McKinstry against British national surrender (sort of)

Leo McKinstry has been described to me as one of the stronger voices of Islam criticism in Britain, but his columns at the Daily Express are not online so I’ve never read him. A reader just sent me McKinstry’s January 22 article, “Pandering to religious demands is destroying our national identity,” and here it is.

DURING the dark days of 1938, as Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, Winston Churchill spoke of his despair at the government’s enfeebled response to the threat of Hitler.

“I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf, “ he said.

He went on to warn that “if a moral catastrophe should overtake” Britain, then future historians would be baffled as to how a great nation allowed itself to be destroyed so easily.

Thanks to Churchill’s magnificent leadership, the end of our civilisation under the German jackboot was averted.

Yet if he were alive today, he would surely be despondent at the collapse of our sense of nationhood in the face of the twin forces of multiculturalism and mass immigration.

Churchill spoke in 1938 of a “terrible transformation” having taken place in the spirit of the political classes, whose patriotic self-confidence evaporated when confronted with the brute force of Nazi ideology.

The same is true today as our rulers dilute their allegiance to our traditions in desperation to accommodate other cultures.

A “terrible transformation” has indeed taken place. A mood of self-loathing hangs over our institutions. Our past is seen as a cause of shame rather than pride. Throughout our public services, diversity is to be celebrated, whereas Britishness must be derided, ignored or mocked.

THIS mood of self-abasement can be seen at its most repellent in the reaction to the endless litany of Muslim so-called grievances.

The official dogma of multiculturalism encourages hardline Muslims to believe that they can refuse to abide by the rules and customs of this country, even where their own superstitious, often oppressive, practices are in direct conflict with Western liberal traditions of democracy and tolerance.

A classic example occurred in the case of a newly recruited Muslim female police officer who refused to shake the hand of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair during her passing-out parade.

Justifying her decision, she said that it was contrary to her religion to touch a man. Well, it is also contrary to the Met’s operational efficiency to have such an apparent zealot in its ranks. If she cannot have any physical contact with a man, how on earth is she going to carry out an arrest, given that more than 90 per cent of serious offenders are male?

In its desperation to parade its multicultural credentials, the Met, like many of our state institutions, has lost sight of its duty towards the wider public.

The police exist to protect society. Whilst there is no suggestion this WPC is anything other than a faithful Muslim, it is absurd of the Met to take seriously this nonsense, which, in my view, is no more elevated than ancient paganism.

Apart from anything else, the refusal to return a handshake is the height of bad manners, implying that the other person is so unclean or so dangerous that he cannot even be touched. But in our climate of political correctness, traditional Western manners count for nothing compared to the sensibilities of Muslims.

What is particularly depressing about this saga is that Sir Ian did nothing about it.

According to reports from inside the police, when he was informed of the officer’s request to avoid a handshake:

“He was bloody furious. But he agreed to go along with it so as not to cause a scene.” Sir Ian’s behaviour could be a metaphor for modern Britain.

At every turn, we have surrendered to Muslim protests, whether it be over freedom of speech or the wearing of the veil. Our Christian heritage is being dumped for fear of “giving offence” to radical Muslims, while new religious discrimination laws force employers to bend over backwards to meet Islamic demands.

A PERMANENT soundtrack of Muslim grievance plays in our society, exploding into full volume at the hint of any challenge to Islam. This climate of appeasement is dressed up as religious tolerance but is really just cowardice. Our institutions are terrified of radical Islam because of the threat of violence. The shadow of the bullet and the bomb lurks behind wails about Islamophobia.

The great Trinidadian writer Sir Vidia Naipaul once described Islam as “sanctified rage” and that has been the bitter experience of countries throughout the world over the past 30 years, as the death toll mounts from the atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists.

Yet, even as their grim catalogue of murder lengthens, radical Muslims present themselves as the victims of Western imperialistic discrimination, oppression or neglect.

Shamefully, too many Westerners and Western governments have colluded in this process.

Instead of confronting the menace of radical Islam, they try to appease it with endless concessions, even compromising basic democratic issues such as women’s rights and liberty of expression. They will do anything for a quiet life. But cowardice does not lead to tranquillity. It emboldens those who wish to exploit our weakness.

The late Thirties showed the disastrous consequences of trying to appease a violent, intolerant ideology. Just as today, there was an institutional reluctance to defend British values in the face of this threat.

Opponents of Nazism were often treated as dangerous cranks; Churchill was all but banned by the BBC for being too anti-German. But as he so rightly warned, appeasement is the road to national suicide. We cannot save our civilisation by continually weakening it.

- end of initial entry -

Spencer Warren writes:

Note how McK invokes Churchill in concrete defense of our civilization against the particular threat we face, unlike the generalized and meaningless invocations by the neoconservatives.

Remember, C told the Peel Commission in 1937: “Where the Jew goes there is oasis. Where the Arab goes there is desert.”

Kevin O. in London writes:

Regarding Leo McKinstry’s article on Britain’s national identity: anyone who refers to the Christian religion solely as our “heritage” cannot expect to preserve it.

LA writes:

The theme of this article is that multiculturalism has gone beyond accommodating other cultures and beyond accommodating hostile cultures; multiculturalism has now become outright surrender to declared enemies who are seeking to destroy Britain—and let’s make no mistake here, McKinstry is talking about an enemy, otherwise the Churchillian analogy would make no sense. That is the new thing conveyed by McKinstry in this piece and what makes it noteworthy. In a recent blog entry with the long title, The mystery is explained: Why, with the enemy inside the gates, acting as the enemy, Britain still doesn’t react, I was looking at the horror of headlong, conscious surrender to declared enemies. McKinstry is talking about the same thing, and he is calling on the British to stand up for themselves.

But here’s the problem. If his Churchillian analogy is to a situation in which Nazi Germany was attacking Europe, attacking Britain, and Britain had to gather its forces and hold off that enemy and ultimately defeat it, how would that analogy apply to Britain’s present circumstances? Today’s enemy is already inside Britain, which the Germans never were. Sure, the British could stop yielding fearfully to every Muslim threat and demand, which would be a great improvement, but the enemy will still be there. Simply resisting further advances by the enemy will not end the conflict. The only way to end the enemy’s attacks is to remove him from Britain. But McKinstry says not a word about how the enemy got into Britain, about how to stop more of the enemy from coming into Britain, or about how to remove the enemy from Britain. Without something along those lines, his Churchillian analogy falls flat.

Of course, it’s possible he’s made these points in other columns that we have not seen. Jeff in England reads McKinstry regularly and maybe he can tell us.

Jeff writes:

I have never read anything by McKinstry that says he is against UK Islamic immigration or severe restrictions on it, let alone removal of Muslims. Now, I’m not saying he definitely isn’t for any of these options but one would think he would have mentioned something by now. He is a fine writer who, like Melanie Phillips and satiric writer Richard LittleJohn communicate in their columns the dangers of the Islamic invasion in the UK.

But as I have said time and time again, there is no use pointing out the problem without providing a logical solution. Why can’t these fine writers do that? It amazes me, it really does. One UK writer after another portrays the problem of Islam and Muslims yet one after another avoids talking about immigration restriction. Maybe as in science fiction stories, there is a chip that has been in their brains that doesn’t allow them to see their writing through to a logical conclusion. That must be it!

LA replies:

Thanks to Jeff for the quick reply. He had previously recommended McKinstry to me several times as one of the strongest Islam critics writing in Britain. He hadn’t let on, at least as far as I remember, that McKinstry was among the Usual Suspects. Oh, well …

LA continues:

But, while this is distressing, it is not surprising. Britain’s population is about 50 million. That’s 1/6 of America’s population. How many bylined published writers (i.e., not anonymous blog commenters) in America support the end of Muslim immigration or something like that? Maybe six or seven at most. So the most we could expect in England would be one. Then when we add the tiny little fact that Britain, with its anti-hate laws and much greater PC, is not a free country any more, it’s not surprising that there are none at all, at least in the mainstream. All there is, is Nick Griffin. One.

LA writes:

For all the discussion we’ve had about the Usual Suspects, it’s still inexplicable. Forget about calling for deportations of Muslims. Forget about calling for a cessation of all Muslim immigration. Why can’t people like Phillips and McKinstry even say something like, “We need fewer Muslim immigrants”??? If they would even say that much, their position would stop being absurd. As it is now, their positions are absurd, invoking Churchillian defiance against the Islamization of Britain, whilc continueing to accept silently the full tide of Muslim immigration.

Karen W. writes from England:

I reckon if McKinstry or Melanie Phillips said that Moslem immigration should be stopped, these comments would be edited out and they may even lose their jobs. It is the proprietors of the newspapers who are to blame as they are controlling what the editors can print. And what appears in the public realm is restricted.

Nick Griffin is the only person who declares Islam evil and demands a halt to ALL Third World immigration, and he was arrested for that. Here is the only other person to have said something similar, a Church leader.

LA replies:

If America is under political correctness, Britain is under political correctness squared.

The grim fact is that you in Britain are NOT a free country. Simon Newman from England said that in recent years people have even stopped using the expression, “It’s a free country,” when they realized that it’s not one any longer.

Yet Natan Sharansky, dividing all countries into “free” societies and “fear” societies, would define Britain and other European countries as free, since according to him as long as you can speak in public without actually being arrested or physically harmed, you are free. He’s basing everything on his experience in the tyrannical USSR. He doesn’t understand that a society where you cannot speak your mind out of fear of losing your livelihood—where you literally cannot speak up against the headlong destruction of your country by a foreign invasion out of fear of losing your livelihood—is not free, even if you have no physical fear. And even if you have no physical fear now, you will have soon, as we have been discussing lately in relation to the anti-white violence that is inevitably unleashed when whites lose their dominant position in the society.

LA writes:

Here are questions that ought to be addressed to McKinstry:

1. Do you think it’s possible to stop Islamization while we still allow Muslim immigration?

2. How can you talk about Churchillian defiance against Muslims while not saying a single word about stopping more of these enemies from actually coming in? Doesn’t that render your Chuchillianism rather empty?

3. Do you think the current immigration is ok? If yes, why? If not, why don’t you call for it to be reduced or stopped?

4. Given your rhetoric about the threat posed by Islam in Britain, it’s hard to understand your silence about immigration. Do you think your livelihood will be threatened if you say that Muslim immigration should be reduced?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 26, 2007 01:40 PM | Send