Peter Hitchens writes:
Why do our politicians and media talk so much drivel about Islam?
We react like superstitious peasants to anything connected with this religion. As a result, we completely miss the point of what is going on.
For example, we imagine that the horrible killings by cannabis-crazed drifters, of Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo (right) and Michael Adebowale here and of Nathan Cirillo in Canada, are evidence of some vast secret Islamist conspiracy masterminded from a cave by a robed villain with a beard.
This is partly because a long and expensive international PR campaign has fooled a willing elite (many of them drug abusers themselves) into believing that cannabis is safe when in fact it is one of the most dangerous drugs there is.
So we shut our minds to all the evidence of the terrible harm it can do – even highly publicised killings by cannabis abusers.
It is also because our politicians are even more useless abroad than they are at home.
Here, they try to persuade us that they alone, armed with surveillance and huge police powers, stand between us and a terrorist peril that is a far smaller threat to life than the motor car.
Abroad, they seek to pose as modern-day Churchills, never happier than when pictured among soldiers or climbing into helicopters.
Having destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state in Iraq, and boosted Islamist fanatics against the secular Assad state in Syria, and urged on the plainly dangerous ‘Arab Spring’ with rhetoric and bombs, they now claim to be surprised and horrified that Sunni fanatics are close to taking over the Middle East.
At home, they spent years actively encouraging Muslim migration to this country, and apologising for our remaining Christian laws and institutions.
Yet they act surprised when Muslim parents want their children brought up in their own faith in British schools.
Our growing secret police forces go on high alert.
Plans are made to nip ‘extremism’ in the bud, and even make it illegal, even though the word means nothing and such a law would be a tyrant’s charter.
These plans are so absurd that last week they exploded in the faces of those who advocate them. A private Christian school was actually reprimanded because it had not been ‘inclusive’ enough.
Rules supposedly devised to curb Islamic ‘extremism’ were used to warn this school that it would be downgraded for failing to bring a Muslim imam to preach to its pupils.
Could there be anything more ludicrous? Actually, there could.
The very people who are loudest in their alarmism about the Islamist menace are – almost without exception – the people who are keenest to abandon serious migration controls.
My guess is Britain – and Europe – will become Muslim in a century or so, without anyone needing to fire a shot or explode a single bomb.
We’ve given up our own faith, and left the door wide open.
Why be surprised by such a change?
Why do our politicians and media talk so much drivel about Islam?
We react like superstitious peasants to anything connected with this religion. As a result, we completely miss the point of what is going on.
For example, we imagine that the horrible killings by cannabis-crazed drifters, of Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo (right) and Michael Adebowale here and of Nathan Cirillo in Canada, are evidence of some vast secret Islamist conspiracy masterminded from a cave by a robed villain with a beard.
This is partly because a long and expensive international PR campaign has fooled a willing elite (many of them drug abusers themselves) into believing that cannabis is safe when in fact it is one of the most dangerous drugs there is.
So we shut our minds to all the evidence of the terrible harm it can do – even highly publicised killings by cannabis abusers.
It is also because our politicians are even more useless abroad than they are at home.
Here, they try to persuade us that they alone, armed with surveillance and huge police powers, stand between us and a terrorist peril that is a far smaller threat to life than the motor car.
Abroad, they seek to pose as modern-day Churchills, never happier than when pictured among soldiers or climbing into helicopters.
Having destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular state in Iraq, and boosted Islamist fanatics against the secular Assad state in Syria, and urged on the plainly dangerous ‘Arab Spring’ with rhetoric and bombs, they now claim to be surprised and horrified that Sunni fanatics are close to taking over the Middle East.
At home, they spent years actively encouraging Muslim migration to this country, and apologising for our remaining Christian laws and institutions.
Yet they act surprised when Muslim parents want their children brought up in their own faith in British schools.
Our growing secret police forces go on high alert.
Plans are made to nip ‘extremism’ in the bud, and even make it illegal, even though the word means nothing and such a law would be a tyrant’s charter.
These plans are so absurd that last week they exploded in the faces of those who advocate them. A private Christian school was actually reprimanded because it had not been ‘inclusive’ enough.
Rules supposedly devised to curb Islamic ‘extremism’ were used to warn this school that it would be downgraded for failing to bring a Muslim imam to preach to its pupils.
Could there be anything more ludicrous? Actually, there could.
The very people who are loudest in their alarmism about the Islamist menace are – almost without exception – the people who are keenest to abandon serious migration controls.
My guess is Britain – and Europe – will become Muslim in a century or so, without anyone needing to fire a shot or explode a single bomb.
We’ve given up our own faith, and left the door wide open.
Why be surprised by such a change?
No comments:
Post a Comment