I am afraid that grim reality requires choosing the second of David Pryce-Jones’s two ways of looking at London’s election of Sadiq Khan as mayor: By choosing an enabler of Muslim extremism, the British are losing control of their destiny.

In the run-up to the mayoral election, the invaluable Daniel Johnson, editor ofStandpoint, provided the essential backdrop:

Indeed, what has emerged before our eyes in Britain is a kind of Islamist state within a state…. A new survey by ICM with the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, for Channel Four and the Sunday Times confirms that Salafists are fast becoming the dominant influence on British Islam. Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of a sample of 1,081 adult Muslims want to see “areas of Britain in which sharia law is introduced instead of British law”. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of them think “it is acceptable for a British Muslim to keep more than one wife”, even though polygamy is in theory punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Wives should “always obey their husbands”, according to 39 per cent; the survey did not ask about the Koran’s injunction to husbands to “chastise” their wives, but Trevor Phillips sees it as “a clear invitation to legitimise domestic violence”. About 5 per cent of British Muslims sympathise with stoning adulterers. That may seem a small percentage, but only 66 per cent completely condemn such executions. This suggests that about a third would go along with such punishments under certain circumstances.

The most striking of all the ICM statistics concern homosexuality. Only 18 per cent of Muslims think it should be legal in Britain, while more than half (52 per cent) would ban it. Up to half of the latter group, it is fair to assume, also support sharia law, which prescribes the death penalty for homosexuality. If most British Muslims hold such hostile attitudes towards same-sex attraction, it is not surprising that – to take one example – a recent gay participant on the TV reality show First Dates explained how he had been beaten up by other Muslims so badly that he was in hospital for months….

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