The most telling interjection from the Islamic extremist who heckled the Home Secretary John Reid today in East London was the cry ‘How dare you come to a Muslim area’. There it was, the territorial challenge implicit in the ongoing attempt to Islamise Britain both by stealth and by force, that areas where British Muslims live are by definition no-go areas for the British state — and, by extension in the cultural sphere, Islamic values are equally no-go areas to which the British state must give way.
This was of course, as Reid immediately observed, an intolerable assertion. It would spell the Balkanisation of Britain. It was good to hear him slap it down; such is the government’s usual craven approach to the problem of Islamic extremism in Britain, it was quite a shock to hear the Home Secretary taking for once such a robust approach. Of course, the predictable reaction duly followed: from the Muslim community, general outrage that parents were being asked to ‘spy’ on their children to prevent them from being indoctrinated by a death cult which would send them to murder untold numbers of their fellow citizens, for goodness’ sake; and from the chattering classes, shaking of heads over the reckless unwisdom of the Home Secretary— through his apparently utterly outrageous request to parents to prevent their children from being brainwashed by fanatics into becoming human bombs — in doubtless provoking previously moderate Muslims into militancy (with no acknowledgement of the blindingly obvious contradiction in that particular proposition).
It seemed to me that what Reid was doing, by addressing the Muslim community in this way, was not merely making a plea to parents but also, for the first time, drawing a line in the cultural sand. In effect, he was saying: this is one country, and it will not be fragmented but everyone has to observe the same basic rules; and also that we will no longer engage in the dialogue of the demented in which we have been forced to participate. We will no longer put up with the moral and intellectual inversion, the shifting of blame onto the victims, the disavowal of communal responsibility for a phenomenon which arises directly out of that community; we will no longer tolerate the cultural dismemberment of Britain.
Whether this tentative throwing down of the cultural gauntlet in the face of creeping Islamisation does mark a more general shift away from the Whitehall strategy of appeasing extremism that has obtained until now remains to be seen. There is still a huge distance for the government to travel before it emerges from its state of collective denial. What is urgently needed, for example, is much more robust action against the fanatics doing the brainwashing. It is beyond belief that individuals are still able to parade on the streets of Britain calling for the murder of the Pope, or inciting hatred and murder against Jews or – in the words of the shiny new law on the statute book — glorifying terrorism. But despite such persistently high levels of paralysis within the establishment, there are now also signs in various quarters of a growing movement towards reality.
It was good to hear representatives of Britain’s newly formed Sufi Muslim Council, for example, speaking up in support of Reid, and expressing their proper concern that their children were in danger of becoming radicalised unless their community took action. Such voices of Muslim realism need every possible encouragement and protection in their brave struggle against the Islamic fascism that threatens them along with the rest of us.
It was good to hear Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking up for the Pope in the most robust of terms.
‘We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,’ he said. ‘There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths. Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.’
Lord Carey went on to argue that a ‘deep-seated Westophobia’ has developed in recent years in the Muslim world… He said he agreed with his Muslim friends who claimed that true Islam is not a violent religion, but he wanted to know why Islam today had become associated with violence. ‘The Muslim world must address this matter with great urgency,’ he said.
What Lord Carey seems to be saying is that the problem is what Islam has become. That formulation leaves open the possibility for Muslims to disagree with what Islam has become — which many do — while making it clear that this is not just a few extremists on the fringes, but the path taken by the religion itself.
The Pope’s initiative, which is continuing to produce Islamic unrest, is surely a highly significant event. It marks the point at which Christianity finally decided to fight back against the attempt to dethrone both it and the civilisation which it has inspired. The much-touted idea that a subtle and sophisticated political player such as the Pope could possibly have failed to anticipate the reaction his words would cause is clearly absurd. On the intelligence site Stratfor (subscription only) George Friedman ponders the Pope’s strategic thinking:
It is obvious that Benedict delivered a well-thought-out statement. It is also obvious that the Vatican had no illusions as to how the Muslim world would respond. The statement contained a verbal blast, crafted in a way that allowed Benedict to maintain plausible deniability. Indeed, the pope already has taken the exit, noting that these were not his thoughts but those of another scholar. The Pope and his staff were certainly aware that this would make no difference in the grand scheme of things, save for giving Benedict the means for distancing himself from the statement when the inevitable backlash occurred. Indeed, the anger in the Muslim world remained intense, and there also have been emerging pockets of anger among Catholics over the Muslim world’s reaction to the pope, considering the history of Islamic attacks against Christianity. Because he reads the newspapers — not to mention the fact that the Vatican maintains a highly capable intelligence service of its own — Benedict also had to have known how the war was going, and that his statement likely would aid Bush politically, at least indirectly. Finally, he would be aware of the political dynamics in Europe and that the statement would strengthen his position with the church’s base there.
The question is how far Benedict is going to go with this. His predecessor took on the Soviet Union and then, after the collapse of communism, started sniping at the United States over its materialism and foreign policy. Benedict may have decided that the time has come to throw the weight of the church against radical Islamists. In fact, there is a logic here: If the Muslims reject Benedict’s statement, they have to acknowledge the rationalist aspects of Islam. The burden is on the Ummah to lift the religion out of the hands of radicals and extremist scholars by demonstrating that Muslims can adhere to reason.
From an intellectual and political standpoint, therefore, Benedict’s statement was an elegant move. He has strengthened his political base and perhaps legitimized a stronger response to anti-Catholic rhetoric in the Muslim world. And he has done it with superb misdirection. His options are open: He now can move away from the statement and let nature take its course, repudiate it and challenge Muslim leaders to do the same with regard to anti-Catholic statements or extend and expand the criticism of Islam that was implicit in the dialogue.
The pope has thrown a hand grenade and is now observing the response. We are assuming that he knew what he was doing; in fact, we find it impossible to imagine that he did not. He is too careful not to have known. Therefore, he must have anticipated the response and planned his partial retreat.
The Pope understands only too well that western civilisation is in the frame. And there are those on the left who get it, too. In the Observer recently Martin Amis — some of whose views I do not share — showed that he understands that modern Islamism was forged from an ideological fusion of Hitler and Stalin:
By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a ‘helpless hulk’ (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.
So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning.
There are even those on the far-left who get it, so much so that they are actually coming out in support of the Pope. On the Workers’ Liberty website, Sean Matgamna writes:
The effort to silence the head of the Catholic Church is a grim joke, but not one to laugh at. Secularist glee at the sight of the Pope being anathematised in this clash of two, mutually exclusive, ‘infallible’ religions, needs to be tempered with awareness of the seriousness of the situation which is summed up in the outcry against the Pope. (As it was in the recent Muslim outcry against the Danish cartoons.)…
The initial freedom of speech and of writing won in the west was the freedom to criticise religion, at first from within common religious assumptions, and then outside all religious assumptions — the right, for instance, to tell Pope Benedict’s predecessors that they were as foolish as they were presumptuous… Now, we have reached the stage where the revelation, which should surprise nobody, that the Catholic Pope doesn’t like Muhammad, or Islam, that he thinks his own religion better, the true religion, and says so, more or less, unleashes organised, obstreperous outrage across large parts of the globe!…I repeat: if political Islam can do that to the Bishop of Rome, what can it not do to secularists, male and female sexual rebels, infidels, apostates from Islam, and socialists in the countries where it is dominant, and in the communities in Western Europe where it is immensely powerful?
… All the more shameful then, for the Guardian, the chief ‘organ’ of invertebrate liberalism, to editorialise, magisterially about Islamic-Christian relations (18-9-06). What needs to be done is to defend free speech, without weaseling equivocation. The Guardian argued, essentially, that the sensibilities and demands of political Islam should be pandered to. Theirs is liberalism rendered helplessly unprincipled, denuded both of historical perspective and historical memory. It is without even a spark of the will to defend the liberal values it professes to hold… When both the ‘revolutionary’ kitsch-left and the backbone-free liberals do what they are doing, then secularists, consistent liberals and socialists who haven’t lost their wits or their historical perspective, should make their voices heard.
Amen to that, comrade.
