I recently attended a conference in Budapest, where I made the mistake of saying that Europe was in danger of “going under” to Islam. It was something like passing loud and smelly wind in public. Not too many people wanted to talk to me after that, and no one wanted to talk about my remark. What’s so appalling is that it’s precisely that failure to face the problem that makes it so likely. Here Melanie Phillips pulls no punches.

Sleepwalking Into Enslavement
The Spectator
MONDAY, 7TH JANUARY 2008

Step by remorseless step, the free world continues in its trance-like state to attack, disable or paralyse its ability to defend itself against the global Islamic jihad.

In other words, a form of auto-immune deficiency. Here, not only can the system’s “brain” not recognize the nature of the invasive forces, but it actively attacks any anti-bodies that spontaneously form… as in the “Canadian Human Rights Commission” in its prosecution of Ezra Levant for publishing the Muhammad Cartoons.

First, the ineffable UN has condemned not Islamic terrorism but the identification of and defence against it. As Robert Spencer reports:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has succeeded in pushing through the UN a resolution condemning the ‘defamation of religions.’ That’s ‘religions,’ not ‘religion’ – yet according to Cybercast News Service, ‘although the resolution refers to defamation of ‘religions,’ Islam is the only religion named in the text, which also takes a swipe at counter-terrorism security measures.’ …The resolution denounces ‘laws that stigmatize groups of people belonging to certain religions and faiths under a variety of pretexts relating to security and illegal immigration.’ Muslims, it says, have suffered from ‘ethnic and religious profiling…in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001.’ This is the fault, in part, of ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media.’ The UN voices its ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’

Perish the thought. Next, the western liberal mind now presents such a mortal threat to life and liberty that a group of anti-jihadi Muslims has been driven to denounce an American Reform rabbi, Rabbi Yoffie,for his sanitising of Islamic extremism and grotesque moral equivalence. In a column in The Jewish Week, they said they viewed with dismay a ‘partnership’ between the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) which they said was not a legitimate representative of mainstream Islamic believers in the West.

Rabbi Yoffie was cited by the Post in a number of statements with which we disagree. He said, ‘As a once-persecuted minority in countries where antisemitism is still a force, we [Reform Jews] understand the plight of Muslims in North America today.’ We are Muslims concerned to protect the rights of our communities in non-Muslim societies, but we consider absurd any attempt to equate the situation of Muslims in Western Europe and North America today with historic anti-Jewish prejudice and oppression. Muslims in Western Europe and North America have not been subjected, in recent times, to wholesale denial of civil rights. Free discourse about Islam in the Western democracies is occasionally abrasive, but has never resembled the wholesale libels directed against Jews — including by latter-day Islamists — and has not been embraced by or institutionalized by any government in Western Europe or North America.

When I made my remark about Europe possibly going under to Islam, the chair of my panel rebuked me: “It’s like accusing the Jews of wanting to take over the world, a new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The statement is deeply ironic. It’s an attempt to dismiss the awareness of an Islamic imperialism that does threaten Europe by pretending it’s as false as the forged and destructive fantasy of Jews wanting to take over the world. “Lest we end up being like the Nazis, let us not go down that paranoid path,” it seems to say.

And yet, no Jew ever claimed they wanted to take over Europe or the world; the Jews never had the demographic weight to conceive of a population take-over; and finally, the Jews’ power came from their genuinely playing the rules of the game of civil society. In the current scene, Muslims openly declare their desire to take over; they have effectuated a stunning demographic shift over the past generation which is accelerating; and they act precisely as the Jews are accused of doing in the Protocols — using democracy to destroy freedom.

Rabbi Yoffie continued, ‘Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true.’ We do not understand the intent of this statement. It appears that Rabbi Yoffie believes dialogue is possible with extremists. We do not agree. We believe that dialogue between mainstream Muslims, Jews, and Christians is necessary, but that the defeat of Islamist extremists is necessary for such interfaith efforts to succeed. We do not support ‘dialogue’ with Islamist and other apologists for violence, or proponents of restrictions on freedom under the pretext of religion.

To which one can only say ‘Bravo’ to these courageous Muslims for reasserting truth and sanity in the face of a lethally deluded Jewish liberal.

Next, an intensely disturbing development in, of all places, the Pentagon. One expects the State Department to grovel to illegitimate force, but the Department of Defence has been assumed to be more robust. No longer. It has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism — because he committed the crime of identifying that extremism. The Washington Times reports that Hasham Islam, a key aide to the Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, tried to get Coughlin to soften his views about Islamic extremism.

Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.

So much for America’s role on the battleground of ideas.

In Britain, one man does get it. The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, himself the Pakistani son of a Muslim convert to Christianity, created a storm when he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that Islamic extremists have created ‘no-go’ areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. Already separate communities, he says, have been turned into areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.

Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation. Attempts have been made to impose an ‘Islamic’ character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer. Such amplification was, of course, unknown throughout most of history and its use raises all sorts of questions about noise levels and whether non-Muslims wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker. This is happening here even though some Muslim-majority communities are trying to reduce noise levels from multiple mosques announcing this call, one after the other, over quite a small geographical area.

There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered? It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain.

The Roman Empire fell in part because the Germanic kingdoms carved out autonomous regions from the Empire’s living body politic.

For uttering these truths, the Bishop has been denounced by both Islamists (with the ever-more preposterous Inayat Bunglawala proving the Bishop’s point by asserting that church bells are just as much of a public nuisance in Britain as the muezzin’s call to prayer) and Nick Clegg, the new centrist Gramscian leader of the more mature infantile Liberal Democrats.

Clegg described the Bishop’s comments as

a gross caricature of reality.

Once again, however, it was a Muslim who showed up both the idiocy and the arrogance of the western liberal. Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Muslim forum, wrote of the Bishop in the Daily Mail:

He has been condemned for making ‘inflammatory’ remarks, distorting the truth about our inner cities and ‘scaremongering’ against the Muslim population. But, paradoxically, this reaction from the politically-correct establishment is an indicator of the weight of his case. If our ruling elite were not so worried that his views would strike a chord with the public, it would not have been so anxious to condemn him.

His statement about the dangers of the rise of radical Islam matches the reality of what people see in our cities and towns, where the influence of hardliners is undermining harmony and promoting segregation…However much his critics may sneer at his accusations, the fact is that the determination of some of my fellow Muslims to cling to certain lifestyles, customs, languages and practices has helped to create neighbourhoods where non-Muslims may feel uncomfortable, even intimidated.

Indeed.

It is encouraging that Muslim voices are now being heard more and more speaking up against Islamic extremism. Their task is made infinitely more difficult, however, by western liberals determined to do the extremists’ work for them.

It has been a longstanding argument that only moderate Muslims can save Islam. Given our idiocy, it may be that only courageous moderate Muslims will save the West.