"Creative Appeasement"

Were it not for the fact that President Trump picked an unnecessary fight with him, we might be discussing Sadiq Khan’s notion that Islamist terrorism will remain a  part of our lives. Thus, that we need to learn to live with it.

Trump misread a statement Khan made and decided to have a brawl. Anyone who looked at Khan's original statement knew that Trump was playing a losing hand. In tennis they call it an unforced error. 

Our president should have known better than to embarrass himself at a time when we needed to be discussing the British and European policies of “creative appeasement” toward Islamist terrorism. He was not the issue on London Bridge and he should not have made himself the issue… thereby making Mayor Khan look like a hero.

We ought to be discussing how British society is advertising its weakness and inviting terrorism. Happily, Theodore Dalrymple explains it succinctly this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

Dalrymple emphasizes that his fellow Brits have been falling all over themselves to accommodate Islam, especially practices and values that are not British:

Instead, we have gone in for what a Dutch friend of mine calls “creative appeasement.” Authorities make concessions even before, one suspects, there have been any demands for them. Thus, a public library in Birmingham, one of the largest known to me, has installed women-only tables, a euphemism for Muslim women only. Whether there was ever a request or demand for sex-segregated seating from Muslims is probably undiscoverable; truth seldom emerges from a public authority. But the justification would almost certainly be that without such tables, Muslim women would not be able to use the library at all.

One understands that today’s tough British feminists have nothing to say about sex-segregation. They are too afraid to speak up or to speak out.

You can say anything you want about any religion you want, except for Islam. But, when you accommodate the Muslim religion you are telling Muslims that they need not assimilate, but that they are conquering heroes who have the right to impose their values on a weak and declining Europe:

The Birmingham airport has set aside a room for wudu, the Muslim ablutions before prayer. No other religion is catered for in this fashion (nor should they be, in my opinion), so the impression is inevitably given that Islam is in some way favored or privileged. Again, it would be difficult to find out whether they received requests or demands for such a room or merely anticipated them; in either case, weakness is advertised.

So the Kumbaya chorus, the light-a-candle expression of deep feeling for the victims of terrorism, encourages more terrorism. It looks servile and submissive, and that tells the terrorists that they are on the winning team:

From all this the terrorists surely draw a great deal of comfort. It gives them the impression of living in a weak society that will be easy to destroy, so that their acts are not in the least nihilistic or pointless, as is often claimed. They perceive ours as a candle-and-teddy-bear society (albeit mysteriously endowed with technological prowess): We kill, you light candles. The other day I passed a teddy-bear shop, that is to say a shop that sold nothing but teddy bears. I am sure that terrorism is good for business, but the teddy bears are more reassuring for the terrorists than for those who buy them to place on the site of the latest outrage.

The terrorists were on police radar for months if not years. And yet, the pusillanimous police did nothing to surveil or control them. In truth, they are spending their money on their massive welfare states and do not have any money left to keep track of the terrorists in their midst:

Another source of comfort for terrorists is that after every new atrocity, the police are able to arrest multiple suspected accomplices. That suggests the police knew the attackers’ identities in advance but did nothing—in other words, that most of the time terrorists can act with impunity even if known. Here, then, is further evidence of a society that will not defend itself seriously. This is not just a British problem. The April murder of a policeman on the Champs Elysées in Paris was committed by a man who had already tried to kill three policemen, who was known to have become fanaticized, and who was found with vicious weapons in his home. The authorities waited patiently until he struck.

[Addendum: See also this column from the Observer.]