population.
I think Britain and the US still do.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.