Part Two: The Chocolate Cake Diet
“Though Muslim population growth in the UK will push us inexorably into violent conflict, our analysis must attempt to move beyond generalities and consider exactly how and when such conflict is most likely to break out. The pressure driving us towards conflict is steady and inexorable, but the escalations of that conflict will be discrete and sudden.”
This is the second of a five-part series by El Inglés comparing and contrasting the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the coming Muslim Troubles in Britain. The first part is available here.
The entire series will be made published as a single document in pdf format after the final part is posted at Gates of Vienna.
Once again, a caveat for readers who are new to El Inglés’ work: this paper is descriptive, not normative. None of us wants to live through what El Inglés is predicting, but we may very well have to.
Our Muslim Troubles: Lessons from Northern Ireland
by El Inglés
IV. The Focus on Terrorism
Before we launch into a discussion of the likely characteristics of our Muslim Troubles, we will take a minor detour to build on the previous chapter by further explaining why, though the likely severity of our Muslim Troubles can legitimately be debated, we consider some sort of violent conflict to be inevitable. Here, we will examine something that highlights just how hopeless the response of our political establishment has been to the problems that Islam and Muslims have created for us in Britain.
One of the most crippling problems to date with the debate on Islam in the UK has been the focus on terrorism. This focus is slowly shifting, but it still lingers, extending a baleful effect over attempts to deal with the real problem, which is the presence in the UK of large and ever-larger numbers of Muslims. Continued Muslim immigration into European countries will lead ineluctably to widespread, violent, tribal conflict that will rip those countries apart, and potentially result in the deaths of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people throughout Western Europe. Yet, in the UK, our ability to openly discuss these vital matters has been badly compromised by a stated desire on the part of those in government to prevent terrorism, which desire is itself largely insincere. It is too early to pass judgement on the Conservative-led government in this regard, but preventing terrorism was so far down the list of priorities of the Labour government as to astonish.
This is a strong claim, and one that can only be demonstrated through rigorous argument. Much rubbish is spoken about Muslim terrorism, but we shall cut a swathe through it all here and strip things down to basics. Given that most Muslim terrorism is, or is at least intended to be, suicidal in nature, let us assume that, to a reasonable approximation, all Muslim terrorists or would-be terrorists either commit one successful suicide terrorist attack (e.g. the 7/7 bombers) or attempt to do so and are then caught and incarcerated (e.g. the 21/7 bombers). The number of successful acts of terrorism perpetrated in the UK by Muslims every year therefore equals, by definition, the Muslim population of the UK (M) multiplied by the fraction of this population Approving of terrorism in the UK as a political tool (A), multiplied by the fraction of this population that Tries, with however much or little dedication, to conduct an act of terrorism every year (T), multiplied by the fraction of this population that Succeeds (S). If one wishes to reduce the number of such attacks, one must try and reduce some or all of these values. As we have defined the matter here, there is simply no other way of doing it.
The Number of Muslim terrorist attacks (N) taking place in a given year must then be:
N = M x A x T x S
So, in 2005, our equation would have looked something like this:
N = 2,400,000 x 0.1 x 0.01 x 0.00167 = 4
These four people were, of course, the 7/7 bombers responsible for the 2005 bus and Tube bombings in London.
Let us consider the four parameters in slightly more detail. A and T are in essence, psychological parameters that pertain to the way Muslims interpret the demands of their religion and events in the world around them. Virtually by definition, they are the hardest of the four to measure, to understand, or to adjust. Countless reams of excruciating guff have been written on the subjects of winning hearts and minds, of empowering the moderates to take on the extremists, of midwifing the Islamic Reformation, and of winning the debate between secularism and fundamentalism. However, despite the great cogitation that its creators presumably indulged in, Prevent, the flagship counter-radicalisation programme of the Labour government, has now been kicked to the kerb, derided by all and sundry as useless at best and counterproductive at worst. This is a crucial point: any attempt to mould people psychologically can have results quite the opposite of those intended, as the underlying psychological substrate of the human mind is simply not amenable to being manipulated in this matter. No even remotely rigorous or reliable method exists for altering the parameters A or T, and attempts to do so are the purest voodoo.
Parameter M, in contrast, has real and obvious meaning. Irrelevant debates about who is a ‘real’ Muslim to one side, it is clear that there are very many Muslims in the UK and that their numbers are growing very rapidly. The causes of this rapid growth are Muslim immigration and higher Muslim fertility. The latter of these two causes is difficult to control directly, but the former is straightforward in principle for a wealthy, technologically advanced island nation in the north-west of Europe. This means that M is a parameter over which the government can extend massive influence over, particularly in the long term.
Parameter S bundles together a number of different factors but derives most obviously from the competence and resources of the security establishment relative to the terrorist threat. A fixed-size security establishment will not be able to keep S (and therefore successful terrorist attacks) at zero year after year in the face of a growing threat (which we can consider to be equal to M x A x T). As S cannot be adjusted directly, but only by creating a security apparatus to try and keep it as low as possible, we take the Efficiency of the security apparatus as being E, and define S = 1 — E. Now, as long as E can be kept equal to one, no successful attacks will occur in any given year. As the terrorist threat mounts, keeping E equal to one will become harder and harder and require an ever greater degree of funding and expertise. Note that E will vary discontinuously from year to year as a function of luck, the competence of Muslim terrorists, and the competence of the security apparatus of other countries, and that N itself will therefore vary discontinuously.
We now have a basic grasp of our parameters. A and T cannot be measured, understood, or adjusted with any meaningful degree of control at all, and attempts to reduce them may well backfire. S can be adjusted only indirectly and without complete control through pouring resources into the security services, and hoping that they can keep the value of E from dropping below 1. M, on the other hand is subject to a very significant degree of what we shall call trajectory control, in that the actions of government (especially a ruthless government) can extend huge influence over its long-term trajectory, for better or for worse.
How then, did the Labour government attack the problem of Muslim terrorism? We have noted that, central to the entire government effort to prevent ‘violent extremism’ was Prevent, a desperate and embarrassing effort to reduce A and T by giving Muslim youth table tennis facilities and other such nonsense. Meanwhile, Blair and then Brown continued to allow Muslims to flood into Britain through family reunion and other mechanisms (which was actually expanded when they came to power in 1997), and be subsidized to have large families by the British taxpayer. This put Muslims (which is to say, M) onto a massively mushrooming trajectory, which they are only now starting to be dislodged from by the Conservative-led government. No mention of Muslim terrorism by anyone in the Labour government (or the police under their control) that we are aware of ever addressed this simple point. M was simply out of bounds, utterly beyond the pale. The Muslim terrorist threat, defined by us as M x A x T, was somehow unrelated to one of its three parameters, M. Trajectory control of M was relinquished to Muslims themselves, whose predisposition for importing close relatives to procreate with has been driving it up rapidly.
Let us consider the significance of this. If M doubles over a given period of time, then halving, say, A, results in N retaining exactly the same value as it had to begin with. In other words, the apparently impossible task of reducing by half the fraction of the Muslim population of Britain approving of terrorist attacks against Britain, even if achieved, would be cancelled out completely if the Muslim population had doubled over the same time period. M is currently thought to be about 2.9 million, up from about 1.8 million in 2001, and presumably from approximately 1.5 million in 1997, when Labour came to power. This is a near doubling of M over the 13 years of the Labour government, a development which would negate huge successes with respect to A and T even if they could be achieved, which they cannot.
What this means is that the only hope for preventing Muslim terrorism is to focus on keeping S as low as possible, which means keeping E at a value of 1. Certainly we must give thanks for a security service that appears, by and large, to do an extremely good job of preventing Muslims who want to kill us from killing us. But, as members of the security service would be the first to acknowledge, there is simply no way in which they can expect to reliably interdict every single such attempt in perpetuity. That the number of successful Muslim terrorist attacks in the UK so far should be so low stems substantially from factors inherent to the Muslim population of the UK rather than from the intrinsic brilliance of MI5 or Special Branch. Should these factors themselves evolve, and Muslim terrorists obtain any of the formidable strengths of the PIRA, we will be in a very different situation.
If, then, a government claims to be terribly concerned about Muslim terrorism, yet wilfully ignores the only parameter (M) it has any significant control over to focus on two parameters that it has no control over (A and T) and one that it has a hard-to-evaluate influence on (S), what are we forced to conclude about its sincerity other than that it has none? We do not claim here that individual Labour politicians did not care about the 7/7 bombings, or laughed them off as a minor inconvenience. We have no doubt that they were appalled by them and were desperate to prevent them being repeated, but only within the constraints of a program of mass immigration which they had created and to which they were still fully committed. Similarly, one could be desperately eager to lose weight within the constraints imposed by a nutritional program of eating an entire chocolate cake for breakfast every day. But what would an impartial observer make of such behaviour? How much importance would this observer conclude that a person eating a chocolate cake a day really attached to losing weight?
We are forced to conclude that, taken as a whole, the counter-terrorism efforts of the Labour government were about as meaningful as our hypothetical chocolate cake diet would be. Yet, ostensibly in the service of this pathetic charade, we have spent years being told that we must hamstring our ability to address the true nature of the problems created by the Muslim presence in our country. What have we been forbidden to discuss, highlight, or criticize so as not to push the moderates into the arms of the extremists, to use the hackneyed expression that has replaced the thought processes of so many?
We cannot discuss the intrinsically violent and oppressive nature of Islam, as to do so would marginalize Muslims in the UK and push the moderates into the arms of the extremists. We cannot oppose Muslim immigration, as to do so would marginalize Muslims in the UK and push the moderates into the arms of the extremists. We cannot draw attention to the rank criminality of Muslims, as to do so would marginalize Muslims in the UK and push the moderates into the arms of the extremists. We cannot demonstrate against anything to do with Islam (the EDL springs to mind, and has been explicitly, and disgracefully, criticized on these grounds), as to do so would marginalize Muslims in the UK and push the moderates into the arms of the extremists. There is simply no end to the self-censorship required of us.
What are people really saying when they say these things? Assuming they are sincere, they are saying that the imperative to keep the parameters A and T as low as possible (despite the fact that we have no control over them) is so overwhelming in the fight to stop otherwise ‘moderate’ Muslims from deciding to try and kill us (!) that we must turn a blind eye to every other pernicious effect Muslims are having on our country, thereby implicitly accepting that we will be thrust into a tribal conflict that will rip our country apart and kill thousands of people. And this from the same people that are happy for M to become arbitrarily high and celebrate its growth as the dawning of a new age of man!
That preventing acts of terrorism is not the only responsibility of government is clear. If the British state had simply withdrawn from Northern Ireland in 1972 (by far the most murderous year of the Troubles), then the IRA would have had no reason to commit terrorist acts on the British mainland. However, few British people indeed would have supported such a course of action. Similarly, few would condemn the immigration policies of the Labour government vis-à-vis Muslims if there existed some massive compensatory benefit to us of the Muslim presence in this country. But as we have established in earlier documents, and as is painfully clear by now in a purely intuitive way to boot, Muslim immigration into Britain has been a catastrophe for the British people quite irrespective of the terrorist threat Muslims pose, due to the criminality, parasitism, and general unpleasantness of Muslims.
Whether or not any particular criticism of the Muslim presence in the UK or Islam in general really increases A or T is a virtually impossible-to-answer empirical question. But the answer is irrelevant. We must speak out about what Muslim immigration is pushing us towards, which is a violent conflict that will make isolated terrorist attacks look like small beer in comparison. Is it not better to face this reality, and, perhaps, a greater short-term threat of terrorism, than to stay on the conveyor belt and be fed into the crusher? But this, not one single figure in mainstream British politics has yet done. This is the scale of the problem, and provides an insight into how hard it will be to turn this ship around before it smashes onto the rocks of a violent, tribal conflict.
V. Towards Conflict
Though Muslim population growth in the UK will push us inexorably into violent conflict, our analysis must attempt to move beyond generalities and consider exactly how and when such conflict is most likely to break out. The pressure driving us towards conflict is steady and inexorable, but the escalations of that conflict will be discrete and sudden. Attempting to predict in detail what these escalations will consist of would be an exercise in futility, but considering what general form they are likely to take is an endeavour well worth the effort.
Whatever form the flashpoints of violent conflict between British and Muslims take, they will obviously not take place in the Scottish Highlands, or in deepest, darkest Cornwall. Conflict will flare first and most obviously in areas where large Muslim populations live side-by-side with large populations of the British. This means that there are three main areas where this conflict can flare up, and where it will doubtless be concentrated thereafter: the north-west of England, the West Midlands, and the Greater London area. We argue here that there are two main types of events that are likely to constitute the key triggering and escalating events in our Muslim Troubles: riots and terrorist attacks. We will consider each in turn here.
Riots
Just as the crucial developments that led to the deployment of the British Army in NI were the rioting on the Bogside housing estate in Derry and the rioting in Belfast that was a direct response to it, we feel comfortable in stating that the most obvious stepping stones on the path to outright violent conflict will be more or less lethal riots in the key urban areas we mentioned above. In other words, our Muslim Troubles are likely to commence when specific towns and cities obtain such large Muslim populations that the tension that has been brewing in them for such a long time bursts to the fore in riots which the police cannot control, which result in serious injuries, deaths, and people being forced from their homes, and which are so severe as to make it clear that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that the divide between Muslim and Briton is total.
Of course, we have already seen severe riots in many Muslim-heavy towns and cities in the north of England, but the 2001 riots were insufficient to ignite outright conflict between Muslims and British for a variety of reasons. Firstly, these riots were prior to 9/11 and the rapid escalation of tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims throughout the West that has ensued. Secondly, they took place before the rapid recent growth of a pan-European consciousness that our countries are, quite simply, being colonized by massive influxes of rapidly-breeding Muslims who have failed utterly in the task of turning their own countries into places worth living in. Thirdly, the areas in question were simply not Muslim enough in 2001. If, in 2031, similar riots break out again in, say, the north of England, by which time the Muslim population will be much larger and an extra twenty years’ worth of hatred and fear will have been allowed to build, the results will certainly be very different. The key question is not whether such riots would push us over the edge into our Muslim Troubles, but whether we are even likely to get through to 2031 before they occur.
There are already a number of towns and cities in England whose Muslim populations are of the order of 20%. Bearing in mind that the demographic profiles of Muslims and Britons are quite different, with Muslim populations having younger median ages, let us assume that areas like this already have populations aged 18 and younger that are already 30%—35% Muslim. As our key assumption, outlined earlier, was that the British government will fail to display the will required to pre-empt the conflict, we are also assuming that Muslim immigration will continue largely as it is conducted at present. Accordingly, the Muslim populations and the young Muslim populations must be expected to continue to rise very quickly. Of course there is no scientific way of determining when we enter the danger zone for a complete disintegration of civil order, but the extreme tensions over the last couple of years in Luton and the emergence and growing profile of the EDL suggest that it is being approached fairly quickly in the UK, as in so many places throughout Europe. We will assume here that a 2:1 ratio of Britons to Muslims, and the approximately 1:1 ratio young Muslims to young Britons that will accompany it will certainly precipitate this situation (which is not to suggest that it could not happen earlier). Again, precise predictions are impossible, especially given that white flight is already accelerating the conversion of certain towns and cities in England into Muslim-dominated zones. Here we will, in a slightly arbitrary fashion, establish a time twenty years from now, in 2031, as being that point in time at which at least some towns or cities in England are tipping over into becoming majority-Muslim in their young populations, and in which riots of the sort we described above could happen at any time. In other words, we claim here that our Muslim Troubles must start by about 2031 at the very latest as long as our underlying assumption of ‘no change of course’ holds true.
Terrorist Attacks
The wild card in this consideration of how the conflict will start is the possibility of terrorist attacks, perpetrated by either side, against the other. Such attacks will act as sparks, setting alight the increasingly pitch-soaked fabric of 21st century Britain. This is not completely inconsistent with our above claim that rioting will be the trigger, as terrorist attacks could turn out to be what sparks the localized violence bitter enough to descend into permanent conflict. But they are nonetheless a distinct phenomenon in their own right, in that sufficiently appalling terrorist atrocities could plunge us straight into our Muslim Troubles years before they would otherwise have been caused by ‘normal’ rioting.
Though Muslims would have to be the odds-on favourites to commit terrorist attacks of this sort, it would be foolish in the extreme to rule out the possibility of British paramilitaries of whatever sort deciding to, for example, car-bomb a mosque. We will have a great deal more to say on such matters in subsequent sections. Let it suffice for the moment for us to observe that, as we will see in a later section, the record of the loyalist paramilitaries in NI during the Troubles provides little reason to believe that those British who consider themselves British (excluding therefore the PIRA and other republican paramilitaries) would refuse to engage in such ruthless and murderous activities.
Of course, we have already suffered terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks at the hands of Muslims. British people were shocked and appalled by the 7/7 bombings in 2005, but they did not threaten to tip us over into any sort of civil conflict. The reasons for this include all the reasons that the riots in the north of England in 2001 could not do so, but include the following separate reasons as well: a) they were carried out against relatively impersonal targets in central London, and b) they did not target any one particular, geographically-rooted community which could feel as a consequence that its very viability was threatened and that would therefore be motivated to strike back. As demographic change proceeds and racial and religious tensions mount, the likelihood of British or Muslim paramilitaries targeting their neighbours and creating a situation reminiscent of the divide between the Protestant Shankill Road and Catholic Falls Road in Belfast will increase. Terrorist attacks on the religious, commercial, or residential hearts of specific geographic communities are far more likely to precipitate long-term violent conflict than repetitions of the 7/7 bombings.
The 2:1 Protestant-to-Catholic ratio in NI in 1969 was a very long way away from anything that currently obtains in the UK with respect to its Muslim population, which is still less than 5% of the whole. This being the case, some will undoubtedly be inclined to think that trouble is therefore a long way off. But we should think hard about which geographical units are of most relevance to our analysis. Which areas should we be focusing on? Individual towns and cities? Areas such as the Midlands? England? Which populations should we be comparing?
To compare the current Muslim population of the UK (just under 5%) to the Catholic population of NI when conflict erupted (about 33%) would be to miss the point. Those parts of Britain undergoing rapid colonization by Muslims are, taken by themselves, only small parts of Britain. But NI itself is only a small part of Britain. It is the local population balance that seems to matter, and NI was a good example of this. Would we say that the 500,000-strong Catholic population of NI in 1969 was only a tiny minority of the whole of the UK, and that violent conflict could therefore not break out between it and some other part of the population? Obviously not, as it is a historical fact that such conflict did break out. Why could something similar not happen in, say Birmingham? Why could conflict envelop an area such as NI, but not a city such as Birmingham, whose population is of the same order of magnitude as that of NI in 1969, or an area such as the north-west of England, whose population is considerable larger?
If, in this context, there is any major difference between the Troubles in NI and our forthcoming Muslim Troubles, it will be that the Troubles were seen largely as being a foreign conflict in a foreign land by most of the population of the mainland UK. The tolerance on the part of the British public and political class for violence in NI was therefore relatively high. An awareness of this reality was one of the factors that led the IRA to start bombing England in the early 1970s, and to strike again repeatedly in London and Manchester in the 1990s. Nothing like this will be the case when British and Muslims fall into low-intensity war with each other in and around the three key conflict areas of the north-west of England, the West Midlands, and Greater London. Most of the population of England will be either in, or close to, one of these war zones, a reality which will instantly confer an edge to the conflict quite different to that of the Troubles,[6] even ignoring its much greater scale.
Coming up:
Part Three: An Explosive Situation
Notes:
| 6. | This is said from the perspective of an Englishman. The Troubles undoubtedly had quite enough edge already for those who happened to live in Belfast. |
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