Cast your mind back to February. We weren’t allowed to see the cartoons, but the reactions to them were everywhere. On our screens, in our newspapers, we were treated to the spectacle of Muslim extremists holding up banners praising the ‘magnificent’ attacks of 9/11 and calling for ‘a real holocaust’. There was even a cute little two-year-old girl wearing an ‘I love Al-Qaida’ cap, and that comedian who decided to don a suicide belt for a joke. After 9/11, 7/7, and various other Islamist atrocities, we could be forgiven for feeling that these weren’t just empty gestures. And then of course there were the riots all around the globe, the bizarre sight of Danish flags being torched, and the sacking of Danish embassies, a violation of diplomatic immunity that for some incomprehensible reason went unpunished.
In Britain, the apologies we heard from the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, the former Met chief, Lord Stevens, and others, indicated they were more upset about the depiction of the Prophet than about the fact that there are people in this country who are hell bent on slaughtering the rest of us. As I predicted here at the time, while people have been arrested for protesting outside the Cenotaph, not to mention clobbered by the police for opposing the fox-hunting ban, the public’s call for the cartoon protesters to be punished was quietly brushed under the plush carpets of Whitehall and Scotland Yard. Freedom of speech was most evidently lost in identity politics: incitement to murder, which has been on our statute books for a long time, was carefully glossed over. It’s called cowardice, folks, and it’s not something the Brits have been very well known for in the past. What’s happened to us?
As some pointed out at the time, and have continued to do so, this pusillanimity can be emblematic as one of the critical failures of multiculturalism. A politically enshrined doctrine that prioritises difference over unity can only fatally weaken the society in which it is enforced. Rather than seek common ground – or, since history has given us a very great deal of that, rather than assert common ground – we have allowed the glue of our common values to be loosened by the glue of minority cultures and religions. Thus could Anne Owers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, ban the flying of the English national flag in our prisons on the grounds that it showed the cross of St George, which was used by the Crusaders and is thus offensive to Muslims. Society, in this environment, becomes friable, liable to crumble when a rigid wedge, such as that of radical Islam, is driven in.
What the Danish paper was testing was the weakness of free societies in the face of intimidation by militant Islam. But it wasn’t actually the cartoons that proved their point, it was a group of Danish imams. The cartoons were published, to no great furore, six months before the explosion. The fuse was lit by the clerics who paraded the cartoons around the Middle East – with a few of their own choice masterpieces thrown in for good measure. The intention was to stir up anger. The result: success. It’s worth remembering, for a second, that the issue of representing the Prophet has been – again, for very specific purposes – blown out of proportion. Quite apart from the fact that Christians are used to seeing Christ as a transvestite or His mother Mary dressed as a whore – this is the work of ‘brave’ artists like of Gilbert and George – there have always been caricatures of Mohammed in Europe, as the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis has pointed out. Some of them – such as the depiction in the Cathedral of Bologna of Mohammed in Dante’s Inferno – have been worse than the recent Danish ones.
So the test of the weakness of free societies in the face of militant Islam was set and militant Islam made us cower. Because it could. We fawned, we poodled, we said sorry. A lot. The same has happened in the Netherlands, where the brutal stabbing of Theo van Gogh has not led to a more robust defence of Dutch liberal values, but has instead resulted in Ayan Hirsi Ali, who has been dubbed a modern-day Spinoza for her commitment to putting Islam under the microscope, being hounded out. It is going on everywhere. The defiant are at risk. The Italian lawsuit against Oriana Fallaci, a journalist and author accused of defaming Islam in a book, is being brought by Adel Smith, head of the Italian Muslim Union, who is known for having sought to have crucifixes removed from classrooms in the public school in Abruzzo that his sons attend.
In Denmark the cartoon affair continues to have worrying effects. The very Islamists who set the affair in motion have good reason to regard subsequent developments as an outstanding triumph. Not even members of government dare speak freely for fear of being killed. In a superb, if deeply disturbing, article entitled ‘The Muhammed Affair and the Denmark Pact’, Danish authors Lars Hedegaard and Helle Meret Brix enumerate the ways in which the guilty clerics have managed to insinuate their way into the corridors of power. The same imams who stirred it up are acclaimed for having calmed things down. These clerics are advising the government while the cartoonists are under round-the-clock protection, their lives wrecked. One of the imams with close links to the Danish Security Intelligence Service, and publicly praised for his decency, was caught on camera by a French journalist saying of Naser Khader, a Social Liberal MP and an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism, that all being well ‘two men will emerge and blow him and his ministry up.’
Such people are fast becoming the moral arbiters in Europe, while the rest of us prattle on agreeably about tolerance and respect.
To return to our own dear land, the same slippage is happening. Take the outgoing head of the infamously moderate Muslim Council of Britain, Iqbal Sacranie, who said that death would be too good for Salman Rushdie, and who called for the abolition of Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day. Or take his successor, Muhammad Abdul Bari. Bari runs a Saudi funded mosque, which did a press release in his name saying that the Muhammad cartoons were similar to the vilification of Jews by the Nazis, and he’s been linked to Tablighi Jamaat (home to American Taliban John Walker Lindh and our own London bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan) through the London Muslim Centre. Or take Tariq Ramadan, the man for whom the concept of Doublespeak – or taqiyya - could well have been coined. He has categorically condemned suicide bombing on British television while advocating it in other forums, as A Dankowitz, Director of MEMRI’s Reform Project, has pointed out. Ramadan is now a key government advisor and media spokesperson for ‘moderate’ Islam.
Quite obviously this is not about all Muslims, but the challenge posed by those that want a new caliphate, the challenge posed by those that want worldwide shari’a law, the challenge posed by those who want to see the overthrow of all western values, is real. Let’s not be found sleeping.
Two other pieces worth reading:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/011787.php
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001738.html
Comments (1)
COMPLACENCY PITFALL IS FOUND IN THE SILENT MAJORITY
I once knew a man whose family was from the German aristocracy prior to World War 2. They owned a number of large industries and estates. I asked him how many German people were true Nazis and the answer he gave me has stuck with me and has guided my attitude towards FANATISCISM ever since.
“Very few people were true Nazis but, many enjoyed the return of German Pride and many more were too busy to care, I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us and we had lost control and the end of the world had come My family lost everything and I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories” he said.
We are told again and again by the ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that ISLAM is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just wish to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.
It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder or honour kill. It is the fanatics who take over the mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the ‘Peaceful Majority’ is the ‘Silent Majority’ and is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia comprised many Russians who just wanted to live in peace yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of some 20 million people. ‘The Peaceful Majority’ were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese individual prior to WW2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across SE Asia in a orgy of killing that include the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians, most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘Peace Loving’.
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace Loving Muslims will become our enemies if they do not speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatic’s own them and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace Loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis Palestinians, Somalis,
Nigerians, Algerians and many others have died because the ‘Peaceful Majority’ did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts, the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
I sincerely believe that anyone who rejects this as just another political rant, or doubts the seriousness of this issue, or just deletes it from their mind without discussion, that you may be a part of the problem.
I found this item on the internet, I do not know who the author is , but it is an accurate summary of the danger that we in the western society face.GB.
Posted by gordon bonner | April 11, 2007 10:21 AM
Posted on April 11, 2007 10:21