It takes courage to speak out against the threatening presence of Islam in today’s world. And it takes courage to defend those who have the courage to speak out.
Eight years ago, after Benedict XVI gave his controversial Regensburg address, most European commentators were shamefully timid in their response. Most refused to raise their heads above the parapet, preferring the coward’s option of not making any response at all. In the light of this continuing cowardly silence, it is timely to remind ourselves of the ugly face of Islamic fundamentalism.
At the darkened heart of radical Islam is what Bishop Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, has called a “dual psychology … of victimhood, but also the desire for domination.” In my own homeland numerous new mosques have sprung up across the country, many of which are being staffed by fundamentalist clerics. Such extremism seems to flourish in the pluralistic climate of so-called multiculturalism and has contributed to the alienation of so many young Muslims from the society into which most of them have lived all their lives.
The alienation works in both directions with many Britons feeling alienated from their self-ghettoised Muslim neighbours. In a recent poll, one in five Britons stated their belief that “a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism” and more than half of those polled considered Islam a threat. These frightening figures caused the writer and historian Niall Ferguson to conclude, with characteristic candour, that a terrorist attack could be “the trigger for the next English civil war.” Since Ferguson also stated that he suspected a terrorist attack as being “bound to happen … sooner or later,” he was effectively saying that England has a loaded weapon pointed at its head, with the trigger poised.
The polarization of British society into mutually antagonistic factions has forced even the most dyed-in-the-wool pluralists to concede that multiculturalism has proved a dismal and destructive failure. Ruth Kelly, a senior member of Tony Blair’s last government, suggested in the days before she chose to leave the political arena for a career in banking, that the multi-cultural experiment “may have resulted in a more fractured society,” thereby uttering a truth that would have been considered an unmentionable blasphemy in Labour Party circles until recently. (Since Ms. Kelly is a member of Opus Dei, and is therefore, presumably, a tradition-oriented Catholic, her rise through the ranks of the feminist-fuddled ranks of the Labour Party has always been a mystery to me. Perhaps the refreshing sanity of her rebuttal of her own party’s long-standing dogma might have something to do with the deeper creed to which she adheres.)
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