Britain Slumbers Still

What will it take to awaken the British to their plight?

Perhaps more even than will be required to rouse America:

When Britain was attacked last year on 7/7 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the U.K. Within a short time, however, much of the country decided that it was Britain’s own fault on account of “Islamophobia” and the war in Iraq.

Now 25 British Muslims have been arrested for an alleged plot to blast up to ten trans-Atlantic airliners out of the sky. This vast alleged conspiracy, thought to encompass many dozens more plotters from Germany to Pakistan, bears all the monstrous hallmarks of a classic al Qaeda operation. In addition, security sources say that dozens more al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells are at large in the U.K.

From the evidence of one opinion poll this week, the British public has at least woken up to the fact that we are in the throes of a world war. Not so, however, the British establishment and chattering classes. Denial is no longer a river in Egypt but a British pathology.

Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson of the Metropolitan Police described the plot as a “criminal” act which was “not about communities” but about “people who might masquerade in the community, hiding behind certain faiths.” So an act of holy war to be perpetrated in the name of Islam just happened to use that faith as a random bit of camouflage, just as it might have used Zen Buddhism, say, or Zoroastrianism?

Then there’s the customary chorus that it’s all due to the war in Iraq and Britain’s poodling to America. This was also the premise of the letter last weekend by 38 Muslim groups, MPs, and peers that unless Britain altered its foreign policy it would get more terrorist outrages. This shameful threat to the nation produced a furious denunciation by the home secretary, John Reid, for proposing that terrorists should dictate British policies.

But the argument that foreign policy is the cause of the threat to Britain — a claim trotted out by a wide spectrum of people — is itself idiotic beyond measure. As Reid said, there was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.

Even now, much of Britain fails to understand the apocalyptic messianism now driving the regime in Iran to develop nuclear weapons with which to blackmail the world.

We have clutched a viper to our breast these past 30 years with the Western embrace of the cult of death. Now true cultists have come, and some of us would respond by leaping on the point of their swords, eager to gain the moral superiority that comes only from utter victimhood.

"I am the Lamb," Jesus said, "Follow me."

"We are lambs," they cry, "Slaughter us," not comprehending that the necessary sacrifice was made long ago, and for very different reasons than misplaced guilt for ancestral sins.

Inured to death, we welcome our murderers, whom we made not through our successes but through our failure, particularly our failure to defend what our fathers and grandfathers fought to accomplish. We have spit upon them, and now those whom they vanquished have come to claim our birthright.

Britain lost her mighty empire within two generations. Shall we lose ours within but one?

I can't help but think of Churchill, who had the terrible poor fortune to have to watch as the great ancient lights of Europe were extinguished by the Nazis one by one.

He lived to see many of them shine again. Will we?