'.... I have ... travelled across Europe, and must admit that it can be terrifying to see the way in which the unsolved problems which Islam brings with it are dangerously simmering. Every European country is now experiencing this in the same ways. From the streets of Scandinavia to the outskirts of Paris, the northern cities of England to the East End of London, we have a set of societies in our midst about which even the use of the word "integration" must be regarded as some cosmic joke.
.... What has been created are not multicultural societies but parallel societies. Every country faces similar challenges and all are going through similar debates.
Yet .... They encourage Muslim leaders to "condemn" extremism but do little to tackle it. They praise "moderates" when they should be insisting on Muslim progressives. Lacking the resolve to change this, we all cling to an unfounded hope that the absorption of tens of millions of Muslims into Europe will change nothing very significantly....
Britain had no significant Muslim presence until the latter part of the last century. There was a negligible Muslim presence in Britain until postwar immigration brought waves of migration predominantly from the Indian subcontinent, and Islam played no important role in our history.
By the 2001 census, there were around 1.5 million Muslims in England and Wales. By the 2011 census, that number was 2.7 million. Over a single decade the Muslim population had doubled — and that is not including the hundreds of thousands of people who are here illegally.
If anyone in power had wanted to alter the vast increase in Muslim immigration during the post-9/11 period, to work on absorbing the people who were already here before welcoming in any more, they could have done so. But they did not and no politician looks set to do so in the near future....
Today Britain's Muslim community is growing ten times faster than the rest of the population. Half of British Muslims are under the age of 25. And among young people under 25, one in ten are now Muslim. Conversions of Britons to Islam are also at an unprecedented high. In the decade since 9/11 more than 100,000 British people converted to Islam. Three-quarters of these were women....
[I]f current trends continue, in the next 20 years or so there will be more Muslims in Britain than Christians. Some demographic studies suggest that on current trends Britain could have a Muslim majority by the middle of this century....
In the last couple of years the leaders of all three main political parties have conceded that it is not racist to have concerns about immigration. But they neither know what to do about the next step, nor can get beyond generalities about the need for "debate" or the sending around — as during this past summer — of occasional dog-whistles to pretend something is being done while the issue truly remains unaddressed....
There is a blockage of common sense or assertion of values....
Last year Mohammed was the second most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. In the country as a whole it was narrowly beaten to the top spot by Harry (which received a boost from the popular prince and a member of the pop group One Direction). But the figures also show that Mohammed is now easily the most popular name for baby boys in many areas of the country, including London and the West Midlands....
Tell Muslim leaders not just to "condemn" acts of violence but to stop them. Tell them that the era of ifs and buts about the extremists must end. Tell them to put the concerns of the state foremost in the minds of young Muslims, to have a picture of the Queen and say a prayer for the royal family in mosques as it is said in synagogues every Saturday. Tell them to teach their young that if they feel an urge to get involved in a struggle, they can join up for one the best armies in the world — the British army.
In particular, tell them to create swiftly and purposefully a type of British or Western Islam which not only is not in the hands of fanatics, but cannot be reclaimed by them. Lock the fanatical scholarship out as strongly as historically it has been able to be locked in. I say all this with a sense of hopelessness. There has been no sign, in a dozen years, that any Western country is willing to do anything like this....
Yes, it will be true that we will have access to a greater variety of food, languages and cultures than we had half a century ago. And we will have to get used to the downside that there will be more forced marriage, female genital mutilation and beheading than there used to be.
My suspicion, not to be too flippant, is that a lot of people, especially those in positions of power, have already made their peace with that deal. There is no plausible reason, if they have not, why so much attention is paid to muffling those voices who raise criticisms of Islam and so much help given to those often highly regressive figures who carry water for the fundamentalists.
....There may be tinkering, and lone voices speaking out against such developments, but there will be no significant force from inside or outside Islam persuading Muslims that the path of segregation and separation denoted by the veil is wrong.
Our politics will inevitably follow the same sectarian lines. Already there are stories — I know of two cases, from different political parties — where Jewish candidates have not been chosen to contest certain parliamentary seats because the proportion of local Muslims is too high. [Emphasis added; is that, incidentally, what we wish to see in Australia?]
With one in ten young Britons being Muslim, there is already a change in the pressures on politicians. What will it be like when it is two in ten? Will some of our closest political alliances survive?
The best we may be able to hope for is the right to pursue the type of British lives that our ancestors lived. You can see this, in rural and other communities in Britain where the concerns of the global battle for Islam, even when they are in a nearby town, appear to be thousands of miles away.
.... As the recent history of the English Defence League may have shown, any non-Muslim, grassroots yet non-racist resistance to Islamic extremism may well be impossible....
In any case, it certainly appears to have become the view of the British governing class that, if there is a problem within or from Islam it is beyond the control or influence of the political class, let alone any single here-today gone-tomorrow politician. The pretence is now so strong that it is assumed that Islam is like all other religions, that suspicion of Islam is as dangerous as suspicion of any other religion....'Read the entire article here
Also worth a sobering read is British Muslim Mehrdad Amanpour's "The Quiet Death of Moderate Islam" on Harry's Place (taster below):
'....When I was a child, my relatives would tell me that the hadud punishments of stoning, beheading and limb amputation weren’t part of modern Islam – such practices belonged to another time, in the same way that burning witches in Europe belonged to another time. I was told that the only Muslims that supported such practices were ‘backward’ and the only places that practiced them were ‘barbaric’ – in time ‘education’ would enlighten these simple folk and drag them into modernity.
Yet I’ve grown up and seen the opposite happen....
The gutless media. The unprincipled trade unions, universities and student unions that turn a blind eye to the wickedness being promoted in their midst. The hypocritical ‘anti-fascist’ organisations that enable and defend hate. Most of all, the lickspittle political class. Shame on them all.
‘Extreme’ has quietly become ‘moderate’ whilst Europeans have been too polite, too unprincipled or too cowardly to object....
During the past two decades, the Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad.
At the same time, competing fundamentalist Shia and Sunni movements have been promoted aggressively throughout Europe, with massive funding from countries such as Iran and Qatar.
Moderate Islam is as good as dead. It didn’t stand a chance....'
Often there are columns like this that ring the bell about the threat of some particularly violent, oppressive and intolerant strain Islam that’s poised to succeed and we’re always left with some pointless finger pointing about what those other Muslims should do about it. While reminding ourselves that they haven’t so far and likely never will. And that either by civil war or flat out re-population they’re going to win. All the while we are scolding our leaders who are already in bed with fanatics for not doing something about it.
ReplyDeleteIn many ways it’s reflective of the middle class response to Bolshevism in its early days. Lenin took over the Russian Empire with barely a hundred thousand men and women. But that was the easy part. The hard part was their wholesale upending of society over time so that Russian society was unrecognizable were one to compare 1905 and 1925. I’m sure the middle class and the Mensheviks scoffed at the activities of a few thousand revolutionaries. After all THEY were enlightened THEY had the nations bests goals and intentions.
Or one could use the analogy of East Germany following WW2 – still ostensibly “Germany” filled with Germans who understood German culture and history but with relatively little effort they were all turned into a police state where everyone spying on everyone else was the norm in the style of the Soviets. I’m sure too when the Berlin Wall went up the ‘liberals’ in East Germany told each other it would all blow over and anyway, wasn’t it all America’s fault for being so….American?
This is likely what will happen to England, France, Holland, Belgium and ultimately – Russia itself. Slowly over time the people who scream the loudest about killing everyone else will be met with the obligatory middle class “Well they can’t ALL possibly be that bad, that can’t all mean that. Keep Calm and Carry On.”
The problem is that ignoring threats is not an adequate defense of your culture. Imagining that Sudan would rather be London than all the Sudanese in London would rather be Mogadishu is a mistake. Often a fatal mistake. It took Soviet Russia barely 2 years to come into being and 75 years to disintegrate of its own accord. It took less than a year for East Germany to turn into East Germany and 45 years for it to grind to an exhausted stop. I suspect that England, (or France or Holland or Belgium or ALL of them like an Islamic Warsaw Pact) will soon reach a political tipping point where the switch from England to political Islam will be in the blink of an eye and it will be decades or a century for the whole failed Medieval disaster to implode on its own. For the first year after it happens, middle class Brits will argue amongst themselves whether it’s really any sort of worry at all. But it will have already long passed the point where they matter.