Election of five UK Islamists may be a glimpse of things to come

Before the opening of the new Parliament in London last week, MPs swore allegiance to the Crown on the King James Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Sundar Gutka prayerbook, the Koran and the Hebrew Bible. All this demonstrated the wide diversity of British society in 2024.

This positive imagery was shattered by the election of five independents who campaigned solely on an “immediate ceasefire for Gaza” platform.

It can certainly be argued that this was undoubtedly the democratic right of British citizens to cast their vote for whomever they wished. The merciless bombing of the Israelis has caused the deaths of multitudes of innocents in Gaza and coupled with the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage, persuaded in the region of 30% of Muslim voters to defect from Labour.

While this is partly understandable, there is, however, a darker side to the campaign of the independents. Several leading Labour figures – both Muslim and non-Muslim – who did not follow the Gaza line to the letter narrowly scraped home.

There was intimidation of those who chose to differ during the campaign – and this extended to other issues such as abortion rights. And this is without even mentioning the avalanche of online abuse.

During the past couple of years, British MPs have rightly worried about their safety. Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a member of the far Right in 2016 while the Conservative MP David Amess was killed by an Islamist in 2021.

The independents took their cue from “The Muslim Vote”which was established just a few weeks after October 7. It projected itself as “a loose collective” yet it has galvanised the nearly four million Muslims in the UK to place Gaza at the top of their priorities. It was more than a validation of solidarity with the cause of the Palestinians.

It was equally a display of Islamic nationalism. It was a far cry from the 15 UK Muslim clerics who immediately denounced Hamas’s butchery on October 7 and “the abduction of innocent people’ as well as Israel’s use of ‘excessive force”.

The broad network which brought five independents to “the mother of parliaments” has its origins in the rise of Palestinian Islamism through such organisations as Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the 1990s. Suicide bombing was then a weapon of choice. They worked arduously to destroy the Oslo Accords – and in unofficial alliance with Netanyahu, the elimination of the prospect of peace and a two-state solution. The war in Gaza today is led by the rejectionists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict, during the Oslo period.

Hamas emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s. It had always believed in a Greater Palestine and not in a two-state solution. In October 2021, a conference allegedly took place in Gaza as to how the Jews were be uprooted in the event of certain victory.

In the mid-1990s, the Muslim Brotherhood influenced the formation of groups in the UK such as the Muslim Association of Britain and the Leicester-based Friends of al-Aqsa.

The far Left made common cause with them, regarding the Muslim community as a new proletariat which could be turned towards revolution. On the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, Islamists, Trotskyists and Stalinists brought out hundreds of thousands in protest. In 2023-24, this pattern was repeated, and capitalised on the public anguish at the decimation of Gaza.

Many young people, oblivious of the tortuous history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, joined the pro-Palestinian protests. This built upon a disaffection with politics generally. Unlike Australia, where voting is compulsory, less than half of 18-24-year-olds bothered to vote in the 2024 British election. By contrast, 81% of the over-65s did.

The appeal to peace and justice in Palestine by local Islamists captivated many Muslim voters but their version of recent history also projected deep lacunae in the narrative. The Islamists were virtually silent on the mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Any mention of Hamas was airbrushed out of existence and substituted with the catch-all of “Palestinians”.

The local Islamists made no distinction between the state and the government in Israel. The families of the hostages who similarly called for a ceasefire in Gaza were ignored – they were an inconvenience. There was no outreach to Israelis and critical British Jews who do not disavow Zionism – the only good Jews were fellow travellers who accepted every full stop and comma in the Islamist narrative.

Instead, there has been a determined push to convert Israelis into Nazis, Palestinians into Jews and to describe the loss of life in Gaza as “genocide”. The daubing of Gaza graffiti on the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam was an example of this.

A demonstration by ‘Youth Demand’ at the Cenotaph in central London, commemorating the dead in two world wars, similarly upended history. ‘Youth Demand’ illustrated their protest with the comment that 12,000 Palestinian Arabs had volunteered to serve in the British army at the outset of World War II. It justified its presence at the Cenotaph with the statement that “we must also honour their sacrifice and to do everything we can to stop the genocide in Gaza”.

What was missing from this rendition was the fact that over 130,000 Jews in Palestine joined the British armed forces during the first week of conscription. The Jews in Palestine offered financial compensation to the local Arabs if they joined up. The Jews had a motive in that an Arab force would satisfy British demands of symmetry from both communities – and thereby allow the Jews to form a Jewish regiment.

By the end of the war, half the Palestinian Arabs had defected with their weapons. Youth Demand also somehow missed out any mention of a survey of Palestinian Arabs, conducted in February 1941. This indicated that 88% supported the Nazis and only 9% the British.

The contortions of British Islamists proved to be welcome fodder for the Christian Nationalist, J. D. Vance – now Trump’s candidate for vice-president. He surmised that Britain could become the first truly Islamist country now that Labour was in power. Even if said in jest to amuse the evangelicals, Vance has travelled a long way since he said that Trumpism was “cultural heroin to blue collar Americans”.

He has journeyed towards those who believe in the second coming of Donald Trump with “God on his side”. Vance therefore did not certify the 2020 election result. He has also flirted with the great replacement theory, masterminded by the puppet master – the Jews.

Vance also believed that George Soros might fund abortion flights from his native Ohio to California. And of course, he agreed with Trump that US Jews should be ashamed of themselves in voting Democrat in such huge numbers.

Vance has advanced towards the White House with the conviction of a zealous convert. His elevation symbolises the victory of national conservatism in the Republican party. In the topsy-turvy world of Trumpland, even Barack Obama has been transformed into “a white liberal”.

Almost 100 years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt. Its direct descendent, the Muslim Association of Britain, today seeks to bring back British Muslims to “a correct understanding” of Islam. It promotes religion as more important than other aspects of identity.

The election of five independents can be explained as a protest vote defined by racism, indifference and poverty. Yet it was not a flash in the pan but the product of hard work by local Islamists who cared little for liberal Muslims and sympathetic Labour MPs. The tipping over into anti-Jewish feeling can be seen in the demonstration last week outside the Great Synagogue in Sydney.

The extreme, the blind and the gullible on the British Left willingly applaud the ascent of Islamic nationalism. The Jews, as history has always indicated, are once again wedged in as the rational alternative – an unpopular and precarious position to be placed in – and a target for the wrath of those who look for instant salvation for the woes of today.

All of this may well be a glimpse of the shape of things to come.