As jihad rises, British police issue most far-out PC statement ever
Melanie Phillips writes at NRO about the British elite’s reaction to the foiled terror plot to blow up airliners:
Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson of the Metropolitan Police described the plot as a “criminal” act which was “not about communities” but about “people who might masquerade in the community, hiding behind certain faiths.” So an act of holy war to be perpetrated in the name of Islam just happened to use that faith as a random bit of camouflage, just as it might have used Zen Buddhism, say, or Zoroastrianism?
Or, with apologies to Churchill, never in the field of human appeasement has one man bent his head so far out of shape to deny the demonic evil of so many.
But here is the core of Phillips’s article, in which she conveys a sense of how the Muslims, aided and egged on by their leftist allies in British media and academia, are mounting to a new level of conscious intention to destroy Britain:
[M]any in Britain simply refuse to acknowledge that the root cause of the threat that Britain faces is Islam. This does not mean that all Muslims sign up to these evil ideas. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims do not, while across the world Muslims are among the most numerous of its victims.
But an insupportable number do subscribe to extremist ideas. A recent poll revealed that a quarter of British Muslims believed the 7/7 attacks were justified, with the number rising to one third among younger Muslims.
Many of these young people live in a kind of cultural limbo, stranded between the repressive culture of the Asian subcontinent and the debauched and degraded culture of Britain. And the terrible message of the jihad is a siren song for those who have been abandoned in a psychic desert and who search for a meaning to their lives.
It gives them an identity which provides self respect because it casts them in a heroic mould: fighting to ‘defend’ the kingdom of God. It is an identity built on undiluted hatred, on lies, on paranoia, on mass murder and even attempted genocide.
These are ideas that kill. And because they are ideas, some of the most significant recruiting grounds are not the backstreet mosques and madrassahs but those seats of intellectual inquiry, the universities. Britain’s campuses are now the prime hunting grounds of the jihad.
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Allie H. writes:
Melanie Phillips writes: “Many of these young people live in a kind of cultural limbo, stranded between the repressive culture of the Asian subcontinent and the debauched and degraded culture of Britain.”
I get so sick of people like Melanie Phillips blaming any of this on British society and culture, and insulting it. Blame government immigration policy and politically correct capitulations yes, the British people no.
The “debauched and degraded” element she is presumably talking about—a certain working class raucousness—has been around forever, and she nor anyone else needn’t be a part of it. There was no doubt the same amount of drinking and floozies in the 16th century or any other time you care to mention, but that doesn’t make it the sum of British culture, values or society: just a fun or disgraceful aspect depending on your viewpoint. But it does belong here, unlike Muslim fundamentalism.
In fact the British Muslim community has had a hand to play in mainstreaming things like pornography in Britain by supplying it in near-all of the local shops. These things are not usually sold in non-Asian shops. It’s the adage of taking license with liberty.
Anyway it’s banal and dangerous to continually blame European peoples and cultures for exacerbating Islamic fundamentalism. Stating the obvious isn’t fashionable just now, but here’s one: this is an imported problem, not a homegrown one. And the only British fault there lies with government policy, the rest belongs inside the Muslim community, not with the British people under any circumstance.
LA replies:
I partly agree with your point—I did notice myself when I quoted Phillips that she was somehow edging away from “Islam is the problem” to “cultural alienation in modern degraded Britain is the problem.” But I quoted the passage approvingly anyway because she starts off by stating clearly that Islam is the root cause of Islamic extremism, and she seems to be saying that the cultural alienation is an aggravating cause of Islamic extremism rather than the main cause. I have nothing against writers positing aggravating causes of Islamic extremism that are extrinsic to Islam itself; it’s when they make such extrinsic causes the main cause that I disagree.
But you can never be entirely sure with Phillips because she remains a liberal and therefore it’s very hard for her to stay with the pure insight that Islam is the problem. In other words, she says that Islam is the problem, but she just can’t remain comfortable with that pure insight, so she immediately edges off into a quite different formula that is less radical and more conventional and acceptable. Still, she said Islam is the root cause and did not take it back. That is the key thing.
Also I do not think she was speaking code for working class British raucousness. I think she meant the leftist academic culture as well, which offers no positive values, is nihilistic, and is seeking the destruction of Britain.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2006 02:04 AM | Send