British Prime Minister Theresa May called for a bold measure after her nation suffered yet another deadly terror attack in the heart of London.
No, May did not call for reforming the United Kingdom’s immigration policies or shutting down known extremist mosques. She instead called for restricting the internet.
“We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning,” May stated in her Sunday speech. She also declared that the “pluralistic values of Britain” must be established as “superior” to any other value set.
It is undoubtedly true that ISIS and other Islamic terror groups have benefited from the internet in gaining new recruits and spreading their dangerous message to the world.
However, we should be suspicious of the British government wanting to clamp down on the internet in the name of combating “extremism.” For one, the “extremism” that would likely come under regulation would be from critics of Islamism, rather than Islamism itself.
The UK already has a lengthy record for targeting so-called “Islamophobia” spread on the Internet. Back in 2013, the British government arrested several citizens in the middle of the night over their “racist” comments following a Muslim extremist decapitating British soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight.
This severe response was done in order to assuage the Muslim community’s concerns there would be a violent backlash.
In February 2016, U.K. police arrested a Scottish man who was upset over the large number of refugees who were set to settle in his small town. A month later, authorities detained a London man for his apparently “Islamophobic” tweet in response to the Brussels terror attack.
The British police haven’t altered their infatuation with dealing with mean internet comments in response to the nation’s recent terror attacks. When political commentator Katie Hopkins tweeted a call for British men to protect their wives and children from terror after the Manchester concert bombing, London Metropolitan Police announced they were investigating the tweet.
And this is just the United Kingdom being discussed here. Pretty much every single Western European country is obsessed with silencing “hate speech” online and Germany has gone as far as to threaten to hit Facebook with a massive $53 million fine if the platform doesn’t comply with its demands to censor “offensive” views.
European hate speech laws are designed primarily to suppress right-wing views the political establishment doesn’t like, such as restricting immigration and questioning Islam. All of these actions are done to crush dissent against the multicultural agenda favored by Europe’s elite and have little to do with protecting Europeans.
One can hope that May’s proposal would only target the jihadi sites that keep inspiring young Muslim men to slaughter innocent civilians. But the talk of working with “allied governments” (read: European governments on a crusade against hate speech) and the U.K.’s prior track record under May’s Conservative Party makes it very likely these policies would be used against right-wing dissident merely voicing their opinion.
Which brings us to Theresa May herself.
Many American conservatives have fallen in love with the first female prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty has glowingly written about her as the embodiment of “Trumpism without Trump” — i.e. Trump’s appeal delivered by a figure pundits can respect.
While May certainly has her merits, her response to this latest attack is incredibly disappointing. The UK reportedly has 23,000 suspected Islamic extremists and an estimated 400 ISIS fighters with British passports have returned back to the country. The hundreds of Saudi-funded mosques in the U.K. are radicalizing thousands of Muslims to oppose British values and sympathize with jihadis.
Restricting the internet will do nothing to tackle these issues, yet that’s May’s response to the London Bridge attack.
There’s still some hope that May will try to reform immigration and implement other measures that would effectively clamp down on homegrown Islamic terrorists. But the prime minister presently faces the prospect of suffering a bigger election humiliation than Hillary Clinton as a Labour Party led by the avowed socialist Jeremy Corbyn surges in the polls. As a refresher, Corbyn, who could be the next prime minister, previously opposed the police shoot-to-kill policy that saved dozens Saturday night and has in the past expressed support for the IRA and Hamas.
Needless to say, Corbyn will do little to protect British citizens from terror besides refusing to go along with western interventions in the Middle East.
May is presently the only hope Britons have for preventing terrorism becoming the new normal in their country. But her call for internet regulation reveals the authoritarian technocrat side to her that should give all right-wingers pause.
Terrorism won’t be stopped if internet “Islamophobia” is banned — it will just shore up the power of the present European order. And no one will be allowed to criticize their disastrous policies that led to the continent’s current nightmare.
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