Wednesday, May 22, 2013, in broad daylight, a murderous act of jihad butchery was committed on a busy London street.  The Daily Mail published a pictorial chronology of the gruesome attack, noting, prominently:

• At 2:20 PM (London time) a British soldier (25-year-old Drummer Lee Rigby of the 2^nd Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers), wearing a "Help for Heroes T-Shirt" (a charity for wounded British soldiers) was deliberately rammed by a car and crushed against a road sign.
• The Muslim assailants emerged from the car, dragged the victim to a wall, slashing and stabbing him to death with cleavers and knives, while bellowing "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is great").  Nearly decapitated, the soldier's corpse was then dragged back into the road.
• For some 20 minutes afterward, the murderers paraded up and down the street, permitting their pictures to be taken, and one trumpeted his rationale for the grisly murder.

The two attackers were both of Nigerian descent and apparently "known" to British security services.  One assailant, whose explanatory statements were recorded on video, was later identified as Michael Adebolajo, nom de jihadist "Mujahid," "holy warrior."  Adebolajo was an acquaintance of Anjem Choudary, the  prominent London jihadist ideologue, who characterized the Nigerian Christian's conversion to Islam (some 10 years ago) in mainstream Islamic parlance as a "reversion" to the "primordial" monotheistic faith -- i.e., the Muslim creed.  Choudary also emphasized Adebolajo's devotion to Koranic memorization, along with his restrained, pleasant, "normal" demeanor.

He was a pleasant, quiet guy. He reverted to Islam in about 2003. He was  just a completely normal guy. He was interested in Islam, in memorizing the Koran.

Indeed, Adebolajo's false grievance-laden diatribe, recorded while his bloodstained hands clutched a cleaver and a knife, featured this devout Koranic justification for the butchery he had just committed:

...[W]e are forced by the Qur'an, in Sura At-Tawba [the 9^th "sura," or chapter of the Koran] through many ayah [verses] in the Qu'ran, we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

Sura or chapter 9 of the Koran is believed by Muslims to be one of the final "revelations" (if not the final one) of Islam's holiest guiding text, thus assuming doctrinal precedence over others, even abrogating them outright.  Unfortunately, sura 9 consists of an almost continuous series of timeless jihad war injunctions directed at all non-Muslims, and even at Muslims deemed "hypocritical" for their inadequate piety.

With depressing predictability, and notwithstanding Adebolajo's mainstream Koranic justification for his act of jihad butchery -- designed to sow terror -- British Prime Minister David Cameron negated the Islamic roots of this brutal public assassination.  Cameron pontificated:

It was an attack on Britain and it was also a betrayal of Islam. There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.

Cameron's cultural relativist dogma on Islam mirrored equally misleading and corrosive statements made by then-U.S. President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the mass 9/11/2001 jihad terrorist attacks.  The appropriate Muslim commentary on such remarks by feckless Western leaders, which resonates even more loudly (and shamefully) today, was provided by Omar Uthman Abu Omar, an alleged "al-Qaeda" ideologue and resident British Muslim cleric of Jordanian origin.  The loquacious Abu Omar, better known as "Abu Qatada," observed (in October 2001):

I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?

Two decades ago, the late respected British scholar of Islam, Dr. Mervyn Hiskett (d. 1994), in Some to Mecca Turn to Pray, warned presciently about the immoderate mindset -- by Western standards -- of Britain's Muslim elites.  Hiskett noted then (i.e., in 1993) the prevailing opinion among leaders of the British Muslim community that unless Muslim immigrants to Britain were allowed unrestrained access to Islamic law, sharia, in all aspects, Britain was to be regarded Dar-al-Harb, or the House of War -- that is, the target of jihadism.  Citing what he characterized as "a more urbane but some may consider ominous statement of the Muslim intention to brook no opposition," Hiskett quoted Zaki Badawi (d. 2006), a Muslim scholar and former director of the Islamic Cultural Center, London, who was made an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in 2004, and also appointed by the Duke of Castro as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I.  (Incidentally, Badawi, an Egyptian Muslim, never became a British subject, although he had lived in the country for more than thirty years and had received all manner of honors there.)  Badawi, as Hiskett documented, had opined:

A proselytizing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole humanity will be one Muslim community, the "Umma."

Hiskett's foreboding concerns have proven justified, as evidenced by disturbing survey results from British Muslims polled in January 2005 and again shortly after the July 7, 2005 London bombings.  These data revealed that 60 percent of British Muslims surveyed prior to the 7/7/05 bombings felt that those who engaged in mere criti足cism of Islam should face criminal prosecution, while one third were brazen enough to admit after July 7, 2005 that "Western society is decadent and immoral and ... Muslims should seek to bring it to an end."  Expressing their desire to replace Britain's current liberal democracy with a bellicose, liberty-crushing, sharia-based theocratic model, these 2005 polling data from British Muslims were consistent with a worldview made plain in a statement published August 16, 2005 in the Guardian and signed by 38 prominent British Muslim organizations and individuals:

To equate "extremism" with the aspirations of Muslims for Sharia laws in the Muslim world or the desire to see unification towards a Caliphate in the Muslim lands, as seemed to be misrepresented by the prime minister, is inaccurate and disingenuous. It indicates ignorance of what the Sharia is and what a Caliphate is and will alienate and victimize the Muslim community unnecessarily.

Additional polling data published in 2007 by the British think-tank Policy Exchange indicated that 43% of British Muslims agreed with the proposition that "Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death," while 52% concurred that "a Muslim male may have up to 4 wives and a Muslim female is allowed only 1 husband."  Subsequently, a late 2008 poll of six hundred British Muslim college students (John Thorne and Hannah Stuart, "Islam on Campus: A survey of UK student opinions," Centre for Social Cohesion, 2008) revealed that one third supported killing in the name of Islam, while 40 percent wanted sharia to replace British law.

And sharia indoctrination of British Muslim youth begins well before college entry.  A BBC Panorama investigation has exposed the presence in Britain of forty "weekend schools" attended by some five thousand Muslim children aged 6-18.  These schools teach the British Muslim youth who attend them, for example, traditional Islamic motifs of Jew-hatred and mutilating sharia punishments -- as per the Saudi National Curriculum -- under the rubric of "Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland."

Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani sat for twenty years as a sharia judge in Pakistan's Supreme Court (his father was the grand mufti of Pakistan).  Currently Usmani is deputy of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of the Organization of the Islamic Conference -- the major international body of Islamic nations in the world -- and serves as an adviser to several global sharia-based Islamic financial institutions.  Thus he is a leading contemporary figure in the world of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence.

Mr. Usmani, who mentored Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam al-Kawthari, Director of the Leicester, U.K., Institute of Islamic Jurisprudence (Darul Iftaa, www.daruliftaa.com), is also a regular visitor to Britain.  During a 2007 visit there, Usmani was interviewed by the Times of London, which published extracts from Usmani's writings on jihad (from "Islam and Modernism"), Saturday, September 8, 2007.  He refuted the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a non-Muslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam (which, not surprisingly, was of some concern to The Times!).  Usmani argued that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practice Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.

Given this toxic British Muslim milieu, and its outward manifestations, the results of a 2010 YouGov poll of 2,152 ordinary non-Muslim adult Britons appear quite rational.  The online YouGov survey found that 58% of those questioned linked Islam with extremism, and 69% believed that it encourages the repression of women, while a mere 13% thought the creed was based upon peace, and only 6% associated Islam with justice.

Despite the continued Big Islamic Lie being enunciated by Britain's political elites -- most notably Prime Minister Cameron himself -- the savage jihadist murder of Lee Rigby validates the legitimate concerns most ordinary Britons already had about normative Islam.

Ultimately, to preserve their liberties, the British people must force chronically capitulating political leaders to act decisively against sharia encroachment -- violent and nonviolent alike.  Mervyn Hiskett identified the crux of the problem already in 1993:

As is so often the case when considering Islam, one has to concede the power of certain of its ideas. But when it comes to having these ideas advocated within our own shores, and as alternatives to our own insti足tutions, one must then ask oneself: Which does one prefer? Western secular, pluralist institutions, imperfect as these are? Or the Islamic theo足cratic alternative? And if one decides in favor of one's own institutions, warts and all, one then has to ask again: How far may the advocacy of Islamic alternatives go, before this becomes downright subversive? And at that point, what should be done about it? Finally, do liberal, demo足cratic politicians have the political and moral guts to do what is needed, or will they simply give way, bit by bit and point by point, to insistent and sustained pressure from the Muslim "Parliament" and other Muslim special-interest lobbies like it?"