[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

On the morning of Yom Kippur, October 2, only days after Britain’s execrable prime minister, Keir Starmer, rewarded Hamas for the atrocities of October 7 by recognizing a so-called Palestinian state, a terrorist attacked a synagogue in Manchester, killing two people before being taken down by police. Manchester, as seems almost to have been forgotten, was the setting for the 2017 suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert that killed 22 people and injured 1,017. Is anyone astonished that the city has been hit again? Manchester, after all, is one of the British cities in which the police have gone the furthest in ignoring potential Muslim malefactors while harassing and arresting law-abiding citizens who have dared to criticize Islam online. That such an attack was able to occur on Yom Kippur under the nose of the Greater Manchester police feels almost inevitable. In the wake of the attack, police officials and politicians issued the predictable statements addressed to British Jews, expressing their solidarity and sympathy. The hell with them and their pro forma poppycock. They’re the ones who have allowed antisemites to enter Britain en masse, to preach their hatred in mosques, to teach in madrassas, and to practice it on the streets, where many Jews no longer dare to wear kippas or Stars of David for fear of being assaulted by the practitioners of the Religion of Peace.

Britain, of course, is not alone in experiencing the dire impact of mass Islamic immigration. Certain parts of America – including Minneapolis, the Detroit area, and East Texas, where Muslims are plotting to build their own sharia-run Shangri-La called EPIC City – are already seriously Islamized, as evidenced by the presence of Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) in Congress. Western Europe, needless to say, is way ahead of the U.S. on this front, and although I try to keep track of all the larger and smaller manifestations of Islamization in this part of the world, it’s gotten to be well-nigh impossible. I do know that in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, two Muslim holy days – the first day of Ramadan and the feast of Eid – have now been named official holidays; that in France, verses from the Koran are now being broadcast in the Metro stations of Paris; and that in Norway, Muslim boys in their early teens have recently carried out a hand-grenade attack in Oslo and a shooting in Sarpsborg – a development that has led many Norwegians to declare that “Swedish conditions” have finally come to Norway.

But it’s hard to pay much attention even to Germany and France and Norway, which are experiencing what you might call good old-fashioned creeping Islam, when the lunacy in Britain seems to be on a whole different level. After all, German and French police are still capable of arresting Muslims who cause mayhem in the streets (even using force if necessary), and Norwegians still proudly hoist their flag on every national holiday. In Britain, by contrast, police rip down Union Jacks that have been raised by patriots, but take no action when Muslims wave the flags of their own native countries, even when these displays are accompanied by violence. Such stories rarely reach the mainstream press (including the newspapers that are regarded as conservative), but they abound on X, the one place you have to go to if you want to know the whole truth about what’s really happening in the UK.

In the last few weeks alone you could have found on X stories about British police surrounding a man and telling him he couldn’t fly the English flag; about Newcastle police ripping a Union Jack “from a young girl’s hands” so as “not to ‘offend’ the foreigners and communists shouting ‘nazi’” at her and a group of her fellow patriots; about a couple of women cops who threatened “to take a lady’s daughter into custody” if she refused to hand over her phone, which contained evidence of her having read a certain “social media post”; about a 75-year-old Scottish woman who has been arrested multiple times for standing in a “buffer zone” near an abortion clinic with a sign reading “coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want”; about an Englishman who was charged with Islamophobia for chanting “Come on, England” in public; about a woman who was taken into custody after telling a man who was promoting Islam at a stand on the street that she didn’t “want to hear about the Quran”;  about police telling a man (who was peacefully observing a pro-Hamas protest) that he was “quite openly Jewish” and would be “arrested for breaching the peace” if he didn’t leave at once; and about a police officer whose conversion to Islam (which he described as “wonderful” and  “peaceful” has made him a “poster boy” for the British police.

You might think that it would be hard to find Brits who actually approve of this stuff. But you’d be wrong. One Harry Eccles, who identifies himself as a nurse, socialist, and trade unionist, wrote recently on X that “Britain does not have an immigration problem. Britain has a racism problem.” Somebody named David Osland claimed: “Where I live in London, churches and synagogues sit side by side with mosques and same-sex couples walk arm in arm in the streets. Doesn’t look much like sharia law to me.” And an Englishwoman named Hannah posted that while she’s “proud to be English and even prouder to be British,” the Union Jacks that are currently on view “are not showing patriotism” – they’re part of an effort “to intimidate our communities and cause division.”

Communities! Division! Hannah may not know much, but she’s done a terrific job of parroting the official rhetoric. In Britain, the word “communities” is almost always a euphemism that’s employed when the subject is Muslims. And British authorities have long since decided that “division” between that “community” and the rest of society is something that must be avoided at all costs. And I mean all costs. Better to allow Muslim gangs all over the country to rape thousands of white English girls than to arrest the rapists and thereby inflame the entire Muslim population. Best to appease Muslims by knighting some of their coreligionists, by appointing some of them as ceremonial mayors of some of Britain’s largest and most historic cities, and by filling the civil service with Muslims whose first loyalty is patently not to the UK but to their faith and their countries of origin. In no other Western European country is the cowardice of the political establishment, and the police and bureaucrats who work under them, as consistent and conspicuous as it is in the United Kingdom.

This insanity reached a new height last month when the National Health Service issued a mind–boggling “guidance” in which it proclaimed the “benefits” of first-cousin marriage – a primitive practice, common among Muslims, which has caused an explosion in birth defects among Britain’s Muslims. (First-cousin marriage, the NHS maintained, is linked to “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages.”) Yes, the NHS soon withdrew this ill-advised statement, but only because it was greeted with widespread outrage. The takeaway here is that these establishment ninnies, who are accustomed to whitewashing Islam and getting away with it, thought that they could pull off with impunity something even this ludicrous.

To be sure, as was demonstrated on September 13 by Tommy Robinson’s massive Unite the Kingdom rally, more and more Brits are finding their voices and giving all this madness a thumbs-down. Recognizing that the public mood had shifted strongly in favor of mass deportation of illegal Muslim immigrant, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage – who is expected to become the country’s next prime minister, who has always been loath to criticize Islam, and who until recently insisted that mass deportations were impossible – did a 180 in late August, issuing a strategy for carrying out such deportations.

In response to all this, the ruling Labour Party has intensified its practice of labeling those who reject its Muslim-appeasing policy as bigots. The other day you could read on Labour’s own X feed that “Reform would deport people who are our nurses, our teachers, our friends and our neighbours. Labour will always choose unity over division.” You could hear Starmer asserting, absurdly, that “climate change” is the reason why so many young Muslim men are pouring into Britain. You could also hear him doubling down on the preposterous old line that “Muslims are making a huge difference in British society, greatly contributing to education, culture and economy. They are delivering every single one of the government’s missions. Muslims are the most generous group in the UK.” Starmer has even contended that the illegal Muslim migrants who come to the shores of England on all those little boats can’t be deported because of Brexit – for which Farage was the poster boy. It’s a lie, and a desperate one. As the podcaster Darren Grimes wrote the other day, the attitude of Labour (and, I might add, of many Tories as well) amounts to the following: “Worrying about the boats isn’t patriotism, it’s a gateway drug to ‘ethno-nationalism.’ Their plan isn’t to fix the border. It’s to fix you for noticing it’s broken. The condescension is breathtaking.”

Amid all this dysfunction, the brightest light is Tommy Robinson, the very embodiment of whatever hope there can be for the rescue of Britain from the knaves and fools who have led it down this malevolent path. So it was not pleasant to read, on October 1, a tweet by Tommy announcing that on October 13 he will once again be in court, facing yet another cockamamie charge drummed up by his mortal enemies in Britain’s version of the Deep State. This time around, he’s being accused – perversely – of violating the terrorism law. Once again his guilt or innocence will be determined not by a jury but by a judge; once again he expects that he will be sent to prison. The blatancy of it all is breathtaking; it’s the UK version of the way in which Trump’s enemies tried to bring him down with the Russia hoax, with two unfounded impeachments, with a blizzard of baseless lawsuits, and with two attempts on his life. So far, Trump has survived – and thrived. One can only hope that Tommy, whom the British elites see as their #1 enemy because he stands for Britain First, will also live to fight another day. Without him, British liberty would seem a lost cause indeed.