is one of the most appalling I have ever read. I’ll more to say about it later. Howard Sutherland, who told me about it, has submitted the following letter to the
No. No. A thousand times: No.
One hardly knows where to begin with the posted extract from Mr Johnson’s book. In it, the Member for Henley manages to be flippant, inaccurate, insulting and irrelevant, all in a very small space. So I apologise in advance for a lengthy comment.
The irrelevant: such nuggets as that Britons buy 15% of their refrigerators from Turkey and “colossal numbers of Britons” are buying holiday properties in Turkey. What does that have to do with whether Turkey “belongs in Europe”? A staggering proportion of consumer products that Westerners buy today is made in China; is China therefore a Western country? When does Mr Johnson plan to ask the Communist Chinese regime to join the European Union? Before or after he asks the Russians – who really are Europeans? Turkey is not, and never can be, a European nation. Trade and time-shares have nothing to do with it.
The insulting: dismissing the legitimate social and cultural warnings of men such as the Pope and the former Archbishop of Canterbury as the hypocritical maunderings of nervous nellies. I wish the political and religious leaders of the West – and, yes, this Roman Catholic includes the current Pope and his predecessor amongst the defaulters – would do much more to defend the West. Nevertheless, on the rare occasions when these figures do speak up, we should encourage them to keep it up, not ridicule them.
The inaccurate: pretending this question isn’t about Islam. Islam is the essence of the question. Mr Johnson’s Turkish cousins are Moslems, and Islam is an all-encompassing religious, social and political system that is viscerally hostile to anything that is not Islam. European “leaders” are undoing the victories of Tours, Lepanto and Vienna by foolishly allowing Islam to take root in European lands. Islam commands its faithful to bring our lands within the Dar al-Islam, with or without us in them, at which point we can choose conversion, dhimmitude or the sword. Westerners’ intentions and desires, all our make-believe about the delights of diversity and multiculturalism (whatever that is) are entirely beside the point. That is true even if not all Moslems in the West are actively militant practitioners. As Western security services are finally starting to learn, no Moslems are likely to condemn or inform on the militants in their midst, giving them a “moderate” sea to swim in undetected and unmolested. “Moderate” Moslems know that (i) to do so is very dangerous and (ii) the militants are being true to Islam as the Koran and tradition teach it.
Christianity is at the very foundation of Western civilisation; Biblical Judaism is one of the foundations of Christianity. The Koran is explicitly and violently hostile to both faiths, and Islamic tradition has not rejected – it cannot – one word of the Koran. Whether or not Mr Johnson wants to see it, Islam is a tradition and culture that is hostile to the West, and has been from its founding. When Constantinople was overwhelmed and “women were ravished; girls and boys were raped on the altar tables; hundreds of severed heads bobbed in the waters, reminding one Venetian of rotten melons in the canals of his native city,” the Turks who did it all had a much clearer understanding of what Islam permits, nay demands, than Mr Johnson. So do the Moslems today who bay for the Pope’s head because he quoted Manuel Palæologus accurately.
The flippant: read for yourself, and then ask how, after casually cataloguing the atrocities that have accompanied the spread of Moslem and Turkish rule everywhere they have gone, together and apart, Mr Johnson or anyone who cares about preserving anything of Western civilisation could want to bring Turkey into it, or – even worse – pretend that somehow Turkey is already part of it? If Turkey is part of “Western civilisation” then there no longer is any such thing. The world has known many civilisations; to say that Turkey is not part of Western civilisation is not to say that Turkey is uncultured. (Back to China: It is self-evident that Chinese civilisation is not Western; it is equally self-evident that China has an imposing civilisation.) Turkey has a rich culture, but that culture is not ours. It is profoundly different, and in many respects hostile. We won’t dissipate that cultural hostility by, as Mr Johnson proposes, preemptively capitulating to it.
The best course for Europe (the real Europe, not the faux-Europe of the EU) is to abolish the European Union forthwith. It is a soul-less, nation-destroying secular bureaucracy seemingly bent on destroying Europe’s civilisation, culture and faith from within. But the EU will survive for the time being. That being so, EU member states should fight to keep as much control over what happens in Brussels as possible. Under no circumstances can the member states allow Turkey to join. At a stroke, the EU would no longer be European and European nations would be wide open to uncontrolled immigration of Moslem Middle Easterners who, pace Mr Johnson, are in no sense European. With the Turkish camel’s nose in the tent, on what principled basis does one say no to Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria…? Iraq? Under the current EU regime, especially with Schengen in place, member states would be hard pressed to defend their territorial and national integrity.
Should it not give Europeans – who regularly criticise the foreign policy incompetence of America’s Bush administration – pause that President Bush and Secretary of State Rice are hyperactive cheerleaders for Turkeys’ admission to the EU?
What conceivable benefit can be worth this risk? If the Constantinopolitans who died under the Turks’ swords in 1453 could see what the Westerners of today are allowing to happen, they would weep.