Few relationships feature one party that freely gives and another party that only takes as blatantly as the relationship between the West and Islam.  Thus, according to a Feb. 1, 2021 report, “The British taxpayer has shelled out over £15,000 to the widow of the mastermind behind the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, while the families of victims were denied similar financial support.”

During that attack, Zahrah Rehman’s husband, Khuram Butt, and two other Muslims, killed eight people and injured another 48, by running over them with a van and stabbing them with knives.  If police had not managed to shoot and kill the three terrorists, many more passersby would likely have been killed.

The distaste felt by some Brits at learning that their taxes are going to the wife of a savage terrorist is further soured by the fact that -- and despite her claims otherwise -- evidence suggests she knew and may even have shared in his “ISIS” worldview: “I knew it was a possibility that he wanted to go to Syria,” she confessed, “but he never told me that he hates this country and wanted to attack this country.” Such a defense is beyond silly: wanting to go and fight for the Islamic State in Syria is synonymous with hating Britain and any “infidel” nation.  Moreover,

In video evidence provided to the hearing, Ms Rehman is seen talking with her extremist husband about naming British airports after radical Islamists….  Another video presented before the inquiry showed the couple on their honeymoon in Pakistan and her husband hailing “Dawlat al-Islamiyah” – a monicker for Islamic State. Rehman denied that she understood what Butt was saying, claiming she could not understand Arabic.

At one point in the video, she even suggested renaming a London airport after Britain’s most notorious hate-preacher, Anjem Choudary, a man who helped “radicalize” her murderous husband and who spent five years in prison for his ties to ISIS.  When confronted about her suggestion, Rehman shrugged it off as “just a stupid joke.”

It is further ironic -- or rather telling -- that she mentioned Anjem Choudary (whom I once debated here).  He is the same man who -- while holding all of the usual beliefs currently styled as “extremist” -- also encourages Muslims to receive welfare at the hands of their hated enemies, the infidels, just as Rehman is benefiting.

In 2013 Choudary was secretly videotaped telling a Muslim audience to follow his example and get “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance” from the government (a pun on “Job Seeker’s Allowance).” The father of four, who was then annually receiving more than 25,000 pounds in welfare benefits, referred to British taxpayers as “slaves,” adding,

We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money -- you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar! We take the money.

According to Koran 9:29, jizya is monetary tribute subjugated non-Muslims (dhimmis) are required to pay to Muslims as the price for not killing them.  This practice was only (and formally) abolished in the nineteenth century, thanks entirely to European intervention.

Choudary’s position on accepting infidel money -- and Rehman’s acceptance of it -- is not out of the Islamic mainstream.  Sometime back, for instance, I watched a roundtable discussion on U.S. foreign aid to Egypt on Al Hafiz TV, an Arabic-language Islamic station.  At one point, one of the guests, a cleric, insisted that the U.S. must be treated contemptuously, like a lowly and downtrodden dhimmi; that Egypt must make the U.S. conform to its own demands; and that, then, all the money the U.S. offers to Egypt in foreign aid can be taken as rightfully earned jizya.

The Muslim cleric further recommended that Egypt be less cooperative with the U.S. -- while simultaneously demanding more monetary aid.  Then, “America will accept; it will kiss our hands; and it will also increase its aid.  And we will consider its aid as jizya, not as aid.  But first we must make impositions on it.”

When the host asked the learned cleric, “Do the Americans owe us jizya?” he responded, “Yes” -- that is the price Americans have to pay “so we can leave them alone!”

At any rate, here, then, is yet another way that the liberal Left and the illiberal Islam complement one another: the one stupidly gives, while the other selfishly takes -- all while despising and plotting the destruction of its benefactor.

Britain, especially, thrives on conforming to this model.  According to a recent report, a ban preventing Anjem Choudary from preaching -- he had “radicalized” several other Muslim murderers aside from Butt -- is set to be lifted in May, 2021, “and now security sources fear that Choudary will immediately resume his campaign to radicalise young Muslims.”

Duh.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Image: David Holt