In Extremis

The Communist threat was not militarily from the Soviet Union, which never had either the means or the will to invade Western Europe, never mind to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific to North America. Rather, it was in our own countries. It came from Communist and fellow-travelling elements, undeniably often Soviet-funded and Soviet-directed, within wider Marxism.

Those elements’ success has been staggering, especially since they followed academic Marxism away from economic and towards social, cultural and constitutional means. The last Government and its entourage were absolutely riddled with them. Until recently required to stand down for other reasons, a former stalwart of the International Marxist Group at Oxford in the early 1970s was sitting in the present Cabinet, having previously come within an inch of becoming Leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Likewise, while a lot of the money comes from our dear friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Islamist threat itself is within our own society, and it is only tangentially related to immigration. It is the threat that people disgusted with the complete collapse of all moral standards in the personal, social and economic spheres, and left helpless by the closely connected, almost total loss of collective cultural memory, will convert to Islam in droves. Look at the mosques full of disaffected young men in Afro-Caribbean areas, and at the flourishing Student Islamic Societies full of white, middle-class, deep-thinking, and often female seekers.

In comparable ways did many another country begin to be Islamised. Who would have thought that present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much of Northern India could have been Islamised? Or North Africa? Or much of Sub-Saharan Africa, very much an ongoing process? Or Central Asia and much of Western China? But how did it happen? And how quickly? The White British Muslim population is already well over 60,000. Imagine if it alone grew by an improbably small 50 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be over a million. Now imagine that it grew by a possibly overlarge, but nevertheless much more realistic, 100 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be nearly 23 million. Yet that is only the White British section of British Muslims.

Marx held that Britain was, with Germany, one of the two countries most likely to have a Communist revolution. That was prevented by the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament.

Likewise, the answer to Islam is our own tradition of structured daily prayer, the setting aside of one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and the greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science. The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.

And the next threat? Judaism denies Original Sin, and it has unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation. The former has contributed immeasurably to the concept of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone. Thus was the latter able to give the world Marx and Trotsky, Freud and Alinksy, Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, Zionism and the secular Turkish ultranationalism that goes back to the Dönmeh, the ultimate in unfulfilled Jewish Messianic hope and expectation.

However radically, each of these is completed, perfected and transformed by, in, through and as the Messiah. He necessarily turns them away from any purely temporal utopianism. Or else they become neoconservatism, a compendium of all of them, and the ultimate expression of the theory, utterly horrific in the consequences at which it always arrives eventually, that human nature can be perfected in this life alone and by its own efforts alone, since Jesus of Nazareth is not the Messiah promised by and to the Hebrew Prophets.

For all the social good that a Jewish presence often does, that leaves a gap to be filled. By Islam. Even in what has become the State of Israel. (However, it must be added that Islam, unlike Judaism, affirms that Jesus was both virgin-born and the foretold Messiah, the former affirmation being an important riposte to the Jewish or Judaising suggestion that the expectation and proclamation of a virgin-born Messiah was a Hellenistic imposition on a Semitic tradition to which it was alien.)

Following Melanie Phillips’s identification of any and everything on the neoconservative hate list as an expression of anti-Semitism, perhaps we shall see the conversion of neoconservatives to some sort of Judaism, identifying the philosophical, theological and ethical resources of Judaism as providing the necessary weapons against such things. Julie Burchill has already made noises of this kind. Those who declared themselves Jews in order to provide a spiritual or ritual framework for their neoconservatism would be most unlikely to trouble the Orthodox.

But they and the average Reform rabbi or congregant would hardly be each other’s obvious best fits, either; on the contrary, although it still struggles to be heard, there is at present a quiet revival of Reform Judaism’s classical definition of Jews as a religious community rather than as an ethnic group, and of its classical rejection of any return to Palestine as surely as of any restoration of animal sacrifice. Orthodox Judaism’s classical position is that Zionism is a blasphemous pre-emption of the Messiah.

So, without necessarily involving the lady personally, will we be seeing new, Phillipsian synagogues springing up? We are about due some fresh expressions of the entrepreneurial popular religious revival that is very much a recurring theme in our history. Might this be one of them?

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