Meet Shada Islam

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If you really want to understand how Britain went totally insane, it helps to check in regularly with the Guardian, because it’s required reading for the privileged leftist twits who flushed their kingdom down the loo, providing them with daily reminders of what their shared ideology requires them to profess. Ban critics of Islam like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Valentina Gomez, and Eva Vlardingerbroek while letting unvetted Muslim men of military age flow into the country like hot lava pouring down from Vesuvius onto the helpless inhabitants of Pompeii? Check. Imprison Tommy Robinson for exposing Muslim rape gangs while protecting the rapists themselves from prosecution? Check. Allow aggressive Muslim men to pray loudly and en masse in the streets, blocking traffic in an obvious power move, while arresting one humble Christian woman for praying silently near an abortion clinic? Check. To your typical Guardian editor, writer, or reader, it all makes perfect sense.

And few writers, as it happens, are more consistently exemplary of the Guardian mentality than one Shada Islam. Born in Lahore, she lives in Brussels, and has the perfect CV for a Guardianista: twenty years as Europe correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, five years (so far) as editor of the EUobserver, a stint at the European Policy Centre think tank, faculty positions at the College of Europe and the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels, and the directorship of New Horizons Project, “a strategy, analysis and advisory company.” Her beat is the EU, which Britain quit years ago (in Guardian country, the worst day of the 20th century wasn’t 9/11 but the date of the Brexit vote, June 23, 2016), but the dreams of all good Guardian subscribers is that one day Britain will return to the fold, subordinating them once again to the unelected likes of the slickly dictatorial Ursula von der Leyen. Until that day occurs, Shada – and let’s call her Shada rather than Islam, which might lend to confusion – gives readers that warm feeling of still being beholden to Brussels. Not that she’s a slavish worshiper at the EU throne. No, she actually criticizes the EU – but from the left, complaining in a June 2020 article, for instance, that the EU’s assorted bodies “are among the world’s last-remaining all-white bastions of power.” I’m sure she’s right: if you asked me to guess which institution in Europe is the most riddled with hypocrisy, of course I’d go for the EU itself.

But Shada does more than just make broad accusations of racism. (On the left these days, after all, that’s just another way of saying hello.)  In the above-mentioned piece, published soon after George Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement spread to Europe, Shada congratulated “Europeans of colour” on finally “finding their voice” and taking on Europe’s “systemic racism” by “exposing the continent’s dismal record of race-based violence, discrimination and harassment.” Yes, she really meant that dark-skinned people in Europe are being victimized by whites. Now, doubtless many Guardian readers, comfortably ensconced in their sitting rooms in Kensington and Mayfair, Oxford and Cambridge, Bristol and Guildford – that is, far from the madding, not to say murdering, crowd – can read such bilge without either laughing or exploding in outrage. But most Brits, I daresay – especially those who’ve had personal experiences of the Muslim destruction of Western Europe – recognize such rhetoric as through-the-looking-glass nonsense.

In April of last year, Shada again took to the Guardian to challenge the EU – this time expressing hope that it’ll “wean itself off overreliance on Washington” and take action to “replace the US as a global player” – a hilarious fantasy, given that the EU’s share of that global GDP has halved in the last 20 years and is still sinking fast. What kind of action did Shada recommend as a means toward this fantastical goal? Offering tax breaks to trigger growth and innovation in the technological and manufacturing sectors? Abandoning the delusion of wind power and the war on agriculture? Eliminating some of the countless regulations that inhibit trade and innovation? No: according to Shada, what the EU needs is to shed the “colonial thinking” that has led it, in her view, to be undermined by “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

This past January Shada resumed her criticism of the EU in a piece that was notable for two notable self-contradictions. First, after depicting “Europeans of colour” as marginalized and excluded, Shada argued the exact opposite – namely, that “countless” members of that demographic “are working to ensure that Europe survives and thrives through their contributions across politics, business, technology, culture, sport, media, medicine, design, transport, academia and more.” Yes, many “Europeans of colour” have indeed made such contributions; they tend to be successfully assimilated Hindus, east Asians, Caribbeans, Latin Americans – everything except Muslims, who live on the margins out of choice. Similarly, after dismissing concerns about a Muslim “great replacement” as right-wing “conspiracy discourse,” Shada demanded that Europe’s leaders speak up more forcefully against “Trump’s fantasy of resurrecting a white, Christian Europe” – thereby acknowledging, in effect, that the “great replacement” is real, that it’s underway, and that it’s dandy.

Shada’s latest Guardian contribution, published on April 27, returned to the premise that European Muslims are objects of prejudice on a variety of fronts – never mind the fact that newly arrived families from the Muslim world are routinely given priority in housing over natives who’ve been on waiting lists for years; that things for which taxpayers must pay through the nose – such as driving lessons – are handed to them for free; that Muslim felons are routinely given lighter sentences –  or no sentences – on the grounds that they simply didn’t understand that rape and gay-bashing, for example, are crimes; and that cops, for fear of stirring up mass protests, consistently blink at Muslim gang rape and other offenses, even as they jail native Europeans for tweeting about such matters. Shada accused a Danish politician of “fram[ing] Muslims as an existential threat by underlining that sharia ‘must never, ever become Danish.’” But Shada didn’t reply to the actual concern. Don’t a majority of European Muslims want sharia? Polls show that they do. Wouldn’t sharia represent an existential threat to Western freedoms? Of course. But it’s part of the Guardian mentality to treat sharia as yet another right-wing conspiracy theory.

Concluding her latest article, Shada told us that all the hang-wringing in Europe about Islam springs from prejudices dating back to the age of empire. As it happens, I live in Norway, which like several other European countries was never an imperial power. How, then, to explain why a Norwegian would fret about Islam? Of course the answer is about imperialism – not of the European variety, however, but of the Muslim variety. It was Muslim imperialism that expanded Islam across the Arabian peninsula, across north Africa, and throughout the Middle East. And the current invasion of Europe by Muslims is a continuation of this process, an attempt to achieve a conquest that was foiled at Tours in 732 and at Vienna in 1683.

What hasn’t Shada Islam mentioned in any of her Guardian articles? Well, she’s never so much as hinted at the multitude of passages in the Koran that command violence against infidels, permit wife-beating, and encourage Jew-hatred. She’s never discussed forced marriage or the stoning of women as a punishment for adultery or “honor killing” as a punishment for girls who are guilty of nothing more, perhaps, than being alone in a room with a male non-relative. And she’s been totally silent about events like the mass rapes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015-16 or about the massacres at the Manchester Arena, at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, at the Atocha railway station in Madrid, as well as every one of the many other jihadist attacks that have taken place in Europe since 9/11.

All of which should give Guardian readers pause. It doesn’t. The reason they read that rag religiously is to keep their illusions about Islam – and everything else under the sun – intact, and to put off for yet one more day the moment when they’ll have to look up from their newspapers or computer screens and face the no-longer-deniable reality before their eyes. And that tells you everything you need to know about them. As for Shada Islam – well, her last name says it all, doesn’t it?