A British comedian quotes his German girlfriend complaining that one can’t get good bagels in Berlin; he pauses for effect and then asks: “Well, whose fault is that?” We might repeat the question after reading Mr. Joseph Pearce’s recent essay on The Imaginative Conservative, sounding the alarm on the Muslim Peril.
The mere “presence” of Islam is a threat to the world, warns Mr. Pearce, referring to all 1.6 billion Muslims. Then he dredges up a right-wing historian at his most populist and swivel-eyed, predicting that just one more act of terrorism “could be” (not “will be”—note the safety clause) “the trigger for the next English civil war.” Really? It’s 1641 all over again? I haven’t noticed any Christian harquebusiers or pikemen marching on the village green, and the Muslims running my nearest corner shop seem preoccupied with watching televised soccer and selling chocolate bars. As I understand it, civil wars require at least two sides willing to fight, so who are they, Mr. Pearce?
Europe is so overrun with Muslims that it is probably beyond rescue, Mr. Pearce warns, but America may just survive if she slams her doors to “non-Christians.” Obviously, that means no more Jews. And at the Simpson’s convenience store, Apu has to go. Mr. Pearce, an English immigrant, cannot oppose all immigration, so he agrees so long as the newcomers are just like him. He sounds less convincing under scrutiny, especially when he writes of America which his US audiences know; but they understandably know less about Britain and are conveniently prone to trust him.
He warns us of what non-Muslim Brits believe that UK Muslims are thinking; a tortured piece of guesswork where, according to some poll which he presents without citation, “one in five Britons stated their belief that ‘a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country…’” Which poll? When and who? What percentage is large? He doesn’t say. And only one in five is pathetic: in Britain, twenty per cent think potato chips come from underground mines and Jesus plays soccer for Nottingham Forest. But like that celebrated dog in the Sherlock Holmes stories, that “didn’t bark in the night,” what Mr. Pearce doesn’t say is often more informative than what he says.
Mr. Pearce avoids mentioning what British Muslims actually think, a far more useful yardstick than how many other people are scared, misinformed, upset or confused by the lightless heat of populist media, opportunistic politicians and the virulent but small white-supremacist parties. Moreover, the better British media, offline and online, is awash in details of what our Muslim citizens really do think. It’s worth a look because the data is so damaging to Mr. Pearce’s argument that Muslims are ultra-dangerous insurgents burrowed into the beating heart of Christian Europe.
A survey, using 2,000 interviews and 60 focus groups in 11 cities, found British Muslims more patriotic than their co-religionists anywhere else in Europe. In another, UK Muslims are less likely to be ashamed of their Britishness than the Scots (13 versus 17 per cent). The respected conservative reporter Peter Oborne writes, this summer in the conservative Daily Telegraph, that another poll “showed that Muslims are more patriotic than other Britons (83 per cent said they were proud to be British as opposed to 79 per cent of the general population), and are more integrated than is often thought to be the case.” Additionally, surveys show that “77% of Muslims strongly identify with Britain while only 50% of the wider population do (and) 86.4% of Muslims feel they belong in Britain, slightly more than the 85.9% of Christians.”
Patriotism isn’t their only virtue. Veteran broadcaster Jon Snow cites a 2014 YouGov survey: “Seventy per cent of British Muslims say they believe in ‘freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, and respecting and upholding the rule of law’—the core values of Britishness as recently defined by David Cameron—while a tiny 6% do not…This poll paints a very different picture of the British Muslim community from the extremist caricature that is sometimes peddled by certain politicians and in some sections of the media.”
This is not surprising to anyone who actually knows British Muslims and who socialises with them as I have. The majority, with relatives still in “the Old Country” (often Pakistan or the Middle East), are enormously grateful to live in Britain and be spared the intolerance, injustice, poverty, corruption and misrule flourishing where they, or their parents or grandparents, grew up. Perhaps for this reason I know British Muslims who, wearing checked tweeds and still chomping on briar pipes, seem more English than stereotypical Englishmen of the 1950s!
The intensity of British Muslim patriotism is all the more remarkable given their relative poverty: “only 7 per cent were considered ‘thriving’ compared with 56 per cent of the general population and only 38 per cent said they had a job, compared with 62 per cent of the general public.” We can explain this while we dispel another convenient inaccuracy.
Mr. Pearce refers to any Briton’s “self-ghettoised Muslim neighbours.” He clearly wants you to believe that all 2.7 million of them are voluntarily huddled up a dark alley somewhere, as far from us filthy infidels as possible, twirling their foreign moustaches and plotting to kill us in our beds. His clumsy word “self-ghettoised,” however, is swift, convenient, and untrue.
A recent Gallup poll shows that 82% of British Muslims want to live in diverse and mixed neighbourhoods compared to 63% of non-Muslims. Most British Muslims, like many other poor and/or immigrant Brits, number among the UK’s 24 per cent who live in public sector housing. Due to well-known shortages of so-called “council houses,” the inmates find it virtually impossible to move and change public accommodation, rendering them unable to pursue jobs in more economically vibrant areas. Poor Irish, poor Caribbean blacks, poor immigrant Muslims—none are “self-ghettoised,” and all are prisoners of socialism. Mr. Pearce grew up in Dagenham, East London, where perhaps a third of the populace lives in public housing, and for all we know Mr. Pearce grew up in a council house too. It is mystifying how so articulate a self-proclaimed conservative could ignore such pernicious socialism, in order to blame widespread social problems on a single minority.
What Mr. Pearce may not know is how a few British cities acquired such densely populated immigrant ghettos, which four-fifths of British Muslims wish to escape in order to live with the rest of us. White people put them there.
During the UK’s first big wave of 20th Century immigration in the 1950s and early 1960s, newcomers from South Asia and the Caribbean were greeted by British officials and handed free train tickets, particularly to Bradford at first. It was thought more collegial to keep all the “darkies” together, and away from the “normal” white Britons. Immigrants, who often had no relatives already in Britain, used the free tickets to go wherever the nice officials wished to send them. Had they been intentionally integrated broadly, today there would be a few darker-skinned families intermarried, integrated and employed in each town and village across the UK. But we crowded them into ghettos. So as the British comedian asked his girlfriend, “whose fault is that?” Conveniently but unfairly, Mr. Pearce points at the outsiders.
This also reveals another historical fact, one that Mr. Pearce may not know, explaining why some UK Muslim youth have been radicalised. After having been herded into ghettos, then enslaved by socialism and imprisoned in council houses and kept without jobs for a variety of reasons (some well beyond their control), Muslims were understandably slow to join mainstream British society. Even so, there has been some assimilation. This began especially in the 1970s, when the children of the first wave of immigrants (both South Asian and Caribbean) reached university-age, made a wide circle of friends, and romances sometimes thrived beyond ghetto barriers.
Since independence in 1947, Pakistan has been economically dependent upon financial remittances from its people who emigrated abroad: in largely tolerant Britain, intermarriage and assimilation threatened immigrant families’ emotional and financial ties to the Old Country. The 1980s dictator of Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq, was alarmed by this; he began shipping Pakistani mullahs to Britain to strengthen immigrant commitment to Islam and to Pakistan and its culture. Sunni mullahs often lack education, and Zia’s Islamist regime sent the most backward ones they could find. They told elderly Asian Brits that they were going to Hell if their hip, street-wise grandsons weren’t married off to illiterate village girls from a “homeland” they had never seen, and their fashionable granddaughters wedded to hirsute Kashmiri “freedom fighters.” The hardship caused to parents, as well as to young men who couldn’t even speak Urdu or Punjabi, and to young ladies set on studying science or literature at university, can only be imagined.
Meanwhile, the British government, under the Labour Party’s Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and the Conservative Party’s Margaret Thatcher, had no idea that this was happening. Some British Muslims knew but had nowhere to object, while others told me they were mystified. “The damned idiot could be studying at Oxford,” one deeply patriotic ex-Pakistani father told me, “instead he’s squatting on a filthy carpet upstairs above a dry-cleaners, memorising the Holy Koran parrot-fashion, in a bloody language he can’t even understand!”
This is not the only reason for radicalism among a fairly small minority of Britain’s Muslim youth. People denied jobs find mischief on the internet or in clandestine meetings, often just searching adventure, self-respect or other meaning in their lives. This helps to explain the bigger problems with radical Muslim youth on the continent. In France, for example, the banlieus or ghettos are even greater and less escapable than in Britain. This is partly because of pan-continental policies that protect existing jobs at the expense of new job formation and economic growth. Hence continental unemployment is always into double digits overall; now between 25 and 50 per cent for youth, and virtually 100 per cent for immigrant youth from ghettos with poor schools. What looks more interesting to an 18-year-old male: sixty more unemployed years on welfare or glamour on the battlefields of Syria?
But it isn’t all about minorities. Some bored or ideological teens from Europe’s white Christian or Jewish families joined the 1970s terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Red Brigade. Reputable modern media, from the Middle East, broadcasts real injustices wrought on the Palestinians or Afghans or Iraqis and others, with Western governmental compliance, and it generates outrage that inspires hateful strategies elsewhere. The Muslim doctors who plotted to blow up Glasgow Airport in 2007 had no connection with radicals in South Asia, and did not appear to be uncommonly religious; but they were moved by perceived injustice. Answers are complex; combining economics, psychology and sociology, media, technology, foreign policy and more.
Mr. Pearce explains none of this, preferring to point fingers at “multiculturalists” and the allegedly evil Muslims they let in. Not to say that multiculturalism has helped, nor that immigration hasn’t been excessive, particularly given socialist impediments to assimilation. But the complex real issues are less politically useful tools for the propagandist than scapegoating. Finger-pointing always works best in groups of two: the evil “outsider” and the traitor or dupe who intentionally or unwittingly lets the outsiders into our midst. For Orwell in 1984, the outsider was the seemingly state-concocted Emmanuel Goldstein while dupes were ferreted out by the security services. Hitler used the excuse of internal Jews manipulated by external Communists. Stalin portrayed capitalists on the outside and Fifth Columnists within. The sleazier end of British media earns gazillions with such tactics, yet this too needs context.
When the UK Government recently warned young Muslims against volunteering to fight the Assad regime in Syria, almost instantly one hundred or more of Britain’s leading Muslim religious leaders lent their authority, pulpits and websites. The white-supremacist British National Party, unsatisfied, somewhat impractically wants the UK government to “replace all Wahabi and Deobandi imams with Sufis.” It’s still preferable to Mr. Pearce’s implied outcome: mobs in armour brandishing pikestaffs and muzzle-loading muskets.
Fraser Nelson, a respected conservative editor of the conservative Spectator magazine, writes that Britain’s penny-dreadfuls and their fans ignore how British Muslims interact with their neighbours:
“Last year, for example, the Jews of Bradford were facing the closure of their synagogue. Its roof was leaking, and the few dozen remaining regulars could not afford the repairs. Its chairman, Rudi Leavor, made the decision to sell the building and face up to it being transformed into luxury flats. As things turned out, the synagogue was saved after a fundraising campaign led by a local mosque. Zulfi Karim, the secretary of Bradford’s Council of Mosques, now refers to Leavor—who fled the Nazis—as his “newfound brother”. He gave his support, he says, to protect the diversity of Bradford.
“After the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last year, skinheads went on the march in hope of stirring up a reaction against Muslims. It was the perfect moment, given how high feelings were running. The next week, a mosque in Muswell Hill, north London, was burnt down—an act that might, in other places, have started a cycle of reprisals. But here, the Muslims were given shelter by the local Jewish community, who offered space, laptops and whatever support was needed. Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner said she was proud to help ‘our brothers and sisters of the Muslim community, emotionally and physically.’”
While groups may misunderstand other groups, or think that they dislike them and tell that to pollsters, in practice British communities and individuals often work together kindly and well.
Mr. Pearce quotes an actor whose claim to expertise is having played a dwarf in one of those interminable Tolkien movies. He’s neither an historian nor a philosopher nor a diplomat nor a theologian; just some guy who, um, acted like a dwarf. Impressive.
The actor worries that what he calls our “Graeco-Judeo-Christian” types aren’t having enough children compared to Muslims. The 70-year-old has two children, falling just short of population replacement, so presumably he’s being theoretical. He adds that race matters little and Western culture matters much—a good point, except that by most measurements Britain’s Muslim immigrants are more patriotic and in other ways more strongly supportive of conservative Western values than their non-Muslim neighbours. British Muslims virtually never produce bastard children, while about every second baby born in Britain started “on the wrong side of the blanket.” Muslims rarely have abortions. They pray often, sometimes five times a day, to the one true God of Abraham, while many non-Muslim Brits don’t believe in God and most wouldn’t go to church even if subpoenaed. British Muslims tend to respect their elders and, yes, they like families, even big ones. Their marriages last. They rarely get drunk in pubs, slash each other with broken bottles and vomit over the sidewalks.
Judging by most social indicators over which they have any control, British Muslims are better than the supposed Christians, apart from small minorities of exceptionally bad Muslims and uncommonly good Christians. But the Muslims are neither Christian nor, generally, um, white. So do most Britons love and respect them? If not, is it because anti-Christian Brits object to Muslims not being Christian, or because Muslims are mostly, as my sardonic Nepali neighbour says, “brownies”?
The Guardian newspaper reports that “47% of Britons see Muslims as a threat. Only 28% of Britons believe Muslims want to integrate into British society…52% of Britons believe that Muslims create problems…45% of Britons admit that they think there are too many Muslims in Britain…55% of Britons would be concerned if a mosque was built in their area…” and “58% of Britons associate Islam with extremism.” It’s demonstrably wrong, but why?
First, the UK economy is in a slump and, during the post-war depression a century ago, Austrians and Germans blamed innocent Jews. Newly-arrived British Muslims make a convenient “other” and are more visible than Jewish people. Then, I bet that many respondents have seen Muslims yet never knew one. Also and critically, irresponsible opportunists exaggerate the risks, misstate the problems, fail to inform the British public and for whatever reasons peddle hatred. I imagine that, for similar reasons, 1930s German media sold more sensationalist newspapers by pandering to National Socialism than by opposing it.
However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of another English civil war are greatly exaggerated. The popular surge of the far-right parties in Holland and France simply does not occur among the phlegmatic and—on an individual level especially—deeply tolerant English. They are in practice more likely to make a pot of tea, send over baked goods or let their neighbours camp out in the synagogue, church or mosque, no matter what Mr. Pearce believes.
One must take Mr. Pearce at his word, of course, and everyone may read his works attentively. Good Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus may remember him in their prayers.
Mr. Masty is the author of The Muslim & the Microphone: Miscommunications in the War on Terror. Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
Well, as I am merely made in Britain, but not British per se – I will, of course, bow to the opinions and arguments of those who are British and have lived there or still do. Still – since half of my immediate family are subjects of Her Royal Majesty, I have some right to speak – if not as an Englishman – then at least as, let us say, a friendly cousin of England.
That said: Despite a robust argument as presented in this essay, I still find Mr. Pearce more convincing – and not, obviously, because I dispute the numerous facts Mr. Masty presents, but because I am more alarmed by the trends that Mr. Pearce highlights.
It seems to me that crisis – when it comes – appears abrupt to all of those who have not paid attention to trends, prefering to pay attention to concrete facts – usually very positive ones.
The problem that Mr. Pearce points out is the problem of culture and politics. No doubt Mr. Masty is correct to cite the piety of Muslims in Western Europe – but this piety will, with the growth of the Muslim population, eventually become a dominant political culture as well; and then it will not merely be a matter of corrupt Britons living side by side with pious Muslims – it will be a Caliphate in England, or at the very least the emergence of a broad political movement for a Caliphate in England.
Apparently in France, if one takes a stroll to the Basilica at Saint-Denis to, let’s say, pay homage to to Charles Martel, who just so happened to stop an armed invasion of 50 thousand Islamists marching on Europe, one cannot help but notice that all around Saint-Denis, there are – well – Muslims. The only Frenchmen visible are the ones lying entombed in the Basilica at Saint-Denis.
Now, one could say that these Muslims pose no threat because they are all lovely and peaceful people – and indeed; Muslims per se pose no threat. I myself find their piety impressive, and certainly in my short travels – where I have encountered any Muslim lands – they have been splendid lands, and splendid cultures which much to emulate and admire.
But as a rule, I think it is nice to be able to travel to Britain and encounter British culture, and to France to encounter French culture. And if what we encounter, more and more, are Muslim cultures which are thriving and British or French cultures which are disintergrating – well then… the trend is clear: perhaps it will not be tomorrow, perhaps not in our lifetime, but eventually – France and Britain will become politically islamic colonies of a broader Muslim world.
Naturally, humans are humans, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. Yet if some people really do believe that it is a good thing to preserve European culture, by which I mean the Christian traditions of the various European nations as they have taken shape over the centuries, then certainly such a person ought to be alarmed by these trends whereby Britons and Frenchmen are no longer Christian, no longer British and no longer French.
For if Christian European culture is to survive anywhere – where else is it to survive except in Europe? And if its British and French strains die, then will they not die on Earth? Does this matter to humankind? Well – that is the real question that Western Man must answer: does Western Culture matter to human kind anymore?
I personally detect a sort of defeatism in the apologia for the large numbers of Muslims in Britain and France. To say that they are “patriotic” is to ignore the fact that “patriotic” simply means they generally support their government, but not necessarily that they support British or French culture. To say that they are pious while we Europeans are so impious is to say nothing about what religion they are pious in, and what religion we are impious towards, and which of those two religions is responsible for the system of tolerance that allows Islam to thrive in the West – and WHY it is tolerant.
For as Benedict XVI rightly noted long ago – tolerance was born with Christianity, because it was Christianity that was the first religion which compelled everyone to bear its’ burden – to bear the burden of the confrontation with the Cross. Benedict XVI noted that Christ could not find a place in the Pantheon of the Greek gods, because while the Greek gods were “interchangeable” (and therefore all really one and the same), Christ was irreplacable and different. Now – this does not mean that we ought to carry Christ to other lands on the sword, but I would suggest for Europe that it also does not mean that we ought to turn the other cheek when someone wishes to ram a sword into it.
The instinct to accept what is clearly a decay of national culture in Britain and France (and in the United States as well) – the helplessness with a view to immigration; the confusion whereby these nations do not apply criteria of culture to the immigration problem; do not set a strict guideline whereby (for example) in France there will never be more than a certain percentage of non-French citizens rather than “as much as can fit” – all of this is baffling to me.
And when people like Mr. Pearce so much as suggest that these trends are problematic for the political community – out come the comparissons to the German treatment of the Jews during the Great Depression and everyone instinctively drops the subject and lets things “develop in time” – ignoring that the trend is for a development in time of a Muslim Western Europe.
But then again, this is because we do not take politics seriously in the West anymore. GK Chesterton understod the seriousness of the matter in his time; I think Mr. Pearce understands the seriousness of the matter in our time.
I wonder if GK Chesterton would have been criticized in his day much as Mr. Pearce is criticized here? Some quotes from Chesterton:
“We are familiar with the radical denationalized progressive revolutionary type of Jew. We are not familiar with the conservative, reactionary nationalist Jew of Poland. We are familiar with the Jewish internationalist, we are not familiar with the Jewish nationalist. Yet the Polish Jew is the most bigoted, the most fanatic of nationalists. He continues to live in the Middle Ages, he feeds on the Talmud and on the Zohar. He retains his long gabardines and his cork-screw curls. He continues to dispute whether an egg which is laid on the Sabbath may be eaten and whether that Sabbatical egg is not an unclean egg. The women continue to shave their hair on the day of their marriage. They continue to speak and to write their German-Yiddish jargon. And lest a Christian might know what it is they are writing, they camouflage their German writing in the disguise of Hebrew characters.”
and
“It was the German Jew, who was in this matter working with the German. The Jew had indeed his own national quarrel with the Polish peasant, and even with the Polish squire. Since the Jew has become a Bolshevist, he may possibly state that quarrel in a manlier fashion as befits a nation. In this sense it is all to the good when the Jew becomes a Bolshevist, as when he becomes a Zionist. He is attacking Europe frankly and courageously along a line of his own. But until the birth of Bolshevism, though the German Jew might be Jewish in his motive, he was German in his theory. It was Teutonism that he invoked from the first against the Poles, as he invoked it at the last against the Belgians. It was in his capacity of golden-haired Nordic giant, that Herr Moses Mendoza trampled on the Catholic relics and the broken Polish sword.”
Now – of course – this is all very politically incorrect to bring up – but Chesterton observed something foul afoot in Eastern Europe which ended catastrophically for my two nations – Germany and Poland. Poland has recovered, but Germany is dead.
It has nothing to do with race or religion per se – but with culture. This is not some subtle excuse or ploy by racists to excuse themselves – it is merely an openness to the effect that mass culture has on political institutions. If the mass culture of Britain and France becomes Muslim – British and French political institutions will eventually become Muslim.
Is that what the British and the French really want to happen to their nations? Is that what Europeans want to happen to their continent? To their identity?
‘I think it is nice to be able to travel to Britain and encounter British culture, and to France to encounter French culture.’ To a large degree, that’s the beginning and the end of things. Well said.
This is a disappointing piece by a writer I have very high esteem for.
Fundamentalist Islam is a threat. Radical Islam is a problem. It’s not a bogeyman; it’s a very clear and very present danger. The fact is that we have no idea what percentage of British Muslims has been radicalized, but we know that it’s disproportionately large: 1 in 4 foreign militants in ISIS’s ranks is British-born.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2730602/The-homegrown-jihadists-fighting-ISIS-How-one-four-foreigners-signed-Islamic-State-British-half-ALREADY-UK.html
To tell the British people—Mr Masty, as an American living in Nepal—that they’re getting too worked up is really unconscionable. Have we forgotten Lee Rigby? (Did the American press even cover that story?) Have we forgotten that Britons have already been slaughtered on their own soil? How many have to die before they’re allowed to be concerned, in your estimates?
Fundamentalist Muslims are armed, mobilized, organized, and totally ruthless. Even the most ‘fundamentalist’ nationalists in the UK are only looking for a repatriation scheme—and at that, it’s usually voluntary. The nationalists are asking Arabs to go back to Arabia; the jihadists are looking to saw the nationalists’ heads off and assimilate Britain into a caliphate. What sane, rational person could say the two are equally disagreeable? There’s no way to compare British attitudes toward Muslims in terms of Hitler-ness. If anyone looked at al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS, and said to themselves, ‘Oh, gosh, well… I’m sure it has nothing to do with Islam,’ they’d be very sick indeed. (In fact, there ARE such sick people as that—they’re called multiculturalists).
If anything, we can hope Britain takes a lesson from WWII. And I hope they do restrain themselves from victimizing innocent Muslims for the atrocities committed by their co-religionists. But God forbid, amidst all this PC, head-in-the-sand scolding, the British people should have their laws dismantled, their culture supplanted, their democracy hijacked, and their religion suppressed. Haven’t we learned that from WWII as well—that every people, every race, every religion, every culture, has the right to defend itself? If the more powerful majority were ever in history likely to facilitate their own persecution by a less powerful minority, you bet it’s 2014. And the odds are only getting better.
Rudyard Kipling anticipated your comment about the ‘deeply tolerant English’ who ‘are in practice more likely to make a pot of tea, send over baked goods or let their neighbors camp out in the synagogue’:
‘Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.’
If the British DO continue to pretend that there’s no helpful correlation between Fundamentalist Islam and Islam; if they refuse to follow these leads while there are still a Moderate and Fundamentalist communities to distinguish between; if they decide to let militant extremists organize in their streets, travel on their passports, and live in their public housing—we can guarantee that the ultimate backlash by indigenous, Christian Britons will be one of unmitigated hate. It needn’t be so. But all of us who bow slavishly to political correctness now will have blood, shed needlessly, on our hands—British and Arab, Christian and Muslim alike.
I am a British subject residing principally in England.
Then I apologize, and I salute you! (Your biography says S. Masty ‘is presently a writer, poet and artist in Kathmandu.’) Though I’m afraid that doesn’t quite effect the point. You’re absolutely right: we can’t make a generic enemy out of this massive entity called ‘Islam’. But the truth is that the barbarians at the gate this time around happen to be almost 100% Muslim. That’s not an unhelpful coincidence.
Mr Davis, two terrorists on trial in Birmingham (UK) had just ordered from Amazon “Islam for Dummies.” The white Brit woman on video promising to behead any Christians is married to a Muslim half her age, is a convert from witchcraft and “kept many cats.” so lots are home-grown savages or idiots or both, who would have joined the Red Brigades earlier. go here so my old friend Alistair can describe what Isis is, and what the West cannot do: http://www.conflictsforum.org/
Whenever someone bases his argument on polls I am reminded of Mark Twain’s quip “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” As anyone who has spent any time with polling data on the views of British Muslims knows there are several polls that show support for suicide bombings range from 11 to over twenty percent. I am certain that no other religious group would register any support for this barbaric act.
It is instructive to move beyond statistics and look at facts on the ground. The biggest education scandal in Great Britain involves radical Muslims taking over the “public” schools in Birmingham, the country’s second largest school system. Dubbed the Trojan Horse scandal, the facts show anti-British Muslims plotting to control the taxpayer funded school system. Where they succeeded they imposed Sharia standards on teachers and students. http://www.bbc.com/news/education-29028960 This plot could not have been launched (with a great deal of success) without wide support in the Muslim community.
As in every other country, Britain has a shortage of Muslims criticizing some really bad actors from their community. What upsets many citizens of Britain is that the perpetrators of violent acts against British citizens are coming from British Muslims who were born and educated in the United Kingdom: In other words they chose not to integrate into British society.
Perhaps the author might wish to open a Christian coffee house and pub in the ancient and great center of Christian learning, Mosul.
Actually with the British ISIS Islamist in the recent beheading videos, and the institutionalized rape racket just exposed in Rotherham, and the hundreds of muslims who have joined the radicals on the battlefield, and the frequent honor killings by very British muslims (actually American too) your argument runs hollow. Joseph Pierce’s piece didn’t break any new ground. What he said there has been said by many conservative columnists on both sides of the Atlantic, and probably in Austrailia, Canada, and the rest of the western world. Radical Islam is a world wide problem and Islamic immigration, even with the moderates, is altering European cultures.
“Radical Islam” is a barbarian monstrosity to be physically annihilated. No one is in disagreement here, I hesitate to hypothesize –
The problem is “Muslim/Islamic” is not a mono-linear, globular term and the “radical Islamic element” is of unknown actual empirical predominance due to propaganda smoke.
Mohammed wrote ambiguous verses susceptible of a downward interpretive exegesis from the surface licensing the indiscriminate pillaging and brutalization of Christians (and Jews); Mohammed also composed loving, pious words concerning the mother of Jesus Christ, and of Christ especially, and His followers – the problem is not simple…
Mohammed, despite seeming to aspire to authentic religiosity, made concessions to indigenous tribal Bedouin culture of the blood feud and piratical endemic warfare tradition, this Viking-like or Akkad-like palaeo-Semitic tribal band culture venerated religiously for untold ages… Here now is where he fell, and showed himself the smallest of prophets if generously granted a prophetic status – and now civilized people have to pay where Mohammed failed…
Islam, when present in its regressive, tribal totemic form (as in the celebrity terrorists of I.S.I.S., an organization I cannot comment on personally, in terms of potential counter-intelligence fomentation – it seems a genuine indigenous Arabic tribal atavistic development and ante-Islamic to all appearances, surprisingly), so “our” favorite enemy “Islam” (impossible term) constitutes a military threat, doubtlessly – the hollow-heart, fake conservatives of PENTHOUSE-subsidized Fox News and hetaerism-capitol Washington D.C. and the Zionist Marxist Likud fanatics, you can all chill out now – if they are “real”, these sub-Islamic Arabian tribal brigands shall be decimated to the last man…
In American-Israeli joy of sanguinary battle, I sometimes wonder where the Augustinian Christian-Humanist sentiment went, considering the destruction of images of God always a failure even if justified and perhaps even meritorious in its own way…
I wonder if there has not been an alteration of our human sensibility into a desensitized, and dehumanized and dehumanizing state, of stony-hearted false phallic virility, the virility of passivity of the two-faced (demoness)/goddess Aphrodite-Ishtar, queen(s) over vulgar eros and irrational violence alike for a metaphysically more than sound reason…
(As an aside: I am heartened to note the increasing presence of Kirkean Jews among this “last battalion” against Nihilism – the whole alleged “anti-Semitic” affair regarding Kirk’s allegedly “senile” comments not friendly to Marxist bund-Zionism, I do hope the editors clarify and let all adherents of the Mosaic religion know, “we” support and welcome them – simply not certain modern socialistic, materialistic ideologies arisen among certain radicalized Jews…)
Whether the greater “existential threat” to Western “civilization” is the God of Nothingness holding unopposed sway and dominion in our own Western modernistic hearts…in seemingly terminal soul-necrosis…this anti-God or counter-God or non-God enjoying a reign of nihilism unknown in history – Sathanas, the unpresence, the un-god, the NIHILITY principle, “entropy” cosmo-theologically, infesting our own collective souls – is this not the more necessary, and pressing battle? Does not one clean one’s own house out first, before “offering” one’s cleaning-services in detoxifying the houses of others, yea…?
Mr Masty makes some valid points. It is true that the ghettoisation of ethnic minorities in Britain is in large part the fault not of the minorities themselves but of officials in government. “Multiculturalism”, in Europe, refers not just to cultural diversity but to its institutionalisation. Thus, Muslims can be treated as a bloc to a greater extent than they behave, and there have been all kinds of sad attempts to engage fraudulent “community leaders” and so forth.
What is understated, to a considerable degree, is the extent to which theocratic and even jihadist trends have flourished among migrant communities. It seems insulting to blame Britons for their fears when popular clerics speak from English platforms of the “Islamic Republic of Britain” – especially when phenomena like honour violence, female genital mutilation and the harassment of blasphemers and heretics fill the news.
Our response should take care not to dissuade more receptive Muslims from engaging with British culture but it is imperative that it minimises the potential for conflict that we have inflicted on ourselves.
Do also consider our cultural encouragement of sensationalist news-porn, which affects so many people who think they are thoughtful!
Here’s an interesting claim published in Newsweek:
“There are now more than twice as many British Muslims fighting for Islamic State than there are serving in the British armed forces, according to a British Member of Parliament (MP).”
One can see where the loyalty of Europe’s Muslims reside.
“… Mr. Pearce, an English immigrant, cannot oppose all immigration, so he agrees so long as the newcomers are just like him.”
No. Not “just like him”, Mr. Masty, just peaceful, obeying the established laws, and non-supportive of all Muslim radicals.