How have you been spending Christmas? Whilst not everyone is turning up to midnight mass, carols, turkey, advent calendars and the King’s speech are all likely to have featured for Britons of many faiths and none. Christmas for British Jews means sitting down to Chinese food, and enjoying the time off. And whilst many British Muslims are following suit, spending time with their families, and cheerfully wishing their neighbours a happy Christmas, the boys over at British Muslim new site 5Pillars have instead been tucking into an indigestible diet of sectarianism, hatred and hysteria.
To mark the festive season, the news site shared a “viral” video of a Muslim family learning about the dangers of celebrating Christmas. A Muslim dad and his daughter are wearing Christmas outfits, and the dad suggests that opening some presents and joining in is harmless and doesn’t mean accepting Christian theology. But he is corrected by his traditionally dressed daughter, who shows him a terrifying Christmas carol style vision of her sister crossing herself whilst praying and taking off her hijab. Any form of participation in Christmas is “haram”, she explains, and it’s “putting your Islamic identity in danger”. Cheerful!
Amidst a steady stream of provocatively framed news articles and videos relentlessly focused on Israel and Islamophobia, anyone tuning in to 5Pillars over Christmas would see plenty to back up this message of Muslim exceptionalism. Tweets by the site condemned the Australian government’s decision to ban Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack, as well as defending the Muslim brotherhood. Also featured was negative coverage of Somaliland’s recognition by Israel, with the editor of the site describing Somaliland as a “zionist entity”, and an “enemy of the ummah”.
Spending a few spare moments of the Christmas break glancing at the news and social media feed of 5Pillars was a glimpse into a world that far too many British Muslims inhabit politically and intellectually. Those who consume such media are saturating their brains with content designed to suppress rational thought and promote tribal identitarianism.
It reflects a mode of dysfunction endemic in contemporary Islamic societies. There is an emotional hysteria and a siege mentality, and a clinging to outwards symbols of Islam in the face of a secularising world. The philosophically sophisticated culture of the Islamic golden age has given way to a crude “post-colonial” Muslim identity politics rooted in ressentiment towards a contemporary Middle East that is leaving conservative Muslims behind.
Islamist organisations … exploit Western freedoms to promote an agenda that is fundamentally antithetical to Western ideals and interests
It is this aspect which fuels the disproportionate rage of the likes of 5Pillars towards successful modern Muslim states like Jordan, Turkey and the UAE, which take a pragmatic approach towards Israel and attempt to keep Islamism firmly in check. Ironically, Islamism and Muslim identitarianism have flourished in many parts of the West due to its free speech norms, even as they are ruthlessly suppressed in much of the Islamic world itself. Britain only banned Hizb ut-Tahrir last year, trailing most of the Arab world by decades. And whilst 5Pillars is free to denounce Christmas in Britain, a Jordanian religious scholar who did the same thing was quickly picked up by security services along with a number of students involved in encouraging Muslims to shun Christmas — as 5Pillars was likewise lamenting over the past few days.
The site’s attachment to free speech is highly selective, however, as it has shared calls for Turkish teenagers on TikTok making jokes about Islamic prayer to be targeted by their universities and prosecuted.
Islamist organisations like 5Pillars exploit Western freedoms to promote an agenda that is fundamentally antithetical to Western ideals and interests. They seek to lock Muslim populations into a dead-end agenda of rage and reaction, and to promote an agenda that their own homelands see as socially destructive. The complacency and denialism of the West, which has handed sectarians the potent weapon of “Islamophobia”, risks the stability of both our own societies and that of the Islamic world.
A cocktail of naivete, historical guilt and bourgeois radicalism has poisoned the mind and spirit of Western countries, paralysing once highly effective states and institutions. When President Trump took action against the Jihadist groups that have been terrorising West Africa for over a decade, the response of much of the mainstream press was confusion, cynicism and, astonishingly, denials that the problem even existed.
After years of stories of entire villages and schools massacred and abducted by slave-trading gangs committed to Islamic fundamentalism (the name of the main group, “Boko Haram” is variously translated as “Western education/civilisation is forbidden”), an astonishing proportion of the press were racing for google to navigate what was going on. An “explainer” in the Guardian, claimed, unbelievably, that in Nigeria “violence against Christians has drawn significant international attention and is often framed as religious persecution, but most analysts argue the situation is more complex and attacks can have varying motivations.” This is how the Western press chose to report an ongoing transnational Islamist insurgency that has lasted 20 years, killed thousands and is still successfully attacking Nigerian military bases.
Whilst America was taking military action against terrorists, Britain was expending its political capital to free an Egyptian blogger, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, and bring him to the UK. Alaa has long been lionised in Western media as a hero of the Arab Spring, yet it was left to anonymous accounts online to do the simple due diligence of looking at his social media history. This involved tweets in which he said he wished to “kill all Zionists including civilians”, that he hated white people and wanted to kill members of the police. In a further coup for the Guardian, its diplomatic correspondent criticised Starmer for thanking the Egyptian president for freeing Alaa, and the newly liberated freedom fighter duly showed his gratitude to the British state by retweeting this profound intervention. Presumably the brilliant minds involved believe that the best way to facilitate the freeing of political prisoners is to insult those holding the keys.
At a time when Western countries face regular terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists, and in which such extremists menace international shipping and engage in genocidal violence against non-Muslims, why are we not responding in the informational sphere? Why, to the contrary, have we allowed such extremists to use Western countries as platforms to further their agenda? Why do we encourage and even arrange the immigration of individuals who hate us, hate our way of life, and wish to see us dead?
Those asking such questions are regularly silenced, denounced or marginalised for daring to articulate them. It’s not polite, it’s not nice, and it’s seen as itself divisive to simply point to what Muslim fundamentalists openly think and say. The policy of ignoring Islamism has not made it go away, and it hasn’t made hostility towards Muslims go away either. Indeed, those who suffer most are often Muslims themselves, who suffer from the backlash that such fundamentalists generate, and many of whom came to the West to escape the kind of politics pushed by groups like 5Pillars.
Back in 2016, shopkeeper Asad Shah put up a Facebook message wishing a “Good Friday and very happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation”. Shortly thereafter, he was murdered in the street outside his shop. Asad had made two mistakes. Firstly, he had dared to wish Christians a happy Easter. Secondly, he was a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, the followers of 19th century messianic leader Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Members of this group are seen as heretics and apostates by many Sunnis, and are not recognised as Muslims by the Pakistani state. Strikingly, Ahmadi Islam emerged around the same time as the Deobandi movement, which encourages violent resistance to Western civilisation — whilst Ahmad in contrast preached non-violent struggle and rejected military jihad in the context of colonial India. In 2014, two years before the killing of Asad, the deputy editor of 5Pillars described the Ahmadis as lower than monkeys.
This is not a conservative Muslim outlet in the way that the Catholic Herald is a conservative Catholic newspaper. As a Christian I would happily read and enjoy a Muslim newspaper that campaigned against euthanasia, advocated for Palestinians, and printed articles about Islamic theology and culture. Yet 5Pillars breaches fundamental norms. It encourages separatism and hostility between Muslims and mainstream British culture. It advocates for the suppression of all criticism against Islam, even as it demands the right to denounce the West in its pages. Most damningly, it advocates for explicitly Islamist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group which calls for the violent reconquest of formerly Muslim lands in Spain, Italy and the Balkans and has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
5Pillars has yet to face any serious investigation, fine or sanction for this behaviour. The closest it came was its disputes with IMPRESS (The Independent Monitor for the Press), but remarkably this was entirely over its hosting of far right figures on its podcast, not any of its openly Islamist content or message. Since then, 5Pillars has left the regulator, stating that “we do not want non-Muslims who do not share our values to have editorial control over our content”.
But worry not, the group is contemplating a new regulator — “an external regulator — but a Muslim one that will judge us according to the Quran and Sunnah”.
Britain is a fundamentally unserious country when it comes to press regulation and counter-extremism. Speech is selectively regulated for “offensiveness” against certain victim groups, independently of any real world impact or threat of violence, yet national security concerns seem barely to feature. Whilst mainstream publications self-censor to fit in with shifting norms and language about race and sexuality, openly anti-British and extremist publications are allowed to operate with total freedom, and even without substantive debate or scrutiny in parliament or rest of the media. The Leveson framework, always an awkward half-measure, is now at risk of itself being employed to set up an “independent” regulator run on the basis of sharia law.
British people are heartily tired of having to give up a lot of liberty for very little security due to the actions of an extreme minority. The government will embrace almost any measure short of what is actually needed — directly targeting Islamism and Islamists. Abstract free speech arguments would hold more water if we were not in a context where Britain is regularly attacked by jihadis. Islamist groups and media organisations should be straightforwardly outlawed, and support for violent jihad and Islamism should be an absolute bar to immigration to the UK. This is also the approach taken by sane and well-governed Muslim countries, including many which are deeply religious and socially conservative. They understand, far better than we, that such movements are irrational and dangerous, and destroy social unity.
Sites like 5Pillars simply shouldn’t be allowed to exist in Britain. The time has come for us to stop tolerating the intolerable, and to stop welcoming those who despise us. The alternative — of deep division, violence and mistrust — is catastrophic for all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
