On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney worried that Britain’s fabled “Keep Calm and Carry On” mindset might be making it harder for the U.K. to adjust to the realities of terrorism.
“I hope you’re taking to heart, Raheem, Mayor Siddiq Khan’s admonition not to be alarmed by what you’re seeing,” Gaffney sarcastically told SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam.
“This is, unfortunately, a situation in which you’re right to be alarmed,” he said in a more serious tone. “I think most Brits have the good sense to know that what they’re doing – what their government is doing, what their law enforcement agencies have been doing, and frankly what the British public itself has been doing mostly – has been contributing to the danger that they’re now confronting.”
Gaffney warned against the danger of pretending that what he prefers to call “sharia supremacism” – the aggressive desire to impose Islamic law on Western nations – is not a problem, or is at worst a “manageable” challenge.
“What I really believe has happened now, and what I think this most recent attack bears out – and more to the point, the information that has come out subsequent to it – is that there are something on the order of 23,000 jihadists that are now being monitored in some form or fashion by Her Majesty’s government,” he said.
“This is not a terrorism problem. These certainly aren’t incidents involving ‘lone wolves,’ as they’re called. This is an insurgency,” Gaffney declared. “I think the British people need to be alive to that danger and alarmed by it.”
Kassam praised British intelligence and law enforcement for their work but said it was disturbing that some very obvious signs of trouble – such as a fitness center used by one of the London Bridge attackers that is actually named after the “ummah,” or global community of Islam – seem to be overlooked in the name of political correctness.
“The problem on both sides of the pond, I’m sorry to say, is that our governments have – for most of the years since 9/11, especially – been in engaged in a practice that Andy McCarthy has called ‘willful blindness,’” Gaffney said, referring to the former prosecutor who worked on the first World Trade Center bombing, and now writes for National Review. “It’s actually gotten to the point he’s upped it to compulsory blindness.”
“I think that’s a very apt term because if you are obliged by government policy to look the other way at red flags – and the Ummah gym might be one of them, but certainly mosques that are incubating jihadism every day, that are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, that are funded by the Saudis and the Qataris, that are known patrons of this sharia supremacist phenomenon – if you’re not allowed to understand those, let alone contend with them effectively in what a counterinsurgency strategy requires, which is action at the local level, well, guess what: this is going to continue to metastasize,” he warned.
“When our enemies – and I’m talking here most especially about enemies within – perceive us behaving this way, they don’t think of it as, ‘Oh, there they go being politically correct!’ or ‘diversity sensitive’ or ‘multiculturally minded.’ They see it as submission. And what submission induces them to do, doctrinally under sharia, is to become more aggressive to make us feel subdued, as the Koran says, which means much more violence, and I’m afraid more insurgency of the worst kind,” said Gaffney.
“When our enemies witness us submitting, they know it is God’s will being realized, which means they must engage in more jihad,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.