By D. J. Webb
So many people have commented on the events in Paris that I see no reason why I shouldn’t offer my two penn’orth. The key issue for me is the declining morale of Western societies. The end of the erstwhile Christian culture has robbed European culture of any social glue. Worse, it is actually thought cool and progressive to take against our culture and see in it the fount of so-called racism, imperialism and the like.
The problem is therefore not external. It is not a problem out there in Syria that we could solve by bombing Syria (although I don’t object to bombing as many Islamic State targets as possible in the wake of the recent atrocities). Neither is the problem one that relates to the presence in our societies of unassimilated minorities.
The problem is one internal within us, the majority ethnic groups (for the moment) of Western societies. The presence in Britain, France and elsewhere of ethnic minorities has been facilitated by our lack of nerve and self-belief. The problem we face is that very lack of self-belief and not the fact that we host minority populations as such, which is an epiphenomenon, a by-product of our crumbling self-confidence.
A lot of nonsense is written on the subject of immigration by faux libertarians of the left. Apparently, everyone in the world ought to be able to do as he pleases, including the right to move to whichever country he wishes. Yet a society that willingly co-operates in creeping colonization, which is what it is, is a society with a death-wish. Societies become coherent as a result of their common culture, and the failure to transmit that culture to incomers and insist on their respect for it shows that the host society no longer believes it represents anything valuable culturally in the world.
To practise a foreign culture in a country you’ve moved to is to engage in deliberately destructive behaviour. It is like moving into someone’s home as a lodger and then insisting on partying in the living room until 3 in the morning while the children of the house are trying to sleep. There is nothing wrong with different lifestyles as such, but if you move in with people, you need to respect their way of life and fit in.
By calling into question the value—even to us ourselves—of our own cultural heritage, we have indicated to the incomers that there is nothing to integrate with. We no longer tell them that this is our house and that, to make living together a success, they have to abide by our rules. The very statement that multi-culturalism is “more vibrant” makes this clear. Heavy metal in the living room while you’re trying to sleep at 3 in the morning is undoubtedly vibrant too. Vibrant in this context means nothing more than jarring and unpleasant, but we praise vibrancy in the belief that our own way of life has become stodgy and stale and boring—just like going to bed early and closing the party down before midnight might be seen as boring.
The corrosion is within us. Clearly the incomers do not all wish us well, but we could deal with ne’er-do-wells if we were not milksops.
The journalist Charles Moore (former editor, I think, of the Daily Telegraph) wrote an interesting article today entitled “How many more people have to die before we stop appeasing Islamists? Why aren’t we standing up to the enemy within?” . There clearly is an “enemy within”, but, as I have stated, the real enemy is not the minority communities, but, in fact, journalists like Charles Moore, who are determined to engage in futile, virtual-signalling gestures to the last. He writes:
This is because of the implacable enmity of Islamism. It is a highly political version of Islam which cleverly mixes the modern blogosphere world of grievance and conspiracy theory with the sanctity of ancient texts ill-understood but passionately invoked. It has some advocates who are not themselves personally violent, but its entire idea is a violent one.
The word “Islamism” is a made-up word that pretends there is a difference between Islam and a radical interpretation thereof. While Moore does not approve of terrorist murder, he does insist on appeasing the Moslem communities in Britain and elsewhere by his claim that Islamists misunderstand ancient texts.
How foolish to insert yourself into the theology of someone else’s religion! We seem to be trying to tell others what their own religion teaches. “No, we love Islam, but you’ve got it all wrong: Islam preaches peace and tolerance.” What about the ones who don’t believe that? How can you believe in freedom of religion and then start telling people which version of their own religion they are allowed to have? If freedom of religion means anything, it means that the Islamic State and other similar groups are entitled to believe that it is appropriate to translate the behaviour of Mahomet in the 7th century into the 21st century. That is their belief. And to be honest, that is what Islam has always taught.
Mahomet himself was a beheader. When he conquered the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe of Medina, then called Yathrib, he himself took part in the beheading of 400 Jews. They lined up before trenches and were beheaded by Mahomet and his companions in an action that took all day. The Moslem Ahadith (the traditions recorded by early followers that are a key source of Mahomet’s life) include the Ahadith compiled by Abu Dawud, who tells how Atiyyah al-Qurazi, a Jewish man, related how he had his life spared by Mahomet:
I was among the captives of Banu Qurayza. They (Mahomet’s followers) examined us, and those who had begun to grow (pubic) hair were killed, and those who had not were not killed. I was among those who had not grown hair.
This kindly prophet spared those young enough to be without pubic hair and beheaded the rest. It is cretinous to tell Islamic State that they are misunderstanding their own religion. They’re not!
Mahomet is on record as approving of rape in warfare (to allow God to create more life) and stating that runaway slaves go straight to hell. Is there any surprise that women are being forced into sexual slavery in the Islamic State and that slavery itself as an institution has been revived by the Islamic State?
It is probably true that Islam could gloss over some early incidents. We note how Christian denominations are uneasily tiptoeing away from the aversion towards homosexuality explicit in the Bible and numerous Biblical statements that “the man is the head of the woman”. We also note that Judaism manages to overlook the slaughtering of the Canaanite heathen (men, women, children and their cattle) by the likes of the prophet Samuel.
These things can be glossed over by contextualising early texts. In that sense, one could imagine a future Islam where people said “well, yes, Mahomet was living in the 7th century and things were different then”, but until Moslems start saying this, they are stuck with a religion that teaches them that Mahomet’s own life is an exact ideal of how to behave today. So what’s wrong with beheading, rape and slavery if Mahomet approved of it?
In the end, we need not get involved in theological debates (nonsense, actually) internal to Islam. Whatever these people wish to believe is up to them. But why should we play willing hosts to them in our societies?
It is not a question of vetting arrivals, as the UK government has promised to do. By allowing Syrians, Afghans, Somalis and others to come to the UK, even if it were possible to be sure that none of the incomers were terrorists, we are fuelling the growth of an unassimilable minority. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will imbibe the poison of multi-culturalism and take against us, even if the first generation of newcomers does not.
We must insist on freedom of association. It is horrific to read of the arrest of a woman (apparently from Trinidad) who does not wish to serve Moslem customers in her beauty salon. Leaving aside the fact that frequenting a beauty salon in itself contravenes a literal and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, why should everyone be forced to take part in a charade that claims that any demographic configuration of the UK population whatsoever is welcome?
I see no evidence that people in the UK are prepared to learn from the French atrocities. Once again, it is being asserted that the murders have nothing to do with Islam. Why then do polls show that at least one-quarter of Moslems in Britain and France support terrorism? If large numbers decided to translate that into action against soft targets, no amount of surveillance would stop them.
We need urgently to abandon the doctrine of multi-culturalism, cease referring to Islam and other religions as part of our culture, and start demanding full cultural integration. Teachers who abuse their positions to promote multi-culturalism should go to prison for attempting to radicalize their pupils, which is what it is. We have a problem in that problem communities are among us, but we can only address this if we start believing in ourselves again. How can the toothpaste of an abandoned culture be squeezed back in the tube again? Left libertarians who have cheered all this on have a lot to answer for.
