Elites with Their Heads in the Sand
by Yonoson Rosenblum
Two recent essays — both brilliant, in my opinion — raise the issue of whether Western elites have either the intellectual fortitude or moral courage to defend Western civilization and its values.
The first of those essays is by historian Mike Burke in the June Commentary, "The Covenant and the Wooden Box." The wooden box in the title refers to the one London's Muslim lord mayor, Sadiq Khan, ordered built around the 12-foot-high statue of Winston Churchill, first unveiled outside of Parliament in November 1973. Khan ordered the box built to hide the statue after vandals scrawled "was a racist" on the base in 2020, and added in February of this year, "Zionist War Criminal," "Globalise the Intifada," "Stop the Genocide."
So, writes Burke, "the man who had defied Hitler was boarded up like a condemned building, hidden from his own city by the people responsible for his memory, lest the sight of him provoke further offense." Burke's verdict: "The reflex that reaches for the administrator's solution — contain, suppress, manage, and defer — is the only reflex Britain's governing class possesses."
Burke traces the refusal to defend British values to the "new ruling-class doctrine" of multiculturalism advanced in British universities, and which Burke defines as "the self-forgiving conviction that nothing essential has been lost because nothing has been formally removed." Rather, the values of other cultures have been deemed equal to those developed over Britain's long history.
His first example is the 1989 fatwa of the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie for writing a "blasphemous" novel. True, Rushdie was provided with police protection. But no robust defense of freedom of thought or expression was forthcoming.
"Liberty would survive as a phantom limb — affirmed in principle, insured tactically — while its public defense was treated as an unacceptable liability," Burke concludes.
"Each surrender of principle made the next one feel less like surrender and more like wisdom," he adds acidly, until the ruling class could no longer distinguish between "caution and cowardice." The mandarins charged with the preservation of British institutions "[have] long since concluded that the exposure of inconvenient truths was a greater threat to its survival than the truths themselves."
Most egregious was the failure of the authorities to prevent the unspeakable abuse of 1,400 lower class white girls, many preteens, by men of Pakistani origin over a period of decades, in the town of Rotherham. Though the authorities possessed irrefutable proof of what was going on, they "weighed the continued exploitation of children against the scandal of being called racist, the disturbance of their self-serving fiction of community cohesion, and chose the atrocity."
When the Labour MK for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had the temerity to write what was already well known — i.e., that Britain has a problem with men of Pakistani origin exploiting white minors — she was sacked from her position in the shadow cabinet, accused of racism by her own party colleagues, and subjected to death threats. As she told the BBC, more people were afraid to be called racist than afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.
The "covenant" to which Burke refers in his title is that between Britain and its Jewish citizens who came to the country to build their lives. Churchill was the foremost advocate of the covenant. He firmly believed that "the L-rd deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews."
But today's governing class has chosen to accommodate the Islamist movement, which has "never regarded England's inherited values as anything other than an obstacle to be managed and, in time, replaced."
In October 2023, Jewish faith schools in north London were closed because of security fears, and two years later, two men were killed at a Manchester shul on their way to Yamim Noraim davening. In April of this year, a knife-wielding man ran down Golders Green Avenue seeking out Jews to kill, and stabbing two.
In response, "Britain's managerial class pretended not to look, choosing instead the path of least resistance, the managed silence, the filed report." England's covenant with its Jews was quietly, administratively betrayed — "not by enemies from without but by custodians from within who had ceased to believe it was worth keeping."
As of May 2026, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was still not proscribed in the UK, even after the director-general of the British secret service, MI5, testified to having broken up at least 20 IRGC plots in Britain between 2022 and 2024, many of them targeting Jewish communities, and some on the scale of the 2005 London Underground bombings.
After the Golders Green incident, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to protect the Jewish community. But nothing changed. The IRGC, for instance, remained free to operate in Britain. This was even worse than the usual "averted gaze, the truth quietly administered out of existence," in Burke's opinion. It was "explicit knowledge, explicit condemnation, explicit promise — and then nothing."
"A governing class that has lost the will to know what it is, what it values, and what it owes to those in its care," cannot defend even its most vulnerable children, as in Rotherham, Burke charges. And the gap between what British institutions know and "what they have decided, for reasons of procedural calm, to pretend they do not know," grows ever greater as the universities that reward "ideological conformity with credentials and institutional authority" send their graduates into newsrooms, council offices, and police commands, in Britain, and into the FBI, Department of Justice, prestige press, and administrative apparatus of every major city, in America.
Statues of Jefferson and Washington have been torn down in Portland and placed in storage — the American version of Churchill's wooden box — and a mayoral commission in D.C. recommended removing or relocating the Washington and Jefferson memorials.
Sadly, there are no Churchills on the horizon, not in Britain and not in the United States — "one man who looked into the abyss and refused to blink." A man who honored the covenant with the Jews — supporting the Balfour Declaration, opposing the 1939 White Paper closing the gates of Palestine to Jews fleeing extermination, and, above all, prosecuting, "at the cost of everything, the war against the regime whose explicit purpose was to end Jewish life in Europe."
AYAAN HIRSI ALI'S September 9 piece in Tablet, "What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us," has a much narrower and more immediate focus than Burke's piece. In her view, the West has completely failed to apprehend the magnitude of the threat from Islam and its incompatibility with Western values.
She opens with a portrait of Mohamed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the Twin Towers on 9/11, as he prepared, five years earlier, detailed notes for his funeral. He was at the time an architectural student living in Frankfurt, fluent in German, and the son of a successful Cairo lawyer. He was not poor; he was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet occurred, nor even by American support for Israel. Just a young Muslim man preparing to martyr himself for Allah confident of his reward in the next life.
For 25 years, writes Hirsi Ali, Western elites have insisted that Atta must have motivated by something other than culture and faith. Religion could not be the cause, they reasoned, because men in the West have not killed each other over religious issues since the great sectarian wars of the 17th century. And for committed multiculturalists, the idea that "some cultures might lead people to murder each other," for reasons not on the Western rationalist list, was akin to racism, and thus dismissed out of hand.
Again and again, the Western intellectual class reached for reasons that made sense in their secular humanist universe: "grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta." And believing that all conflicts are ultimately material in origin, they assumed they could be settled by material means. "Theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, and diplomacy." Western societies could not see beyond their own borders, and failed to realize that secularism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith are not "universal defaults."
In her twenties, while working for a center-left think tank in the Netherlands on 9/11, Hirsi Ali witnessed everyone reach for answers that made sense to them — the injustice of US Middle East policy in general, or the Israeli-Palestinian question in particular. Yes, the attack was admittedly brutal and inhumane, her fellow think-tankers allowed, but one must always consider the injustice of American foreign policy, which impelled the terrorists.
Ali, however, had a perspective her fellows lacked, having become an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya in her teens. When she told her teachers that she could not view her Christian friends as enemies, they corrected her: She had only two choices — convert them, or view them as enemies. All outside the Muslim ummah are enemies, and above all the Jews, who are synonymous with Satan and for whose elimination they directed all their daily prayers.
SINCE 9/11, as many as 13 million Muslims have immigrated to Western Europe from war-torn home countries. They brought with them values completely antithetical to those identified with Western civilization. Hirsi Ali lists some of the differences: Islamic doctrine does not recognize a separation of state and religion, secular law, or the idea of individual freedoms, including the right to worship as one chooses. Islam, she writes, is animated by the belief that the Muslim world suffered a historical dispossession with the abolition of the caliphate, and that this loss must be reversed by retaking all lands ever ruled by Muslims. In addition to retaking lands once under Muslim rule, it is well to remember that Muslims are among history's leading colonizers.
Since 9/11, Western governments have greatly improved their tracking of Islamic terrorist networks. But, Hirsi Ali argues, that is not the only threat from rapidly growing Muslim populations, including the radicalization of adherents who may become "lone wolf" terrorists.
As Muslim communities have grown, a network of institutions — mosques, faith schools — have intensified "communal separation and normative distance from the constitutional order" of the states in which they dwell. Those institutions have also exerted social control over earlier Muslim arrivals, who had integrated into Western society, by confronting them with the gap between their professed totalizing faith, controlling every aspect of life, and their modern compartmentalized lives.
Western leaders assumed that in any clash caused by the sudden influx of millions of people, a large percentage of them single young men, from Muslim lands, the civilizational superiority of the West would be instantly manifest. And they could not imagine that Osama bin Laden and his like would become aggressors against the West and actively seek confrontation. What threat, Western leaders wondered, could a bunch of "cave dwellers" actually constitute?
In short, they misread and underestimated their enemies. But a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood document, known as "The Project," outlined how large-scale immigration, far greater fecundity, and the use of Western freedoms could advance Islamic rule by weakening Western civilization from within.
And in that goal, Islamists found ready allies. Left-wing parties in the West view Muslims as a large, new voting bloc. "Painting the Jewish state as uniquely evil is a small price to pay in exchange for a large and growing voting bloc," in the left's view. The fastest growing party in the UK — the Greens — basically called for the end of Israel at its most recent convention. Much of its support is from the Muslim community.
The current prolonged rioting in France is another example of the Red-Green alliance in action.
Each side of the new Red-Green alliance views the other as a tool to power. But as Hirsi Ali observes, if one had to bet on one side or the other prevailing, one would choose the one with 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, financed by some of the world's richest oil producers, over a group of suburban college kids.
The union of Islamists and the left provides "a fertile channel for foreign propagandists to widen the fractures in American society." Among those propagandists are China and Russia, both of which are adept at flooding cyberspace with misinformation to fan the flames of social conflict. For them, Islamic separatists are instruments of further societal destabilization. Even as China oppresses its own Muslim population, it supports Islamists abroad.
The greatest strengths of liberal society — "open information systems, generous migration regimes, and expansive protections for association" — have, Hirsi Ali argues, "become the precise channels through which hybrid adversaries and civilizational movements seek to destabilize them."
While America is somewhat behind Europe in civilizational collapse, as Muslims are a much smaller percentage of the population, it is nevertheless a measure of how far American elites are from recognizing the challenge that the 25th anniversary of 9/11 in New York was presided over by a foreign-born Muslim, well-connected to Muslim extremists, and whose wife openly celebrated Hamas's 10/7 massacre of Jews.
And as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in Michigan last week, campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is currently leading in most polls, despite his well-documented connections to Islamist groups: "If we [i.e., the Red-Green alliance] can win here, we can win anywhere."
Indeed.