By now, you’ve heard about the petition in the UK to ban entry to The Donald.
Oooh, a petition. That’ll show him. Maybe, if they have time left over, they can petition to stop jihadis from slitting throats on the London Tube, too.
Well anyway, the British population is aghast — aghast! — that Trump has said hateful things about Muslims. Or at least, they call his words hateful. It lets them be aghast.
Because it’s so hard to be aghast about an idea that’s merely unenforceable, or impractical. What they’re actually upset about is Trump drawing a direct connection between Islam and violence.
Islam is the religion-of-peace, dontcha know? It has that name trademarked or something. Which is a neat trick, having a founder sometimes known as “the Prophet of the Sword”.
We’ve now come to the part of the script where we are *supposed* to put disclaimers — about the majority of Islam being wonderful, and that jihadis killing innocents have gone rogue. Or something. Trump makes no such disclaimers. And people are pissed.
But not all people. In fact, a British TV personality (Katie Hopkins) is confirming a lot of what Trump is saying. He said, for example, “We have places in London so radicalized that police are afraid for their lives.”
In the UK, she tells us, that’s correct. There actually ARE problems directly connected to Muslim communities. [To say nothing of the 3 Mosques raided in France that were essentially armories.] Mostly peaceful, remember?
Five “Bobbies” have come forward and acknowledged that there really are neighborhoods they do not patrol while in uniform. Ms. Hopkins goes further. It isn’t just the police that are in fear; it’s the public, too. There are cameramen in London that text their loved ones on the hour to confirm they are safe.
And she draws another insight to the jihadis that only a Brit could provide. She applied lessons learned from the “The Troubles” (the violent uprising associated with the IRA).
“The IRA would not have enjoyed decades of success without many among the Northern Irish Catholic population acting just the same way as the imams and family and friends of extremists in Luton today. … In part we ARE a radicalized nation, and it does nobody any favours to deny the obvious. Trump wants to call a temporary halt to Muslim immigration until America figures out what is going on.”
What is the difference between Trump, and his opposites on both sides of the Atlantic? Whether or not you like his solution, at least he is acknowledging a problem exists. The other team is busily denying there is a problem, and their anger is reserved, not for perpetrators of violence, but those who try to identify and remedy it.
Have a better solution than Trump’s? Great, let’s hear it, and evaluate it. But your first step is identifying the problem.
And thus far, Progressives? You’ve got bupkis.
