Letter to Leo McKinstry on Muslim immigration

Twice this past winter I wrote about Leo McKinstry’s columns in the Daily Express (here and here), praising his eloquent protest against the surrender of Britain’s culture, while also lamenting his failure to mention immigration as a key factor in that surrender. In February I wrote him an e-mail asking him how he thinks Britain can stop Islamization without stopping Islamic immigration, and asking him why he says nothing about that point. He did not answer. Thus his reply to my question about his silence on this critical issue was—more silence. Below is my e-mail.

February 16, 2007

Leo McKinstry
The Daily Express

Dear Mr. McKinstry:

The theme of your January 22 article, “Pandering to religious demands is destroying our national identity,” is that multiculturalism has gone beyond accommodating other and hostile cultures and has now become outright surrender to declared enemies who are seeking to destroy Britain. You then appeal to the example of Churchill in rousing Britain to fend off the Nazis.

But here’s the problem. Your Churchillian analogy concerns 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 you say 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, it seems to me that your Churchillian analogy falls flat, because your position comes down to decrying a threat that you propose no way of defeating or stopping.

So I’d like to ask you these questions:

1. Do you think it’s possible to stop the Islamization of Britain while Britain still allows Muslim immigration into Britain?

2. How can you talk about Churchillian defiance against Muslims while you don’t say a single word about stopping more of these enemies from actually coming in?

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

4. Do you think that the papers that now publish you would stop publishing you if you argued that Muslim immigration into Britain should be significantly or drastically reduced? If the answer is yes, is this the reason you have remained silent on the issue? I do not ask this in a disrespectful spirit but because readers of my website, View from the Right, often say that this is the real reason why writers who express great alarm about Islamization never say anything about stopping further Muslim immigration. If that is the case, then blogs remain the only medium where these things can be said.

Thank you very much.
Lawrence Auster

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 28, 2007 12:09 PM | Send