When he learned that Pamela Geller and I had been banned from entering Great Britain, Roger Kimball wrote in a marvelous PJ Media piece entitled “Free Speech Dies in UK” that what Geller and I do is “speak out against the intolerance of Islam,” for that, we are not welcome in a country where recently a British soldier was “hacked to death by Muslim fanatics.” He summed up the situation in a single phrase: “the irony of the situation is rich.” And since then, it has gotten even richer than that.


Kimball succinctly summed up the Leftist mindset behind the ban:

The British Home Office was kind enough to spell out which of my views and opinions were so unacceptable as to make it “not conducive to the public good” for me to enter the country. The Home Office’s letter stated that I said this:

I have to admit that the Home Office has a point. After all, to suggest that Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, whom Islamic scholar Karen Armstrong has likened to Gandhi, called for the genocide of the Jews – clearly such a thing would be morally abhorrent. Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, almost certainly has been told again and again that Islam teaches tolerance of Jews and Christians as “People of the Book.” Saying that Muhammad told Muslims to kill Jews would be hateful! Islamophobic!

And there is more. The Home Office also depicted me quoting what I brazenly misrepresented as Islamic supremacist aspirations:

Horrors. That is bad: to suggest that Islam, which every right-thinking person knows is tolerant, pluralistic, and peaceful, has imperialist ambitions to conquer and subjugate Europe – clearly such a view would incite hatred against Muslims, and I have to admit that under the circumstances I understand why the Home Office banned me.

And – I am abashed to admit – it gets even worse. The Home Office also quoted me thusly:

Now, that’s just going too far. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently sponsored a huge ad campaign designed to show that jihad was walking on the beach with a loved one, or dropping off the kids at soccer practice. Everyone knows that the one thing that jihad is not is warfare against and murder of those who don’t believe in Islam. Only hate-filled Islamophobes contend otherwise, and that’s why I was banned from the United Kingdom.

I feel so ashamed.

Except that there’s one catch. In reality, I didn’t say any of those things, and none of them are in the letter to me from the Home Office. Those are all the words of Mohammed al-Arifi, a Saudi cleric who just last week was admitted into Britain without any difficulty.

So what I really said must have been even worse than those statements by al-Arifi, right? After all, he is in, and I am out. So here goes: shield your children’s eyes, and read what the Home Office actually quoted me as saying that was so heinous as to warrant my being forbidden to gaze upon the glories of The Sceptered Isle:

The quote appears to be taken from a mangled machine transcription of a documentary I appeared in about ten years ago, Islam: What the West Needs to Know. Since I’ve said and written similar things many, many times over the years without automated garbling, it’s unclear why the Home Office had to step back so far to find something it considered bad enough to warrant my banning from entering the country.

You’ll notice, however, that what I said was actually milder than the statements from Mohammad al-Arifi, and simply note facts with which the Saudi cleric would wholeheartedly agree: that Islam mandates warfare against unbelievers, and that Sharia and Western democratic pluralism are incompatible.

From this we see that you can actually get into Britain if you speak honestly about Islam’s doctrine of jihad violence against unbelievers. You just have to be for that violence. If you’re against it, unpack your bags: you ain’t making the trip. And thus the irony of the situation is, as Roger Kimball noted, rich, exceedingly rich.