Matt Goodwin
Britain provided refuge to the senior bodyguard of the leader of Hamas. Then it gave him citizenship. And now he is accused of plotting a major terror attack against Jews.
Yes, you read that right.
Yesterday, thanks to The Sunday Times, we learned that Britain granted asylum and then citizenship to a former bodyguard of Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, before that bodyguard went on to “plot” a major terror attack against Jews ahead of the second anniversary of the October 7th massacre.
“Mr X”, who has also been given anonymity, not only served in the personal security team of the leader of Hamas in Gaza but was given ‘refugee status’ despite people knowing he had worked for the Hamas leader, was the son of another senior Hamas official, and had already been arrested for operating a tunnel into Gaza.
Despite all of that, he was still, astonishingly, given sanctuary by the British state and able to operate under cover as an ‘IT consultant’ in England’s suburbs, where he is accused of collaborating with Hamas terrorists and plotting to attack Jewish community centres, Israeli diplomats, and pro-Israel demonstrations across Europe.
Cue the outrage.
For much of the last twenty-four hours, social media has been flooded with journalists, politicians, and members of the British public venting their outrage.
How could this happen? What on earth is happening to Britain? How could the British state have let this person slip through the net?
But you know what? I’m not surprised at all.
Because Britain, or more accurately the country’s ruling class, has been doing this for decades. Providing space and support to people who simply hate who we are.
If you read my last book, Suicide of a Nation, then you’ll be familiar with some of the most shocking examples.
Mohammed Emwazi or ‘Jihadi John’, who grew up in social housing in London, subsidised by the British people, and then returned their generosity by joining Islamic State and becoming one of their most well-known executioners.
Hani al-Sibai, the Egyptian ‘Islamic scholar’ and supporter of al-Qaeda who praised the 7/7 bombings as a “great victory” and was reported to be living in a five-bedroom London home while he and his wife received nearly £50,000 in welfare benefits.
Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Islamist, whose family live in a £1.7 million council house in Shepherd’s Bush, and have received thousands in welfare support.
Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Syrian-born extremist cleric who became known as the ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’. Despite celebrating the 9/11 terror attacks, creating the extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, calling for an Islamic state under Sharia law, and branding Britain ‘Dar al-Kufr’ (“the land of the unbelievers”), the British state still gave him a council house in Tottenham and welfare benefits.
Anjem Choudary, the Islamist preacher who is alleged to have influenced more than one hundred Islamists in Britain, including Michael Adebolajo, one of two men who murdered and beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby, claimed welfare benefits while also instructing his followers to claim what he called “jihad-seeker’s allowance”.
And Abu Qatada, once described by a judge as Osama bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe”, who arrived in Britain and claimed asylum before becoming one of Britain’s most notorious extremist preachers. We supported him, too.
Here’s what I wrote earlier this year:
‘We have harboured those who hated us’, wrote Margaret Thatcher, in the shadow of the 9/11 Islamist attacks. ‘Tolerated those who threatened us and indulged those who weakened us’. Thatcher was absolutely right then, and she is right now.
Look around London and you will find countless examples of the ruling class harbouring, if not prioritising, newcomers and outsiders who hate us, threaten us and weaken us – all in the name of a warped, suicidal understanding of empathy.
The same mentality that allowed Pakistani Muslim rape gangs to operate for years now hands social housing, welfare, even passports to men who praise suicide bombings and dream of the destruction of our entire civilisation.”
And it’s still going on today.
Only a few days ago, we learned that Abu Hamza’s wife not only remains the sole registered occupant of their five-bedroom council house in Shepherd’s Bush but that the house is being refurbished at a cost of roughly £70,000 to … British taxpayers!
In other words, in only 48-hours the British people just learned they are subsidising a house makeover for the family of a convicted Islamist terrorist while the British state has just given out citizenship to a committed member of Hamas in Gaza who, by all accounts, appears hellbent on murdering Jews.
You could hardly invent a better metaphor for modern Britain. A state that is so woefully incompetent, a ruling class that is so drunk on the warped mindset of suicidal empathy, and a nation that is so committed to undermining its own survival, that it is directly supporting extremists who one day hope to destroy its civilisation.
And what makes all this even more depressing is just how long it’s been going on.
If anybody in Britain was surprised by the revelations in yesterday’s newspapers about senior Hamas operatives being given British citizenship then they have clearly not been following the research.
It has been twenty years since the courageous commentator Melanie Phillips released Londonistan, a book in which she describes, in detail, how Britain and its hapless ruling class allowed themselves to become a refuge for Islamist extremists.
The term ‘Londonistan’ was first coined by frustrated French officials who believed, with good reason, that Britain had become far too tolerant of extremists in London.
For her part, Melanie Phillips argued that a toxic combination of tolerance toward Islamists, a failed model of multiculturalism that encourages separation rather than integration, elite fears of being called “racist”, and declining confidence in British identity, had all collided to allow an Islamist subculture to develop within Britain.
She was, clearly, ahead of her time.
Today, we would describe the over-arching mentality that has taken hold of the ruling class in Britain and presided over these insane decisions as suicidal empathy.
It is what happens when empathy and compassion become fully detached from self-preservation, when tolerance is shown to those who do not tolerate us in return, and when the rights and welfare of outsiders becomes disconnected from the obligations and responsibilities they have to the nation that provides this support to them.
A serious country would not be granting citizenship to members of Hamas.
A serious country would not be handing out welfare to committed Islamists who seek to destroy our entire way of life.
A serious country would not allow its own charitable sector to be indirectly funding Islamist extremists.
And a serious country would not be doing something else — providing refuge to people who are entering the country illegally, on small boats, despite knowing they have included Iranian terrorists, ISIS sympathisers, and other people who hate us.
People like those three Iranian nationals who are currently facing National Security Act charges having been accused of assisting a foreign intelligence service and conducting surveillance connected to intended serious violence in Britain.
People like Rebwar Hamad who, after being convicted of terrorism offences in Italy, applied for a visa to return to Britain. When Britain declined, he paid some money, got into a small boat and came here anyway.
People like Abdelrahmen Adnan Abouelela, who before arriving in Britain illegally, being put into taxpayer-funded hotel accommodation, and sexually assaulting a woman in Hyde Park was accused of making bombs for the Muslim Brotherhood
And now, as we saw this weekend, five men who have been arrested near RAF Fairford on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act after three suspicious vehicles were reported heading towards the military base. Investigators are examining an Iranian connection and many people are asking: how did they get here, too? On the boats?
Whatever happens in the coming days, the question that everybody in Britain should be asking Westminster seems clear to me: why does the British state and the ruling class find it so difficult to distinguish between people who genuinely need our protection and people from whom we, the British people, need protecting?
Twenty years ago, Melanie Phillips and a few others bravely warned where this sick mentality would lead us. Yet instead of learning from it and acting accordingly, Britain’s ruling class has very clearly doubled down.
Every week, it seems to me, we read about seemingly endless examples of the ruling class extending tolerance to people who hate us, sanctuary to people who do not deserve it, and empathy to outsiders while showing no empathy to the British people.
I thought about that yesterday, as I watched our new Labour Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, criticise a lone British activist who has been prosecuted for trying to stop the small boats in the Channel while saying nothing at all about the 210,000 migrants who have entered Britain illegally and have not been prosecuted at all.
That is the deeper scandal. Not simply that dangerous extremists and Islamists have sometimes slipped through the net, but that the British state itself appears to have lost confidence in the very idea that its first duty is to protect the British people.
When does showing compassion turn into recklessness? When does tolerance morph into surrender? And when does offering outsiders sanctuary fundamentally conflict with a country’s ability to protect itself and its own people? These questions are all crucial and yet I cannot see anybody in Westminster even thinking about them.
We’ve had twenty years of warnings. Twenty years of one embarrassing revelation after another. How many more will it take before the British state finally starts doing its job by putting the safety of its own people first and no longer tolerating those who refuse to tolerate us in return?
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