Faux Muslim leaders worse than no leaders at all
The Australian
12:00AM June 7, 2017
Janet Albrechtsen
A fortnight after an Islamic terrorist mowed down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and then stabbed more people outside the British Houses of Parliament in March, Britain’s most prominent Muslim, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, spoke to The Guardian. “I don’t want, in 60 years time, our grandchildren to be saying, ‘What the f. k was Sadiq doing…?’ ”
The mayor of London was referring to his desire for a ban on smoking in public. “It’s a scandal,” Khan said, “when I saw the evidence that people knew about smoking 60 years ago, it beggared belief that nothing happened …”
If only Khan was so incensed when he spoke about Islamic terrorism during the interview. On that front, Khan didn’t wonder whether grandchildren would ask what the heck did Sadiq do?
Instead, the mayor said his city had experienced terrorism for decades and “it makes us resilient”. 
If you’re not familiar with Khan, picture Waleed Aly. Both love the limelight. And let’s be honest, they’re sought out as the educated voices and pretty faces of moderate Islam.
And both are textbook examples of the resolute ignorance from the political class about the deadly ideological war under way within Islam and between Islam and the West.Surely Brits are tired of being resilient. On Saturday night, one of the Islamic terrorists shouted “this is for Allah” before stabbing a woman between 10 and 15 times. Three Islamic terrorists mowed down and murdered pedestrians on London Bridge before going from bar to bar, stabbing and slicing at patrons with 30cm hunting knives. Within eight minutes from the first emergency call, courageous police had fatally shot all three. Had these police officers not acted as they did, the Islamic terrorists would have slaughtered many more people that night.
What did Sadiq do? In the morning sunshine, against a verdant garden backdrop, the mayor of London, a Muslim no less, looked down a camera lens and said not a word about Islamic or even Islamist terrorists.Khan mentioned terrorists and terrorism. But nothing about how his faith, Islam, is being used to justify the massacre of Londoners. Fronting a CNN camera a few hours later, Khan was asked about the British Prime Minister’s powerful words. More muttering about needing to evolve to find new ways to stay safe. More police officers, in uniform, in plain clothes,
we will not be defeated, blah blah blah.God help poor London police. British intelligence has identified 23,000 jihadis in Britain, so that means just 22,997 to go.
As a prominent Muslim leader, Khan should have said we cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are, that things need to change.Instead, British Prime Minister Theresa May said that.
A Muslim leader should have said that defeating Islamist ideology is the greatest challenge of our time. But only May said that. Khan should have said we need to turn people’s minds away from violence towards our values, to something superior to anything offered by hate preachers. Alas, a white Christian prime minister, not a Muslim mayor, said that.
It should have been Khan who said we need to deprive extremists of safe spaces, not just online but in the real world. Khan could have said we, in the 21st century, are watching the deadly consequences of London becoming Londonistan in the late 20th century, when hate preachers expelled from the Middle East were welcomed into Britain in the name of multiculturalism
. If only London’s Muslim mayor were frank and had said that there was
far too much tolerance of extremism in Britain.
And it should have been Khan who said that we need to be more robust in identifying and stamping out Islamist extremism. Instead, the PM said that. Nor, sadly, did he say that to defeat Islamist extremism we need to have some difficult and embarrassing conversations. May said that, too.
Khan could have been just as brave as those British soldiers. He could have said that, while today is not the time, tomorrow, next week, and in coming months we, Muslims, must have a confronting doctrinal debate about Islam and our religious traditions because a contest of ideas is generating a contest of wills within our religion.
It’s not enough to jump in front of a camera after every attack to denounce violence and say “carry on”. We need to recognise that, unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam does not have an exilic history: no deep learning tradition about living in exile, as Jewish psalms explore in their exile to Babylon; as there is through the New Testament, particularly in the teachings of St Paul.
Where is our Augustine of Hippo, the early Christian philosopher whose seminal work, The City of God, explains Christianity’s message as spiritual, not political? Where is our Treaty of Westphalia, that 1648 agreement that brokered the conflict between Christian sects in pre-modern Europe, pioneering a modern political state free from the shackles of religious rule?
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