Taki's Mag

As the world struggles to make sense of Anders Breivik’s ugly, senseless slaughter and largely incoherent online manifesto, you might have thought that the Islamist fringe would have enjoyed having the heat taken off them while the world’s attention shifted to extreme Christian-based fanaticism. You’d have thought wrong. Instead, at least one small-but-belligerent group has taken it upon themselves to promptly demolish whatever upsurge in public sympathy they might otherwise be enjoying by forcibly reminding the public that there will always be Muslims who love to act like bat-shit crazy loons at the merest provocation.

Case in point: Muslims against Crusaders (MAC), a nut-fudge fringe group based in the UK, recently instigated a campaign to introduce “Shariah-controlled zones” in various parts of London. A lively and colorful series of stickers and flyers suddenly appeared on buses, streetlamps, and shop windows in various areas of the city, warning pedestrians and drivers that, Rod Serling-fashion, they were now entering…The Shariah Zone. “Islamic Rules Enforced” explained the posters somewhat menacingly, aided by a series of helpful pictograms illustrating the zone’s banned activities—gambling, pornography, alcohol, music, concerts, drugs…it would seem easier to list the activities in which a hapless visitor would be allowed to engage upon entering the designated areas. As far as I can tell, men are still permitted to be clean-shaven when wandering into said neighborhoods and ladies may be uncovered, but hey, it’s still the early days.

The zones are the brainchild of Anjem Choudary, the British-born blowhard who leads the banned militant group Islam4UK (apparently, there isn’t a hadith that forbids annoying SMS-language on grounds of it being “un-Islamic”) and who has commented that the campaign is part of a larger plan to “put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term.”

“We now have hundreds if not thousands of people up and down the country willing to go out and patrol the streets for us,” Choudary says, “and a print run of between 10,000 and 50,000 stickers ready for distribution.”

Nothing says “cultural outreach” like thuggish, self-appointed guardians of religious morality patrolling the streets to intimidate and harass ordinary citizens. The Breivik fallout has led to soul-searching and hand-wringing in Europe’s ongoing debate about the merits and demerits of immigration and multiculturalism. Attention-seeking charlatans such as Choudary and MAC seem determined to prove Breivik’s more paranoid beliefs—you know, the “total Muslim takeover of Europe and the known world” sort of stuff—to have some basis in reality. If I were conspiracy-minded, I might think that Choudary and Breivik were social-media buddies who played poker together on Wednesdays.

You can watch the MAC’s recent press conference on YouTube, with Choudary playing an Islamic Moe to his associate stooges—ineffectual, fussy Larry (Abu Rumaysah), frazzled Shemp (Sayful Islam), and portly, dopey-faced Curly (Abu Izzadeen). It’s easy to laugh at MAC’s self-importance and fake piety—they are, after all, state-benefit-collecting conmen (Izzadeen lives with his wife and three kids off state welfare handouts, which he wittily refers to as “the jihad-seekers allowance”) whose outspoken contempt for their host culture would land them in prison or worse if they were to try it in Iran or Saudi Arabia, and they know it. Their previous zany hijinks include calling for the decapitation of British soldiers serving in Iraq and burning poppies on Britain’s Remembrance (Memorial) Day. Such cartoonish provocations seem so painstakingly engineered to shock mainstream English culture’s straights and squares that they’re hardly worth getting upset about. It’s like the Islamo-retard version of Marilyn Manson doing the Devil sign at a ladies’ Sunday-tea get-together.

Still, vigilante religious police are no laughing matter in many underdeveloped parts of the world, and they’re hardly anybody’s idea of the kind of vibrant, exotic, super-authentic cultural import for which the West should be clamoring. Reports suggest that the British Constabulary is outnumbered—they take down hundreds of Shariah-zone warnings every day, only to have hundreds more appear the next day. If the Shariah zones take root and turn out to be more than an attention-getting media farce, much of their success will depend on whether people are willing to tolerate them. That would seem to include not only moderate Muslims—many of whom likely emigrated from elsewhere precisely to avoid having religious thugs dictate every detail of their dress and behavior—but also the native population.

The Brits I’ve met while living and traveling in Europe tend to fall into two distinct camps. Group A are self-loathing, chinless uber-wimps who express a self-abasing level of contempt for their own nation, culture, and history that borders on the pathological—while they fawn obsequiously over every other culture in the known universe. Group B are shaven-headed, tattoo-faced yobs whose levels of cultural sensitivity and open-mindedness hover at a level somewhere near Himmler’s.

So it will be interesting to see whether this conflagration-in-the-making catches fire. Will the Brits keep to their traditional preference for a quiet life—avoiding eye contact when entering Islam-dominated boroughs, dressing “their” women modestly, and preemptively submitting in the name of tolerance, diversity, and respect? Or will working-class yobs, enraged at being denied the right to a pint of lager in their own neighborhoods, react with the equally quaint British tradition of “glassing” their opponents and other such thuggish violence? Will women cover themselves modestly to avoid harassment in certain designated (and presumably ever-expanding) areas? Or will they take the risk of letting their full British “slag” hang out openly?

Thankfully, those of us who don’t live in Britain won’t need to find out firsthand. A multi-ethnic, religiously diverse tapestry’s rich delights always seem more entertaining from a safe distance.