Islamists are Starting to Influence the UK -- We MUST Push Back

What events in Birmingham reveal about the UK

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Credit: Mark Kerrison

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Nearly one year ago, a major report into Islamist influence in France warned the country faces an entirely new kind of political challenge — not terrorism or violent insurgency, but something quieter, more patient, and more corrosive.

Political Islam, the report warned, is now advancing not from the ‘top down’, through organised violence, but from the ‘bottom up’, by embedding itself in local institutions, municipal politics, schools, charities, and community organisations. Not by force, but by local pressure. Not by revolution, but by forcing compliance.

The danger, it warned, lies in a slow process of capture. The state retreats, civic norms erode, and national life is gradually reorganised around Islamist sensitivities.

At the time, many experts in Britain either ignored the report altogether or mumbled something like “France is different”. A different model of integration. A different history of immigration. A different political culture.

But not so fast.

Because now the very same problem is starting to emerge in Britain, pointing to a dark and worrying future if we do not urgently change course.

Just look at what we have learned in recent days.

For a start, there have been extremely worrying developments in the country’s second city of Birmingham, where institutions are increasingly unwilling to defend liberal democratic norms when confronted by local Islamist and sectarian pressures.

Take the case of West Midlands Police decision to ban Israeli fans from attending a football match at Aston Villa’s Villa Park stadium —a decision that Conservative MP Nick Timothy has been ruthlessly dismantling in recent weeks.

The official justification for banning Israeli football fans, you might remember, was “intelligence” suggesting that supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv football club, based on protests in the Netherlands, posed a unique threat to public order.

But as Timothy has showed, and as reporting over the weekend confirms, this justification has now entirely collapsed under scrutiny.

There was no such intelligence. What actually appears to have driven the decision in Birmingham was pressure from local independent Muslim politicians and activist groups —linked to Islamists and mosques that have hosted anti-Semitic preachers— who demanded Jewish football fans be banned from Britain’s second city.

Read this —it is absolutely chilling—and then let me explain why the forthcoming local elections will also make this threat unavoidable:

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