ROBERT SPENCER: Theresa May’s Tories Targeted Critics of Islam Instead of Terrorists

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The United Kingdom and the world are still reeling from the jihad terror attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that murdered 22 people and injured 59, and the country remains on high alert as police have uncovered and are hunting for the members of an entire jihadi network connected with the Manchester attack.

MI5 has also revealed that there are as many as 23,000 jihad terrorists on the streets of Britain today.

That’s an army. And Britain is indeed at war. But this is not just a problem that Prime Minister Theresa May has the responsibility to solve. It is also a problem that she and her colleagues have created.

This Britain of troops on the streets and high tension over another imminent jihad attack is the Britain that Theresa May and her ilk have chosen. This is the Britain of the policies that she and her predecessors, David Cameron,Gordon Brown, and Tony Blair have followed for years. They now have the Britain they have made. In getting to today’s traumatized, bloodied, nervous, frightened Britain, they followed a multi-pronged strategy.

One chief element of this strategy was to demonize and marginalize anyone who spoke too clearly about the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism.

For years, May and her cohorts have hounded, stigmatized, and demonized foes of jihad terror, falsely claiming that they represent a “far-right” equivalent to jihad terrorists, while appeasing and accommodating Muslim groups in Britain, many of which were by no stretch of the imagination “moderate,” and allowing numerous jihad preachers to operate without hindrance.

Meanwhile, Britain has a steadily lengthening record of admitting jihad preachers without a moment of hesitation. Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri’s preaching of hatred and jihad violence was so hardline that he was banned from preaching in Pakistan, but the UK Home Office welcomed him into Britain.

The UK Home Office recently admitted Shaykh Hamza Sodagar into the country, despite the fact that he has said: “If there’s homosexual men, the punishment is one of five things. One – the easiest one maybe – chop their head off, that’s the easiest. Second – burn them to death. Third – throw ’em off a cliff. Fourth – tear down a wall on them so they die under that. Fifth – a combination of the above.”

May’s government likewise admitted two jihad preachers who had praised the murderer of a foe of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. One of them was even welcomed at the airport by no less illustrious a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What can one conclude from all this than that the British government is indifferent to the preaching of jihad terror and Sharia oppression in the country?

But toward Christian preaching it is not so charitable.

The UK government last December banned three bishops from areas of Iraq and Syria where Christians are persecuted from entering the country. And of course, May also has banned me from entering the country for the crime of saying: “[Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers.”

Yet that is a manifest and readily demonstrable fact. It was tantamount to banning me for saying that human beings need oxygen to live.

In sum, May and her predecessors for years have been effectively encouraging the preaching of jihad, while energetically discouraging and stigmatizing resistance to jihad.

That road leads to Manchester.

When you ban foes of jihad and allow jihad preachers to enter and preach all over the country, you’re going to get more jihad. And so that is what Britain has today, and will have a great deal more of in the near future.

Events canceled for security concerns, heavily armed troops roaming the trains and the streets, the candle and flower industries booming as more and more impromptu monuments spring up to an ever-rising number of victims of jihad — this is Theresa May’s Britain. This is the Britain she wanted. This is the Britain she has.

If Britain survives as a free nation, which is quite reasonably in question at this point, Theresa May will not be remembered as a statesman. She will be excoriated as the useful idiot she is, one among the small group that is chiefly responsible for the downfall of British society.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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