Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum (MEF) and the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.
“The leader of the Islamic State in Somalia has a wife and three children in Britain,” reveals the Daily Telegraph. Abdul Qadir Mumin lived for a long time in the United Kingdom, where he obtained British citizenship and delivered sermons in London mosques. During that period, Mumin married the British Somali Muna Abdule and had one son and two daughters, who still live in Slough.
Does Slough ring a bell?
Slough is a town eight minutes by car from the royal family's Windsor Castle and from Eton, the school of the English elite, and has a 30 percent Muslim population.
Richard North writes:
“Slough is an interesting constituency. One of the most ethnically diverse areas of England, 47 percent of the Asian-origin population is divided between Indians and Pakistanis. In the 2011 census, Indians held the majority, so the Indian Tan Dhesi held the parliamentary seat. In the last decade, however, there has been an influx of Pakistanis that has brought them to represent 22 percent of the population against Indians, mostly Sikh, who are at 19, giving Muslims the largest ethnic group. Now that the Muslims are presenting an independent candidate, Azhar Chohan, they have enough voting power to take the seat.”
Trump may have abandoned Europe, but Europe abandoned itself first. Or, as Gavin Mortimer of The Spectator puts it, “yes, European civilization is being erased and Trump is right to warn against mass immigration and the Islamization of Europe.”
Needless to say, one of the largest mosques in Slough used to be a Protestant church. And there are at least fifteen mosques in the city. Ramadan next to afternoon tea.
I can picture that little church. The Anglican vicar, a poor progressive soul, delivering his last sermons to four old ladies and a dog. The diocese goes bankrupt: maintenance, heating, leaking roof. An offer arrives: an “Islamic cultural centre” offers a sum that makes your head spin. The bishop signs, washes his hands, tweets something about “interfaith dialogue,” and escapes to London.
Next: The centuries-old oak pews are sawn apart to make room for carpets facing Mecca. The altar, where mass was celebrated for nine hundred years in Latin and then in English, becomes the mihrab. The baptismal font ends up in a suburban depot.
Then it’s the local pub’s turn: the owner dies, the children sell it, and it becomes “Al-Madina Coffee House - No Alcohol, No Dogs, No Infidels.”
And yet, strangely, the lawns remain trimmed. The hedges are still artfully cut. The slate-roofed houses glisten in the rain. And the village looks like an old woman, heavily made-up, who refuses to admit her age. And maybe now the Caliph’s son cuts the royal lawn.
If it weren’t all absurd, it would be laughable: the ISIS leader with his family in Slough funds ISIS in Congo, responsible for mass beheadings in African churches.
Thus, in a world where the tragic ironies of history intertwine with the randomness of postal codes, emerges this anecdote which, if it weren’t tragic, could pass for satire. Imagine: the family of the head of ISIS, the caliph who wants the beheading of infidels and the reconstruction of a theocratic empire, lives a stone’s throw from the palace of King Charles III. Not in an underground hideout in Raqqa or Mosul, but in a British town.
And Charles, with his speeches about homeopathy, sustainable architecture, climate, and the Quran, lives a step away from this powder keg.
But the West is agitated by Trump’s scoldings of Europe.
“I’m listening to the beautiful bells of Winchester, one of our great medieval cathedrals, much more beautiful than the aggressive ‘Allahu Akhbar’,” wrote the world’s most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins. “Before rejoicing at the spasms of relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s threatening nursery rhyme: ‘Always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.’”
Mass Islamic immigration has not been a multicultural gift, but Europe’s demographic Russian roulette. And those who have not understood it, or pretend not to understand it, risk firing the fatal shot.