Muslim baroness says “paranoid” government must make Muslims feel welcome

The idea that the British government, which relentlessly persecutes foes of jihad terror while appeasing and accommodating jihad preachers on a routine basis, is not making Muslims feel welcome is ridiculous. The British government is doing everything it possibly can to make Muslims feel welcome, including increasingly exposing its native population to jihad attacks and Muslim rape gangs rather than crack down on such activity, for fear of being perceived as “Islamophobic.”But Baroness Warsi knows that claims of victimhood lead to further concessions, and so she is playing her role to the hilt. And British authorities, as cowed, cowardly, and witless as they are, will doubtless fall for it yet again.

“Baroness Warsi: ‘Paranoid’ Government must change tack so Muslims feel welcome in Britain,” by Tim Wyatt, Church Times, August 26, 2017 

BRITISH Muslims feel like they must take a daily “loyalty test”, Baroness Warsi, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, has said.

The lawyer and peer, who was previously a minister in the Foreign Office and minister of state for faith and communities in the Coalition Government, said that despite some signs of progress, “I still feel like every day I’m having to face a loyalty test.”

Baroness Warsi was speaking at the Greenbelt festival in Northamptonshire, where she was promoting her new book The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain.

The message she wanted to tell the crowd of hundreds who had gathered to hear her speak on Friday evening was that British Muslims were just like them: young and old, straight and gay, they came in all shapes and sizes

“They shop at Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda,” she said. “The posh ones even go to Waitrose.”

But despite the presence of young, well-integrated Muslims in popular culture, such as the popstar Zayn Malik or the Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, Muslims were still “sick to death of being counted out” of mainstream society.

The Government’s approach amounted to “the paranoid state”, she said, noting how anti-terrorism policy focused solely on proscribing ideology and ignored the other factors research showed pushed people into extremism.

Less than a tenth of one per cent of the three million Muslims living in the UK had anything to do with jihadism, yet the Government’s engagement with this diverse community was seen solely through the prism of counter-terrorism, she lamented.

“There are far more Muslim doctors in the NHS than there are Muslim terrorists,” she said. “We are more likely to be life-savers rather than life-takers. This policy of disengagement is fundamentally wrong.”

In 2014, Baroness Warsi resigned from the Government saying that she could no longer support official policy on the escalating violence between Israel and Gaza (News, 8 August 2014). She described the Government’s stance as “morally indefensible” and not in Britain’s national interest nor consistent with international justice.

In her Greenbelt talk, she explained how the name of her book had come about one year earlier when Lee Rigby had been murdered in Woolwich by Islamist terrorists.

One “right-wing journalist” at The Spectator had questioned her place on the national security council discussing counter-terrorism proposals after the attack, describing her as “the enemy at the table”.

“That insult was the worst. It said that we don’t trust you,” she recalled. “You don’t belong. But the best way to deal with an insult that really hurts you is to own it — this book is my way of fielding that insult.”…