British Home Secretary Theresa May announced last week:
[I]n the not-too-distant future we will be launching an anti-extremism, counter-extremism strategy as a Government. That will be looking across the board at all forms of extremism — yes, Islamist extremism, but also neo-Nazi extremism.
Is Dr. Strangelove patrolling the British countryside in his wheelchair? Has Oswald Mosley mysteriously reappeared and begun ranting on the BBC?
Do the handful of skinheads, convicts, and other idiots with swastikas on their necks sieg-heiling around the fringes of British society really constitute a threat equivalent to that of the international jihad? Hardly. And Theresa May certainly knows it.
She not only knows there is a global threat from Islamic jihadists, she also can’t help but be aware of the fact that there is a very severe and imminent jihad threat within Britain itself. To equate this with a minuscule threat from a handful of neo-Nazi nutjobs (who should of course be combated in any case, however much she exaggerates the threat they pose) shows how deeply May and the entire Conservative government of David Cameron are beholden to Islamic supremacists who will pillory the government as “racist,” “bigoted,” and “Islamophobic” if it speaks too forthrightly and honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.
The enlightened and multicultural home secretary is not, of course, speaking just about real neo-Nazis. She also almost certainly is lumping in with neo-Nazis the opponents of jihad terror that she and her government consider to be “right wing.”
In doing this, she has behind her a series of libels from groups such as the far-Left Hope not Hate, and the Marxist, Palestinian jihad-supporting One Law for All to abet this mischaracterization. Both groups, and others like them, have labored for years to brand those who dissent from their far-Left, anti-Israel stances as “right-wing extremists.”
In taking up these tendentious smears and giving them the imprimatur of the British government, May and her cohorts have ruled all honest discussion about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism as being unacceptable discourse. In place of that honest discussion, the government has instituted the prevailing fantasies about how Islam is a “Religion of Peace,” and groups such as the Islamic State are not Islamic.
She is, in other words, smearing an honest and realistic response to the jihad threat as “neo-Nazi,” and is enforcing falsehoods about “Islamist extremism” that will hamstring, and ultimately doom to failure, her government’s attempts to combat it.
The same thing is happening in Obama’s America. The administration has published several statements and reports about the threat from “right-wing extremists” while consistently denying the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat. He even did so last Wednesday, after a gay, black man murdered two white journalists in a rage over injustices he believed he had suffered. Obama said:
What we know is that the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism.
Just as with the recent “study” that purported to show that “right-wing extremists” were more of a threat than Islamic jihadists, in saying this Obama is probably leaving out the deaths from 9/11. And if even a fraction of the foiled jihad plots had come to fruition, this would be an even more risible claim than it is.
But this is the opinion of the powerful elites in both America and Britain today, and in both countries, innocent people are going to suffer as a result. Innocents will be unjustly tarred as “right-wing extremists,” and will be susceptible to the incomplete, faulty response to the very real jihad threat that the American and British governments would rather wish away than confront.
Unfortunately, the confrontation cannot and will not be avoided forever. The official denial ensures than when it comes, it will be worse than it could have been had more realistic and effective action been taken sooner. Future generations of free Britons, if there are any, will condemn Theresa May and her boss Cameron as naive fantasists, whose draconian measures against counter-jihadists and blind eye to jihad activity within Britain (except in the most egregious cases) doomed Britain to years of bloodshed and chaos.
In the meantime, British people can sleep easy knowing their government’s good efforts have kept them safe from the neo-Nazi scourge.
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