It takes courage to speak out against the threatening presence of Islam in today’s world. And it takes courage to defend those who have the courage to speak out.
Eight years ago, after Benedict XVI gave his controversial Regensburg address, most European commentators were shamefully timid in their response. Most refused to raise their heads above the parapet, preferring the coward’s option of not making any response at all. In the light of this continuing cowardly silence, it is timely to remind ourselves of the ugly face of Islamic fundamentalism.
At the darkened heart of radical Islam is what Bishop Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop of Rochester, has called a “dual psychology … of victimhood, but also the desire for domination.” In my own homeland numerous new mosques have sprung up across the country, many of which are being staffed by fundamentalist clerics. Such extremism seems to flourish in the pluralistic climate of so-called multiculturalism and has contributed to the alienation of so many young Muslims from the society into which most of them have lived all their lives.
The alienation works in both directions with many Britons feeling alienated from their self-ghettoised Muslim neighbours. In a recent poll, one in five Britons stated their belief that “a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism” and more than half of those polled considered Islam a threat. These frightening figures caused the writer and historian Niall Ferguson to conclude, with characteristic candour, that a terrorist attack could be “the trigger for the next English civil war.” Since Ferguson also stated that he suspected a terrorist attack as being “bound to happen … sooner or later,” he was effectively saying that England has a loaded weapon pointed at its head, with the trigger poised.
The polarization of British society into mutually antagonistic factions has forced even the most dyed-in-the-wool pluralists to concede that multiculturalism has proved a dismal and destructive failure. Ruth Kelly, a senior member of Tony Blair’s last government, suggested in the days before she chose to leave the political arena for a career in banking, that the multi-cultural experiment “may have resulted in a more fractured society,” thereby uttering a truth that would have been considered an unmentionable blasphemy in Labour Party circles until recently. (Since Ms. Kelly is a member of Opus Dei, and is therefore, presumably, a tradition-oriented Catholic, her rise through the ranks of the feminist-fuddled ranks of the Labour Party has always been a mystery to me. Perhaps the refreshing sanity of her rebuttal of her own party’s long-standing dogma might have something to do with the deeper creed to which she adheres.) Heralding what appeared to be a revolutionary u-turn in her government’s thinking she called for an “honest debate” on “integration and cohesion”: “We have moved from a period of near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness.” This is almost Orwellian in its doublethinking convolutions: multiculturalism, the battle cry of anti-racist egalitarians, is now seen as apartheid! The comrades must be getting a little confused by the political somersaults they are being asked to perform.
Nor was multiculturalism the only longstanding Labour Party dogma that Ms. Kelly attacked. Addressing the thorny subject of mass immigration, she argued that to discuss the subject was not being racist. This must have come as a big surprise to most of her comrades, not least because the Labour Party has effectively stifled all debate on the subject of immigration for half a century on the grounds that questioning the wisdom of large-scale immigration was “racist.”How many more eyebrow-raising revolutionary revelations can the comrades be expected to take?
Even stranger than the sight of members of the Labour Party coming to their senses is the sight of Hollywood actors speaking words of prophecy. John Rhys-Davies, the actor who plays Gimli the Dwarf in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, spoke with ominous potency on the deeper meaning of Tolkien’s epic: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization.” Then, with that gift of “applicability” which Tolkien himself proclaimed was the way in which his work should be read in relation to events in the world, Mr. Rhys-Davies drew some sobering conclusions. As with the civilization of men in Middle-earth, our own Western civilization was in a “precarious” state because of a “collapse” in population. “Western Europeans are not having any babies,” he lamented.
“There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe which nobody wants to talk about,” he continued, “that we daren’t bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially. And rightly we should be. But there is a cultural thing as well … By 2020, fifty per cent of the children in Holland under the age of eighteen will be of Muslim descent.” This combination of declining European birth-rates, coupled with large-scale Muslim immigration, constitutes not so much a racial threat as a threat to western culture, he concluded.
“There is a change happening in the very complexion of Western civilization in Europe that we should think about at least and argue about,” he said. “If it just means the replacement of one genetic stock with another genetic stock, that doesn’t matter too much. But if it involves the replacement of Western civilization with a different civilization with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss … True democracy comes from our Greco-Judeo-Christian Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world.”
The ultimate lesson to be gleaned from rational criticism of the irrational nature of Islam, such as that offered in Benedict XVI’s perennially relevant Regensburg Address, and the violent reaction to such rational criticism by Muslims the world over, is to be found in these words by Mr. Rhys-Davies, who is veritably a Giant in Dwarf’s clothing.
Europe has learned its lesson the hard way and it is doubtful whether she will ever recover. If the United States is to avoid the fate of Europe, which seems destined to become Eurabia unless she can be re-evangelized with the Christian culture of life, it must heed the hard lessons and avoid the mistakes of multiculturalism and prevent any future mass migration of non-Christians into North America. We have been warned. We have seen the Arabic writing on the wall.
The fact that Europeans didn’t understand Benedict XVI on the subject of Islam is only half the problem. The real problem is that Europeans didn’t understand Benedict XVI on Christianity, and Catholic Europeans often didn’t understand Benedict XVI on Catholicism.
On the other hand the fact that Le Pen has the support she does in France is heartening. If France can restore its’ Republic, the West is saved (The East of Europe does not need saving on this front).
“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” – James Burnham, 1964
So Western Europeans are not having babies……….have known this for a long time……….how about America discarding babies in utero since Roe v Wade ??? Wonder how long the Creator will tolerate His Gift of Life being thrown back in His Face…….He is a loving and merciful God, but He is also just…….will this country ever figure it out ??
Excellent to hear about John Rhys-Davis. I remember the sad day when I realized just about all the actors in the film trilogy (at least the main ones) were progressive and atheists (particuarly Ian McKellan), in other words rather anti-Tolkien in the end. But then along he comes and he alone seems to “get along” so to speak with who Tolkien is and what it means even if they wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on many things.
Joseph Pearce does strike a common chord among many of us.
I am a little leery of European Christians eschewing “multi-culturalism,” partly because I wonder if they would have considered Christ Himself a swarthy skinned outsider. The real problem is not colour or culture, neither of which we can choose, but ideology and religion, which we should.
“True democracy comes from our Greco-Judeo-Christian Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world.”
The “Greco-Judeo” thing was not all that great back in the day, and the “Christian Western” thing only started to feel great with the rise of an affluent, even bourgeois, middle class – with all these creature comforts thanks in due to well dominated swarthy types in far off lands we somehow gained a sense of entitlement as though we had actually earned our place on top of the world and that it had something to do with being right, righteous and Christian instead of not having to acknowledge the ones we were exploiting and start acting “Christian” towards them.
Still, even after many had lost their faith, it seems there was a pervading sense of “Christianism” in a “do unto others” type of way that made it “OK” to be good but with a “new and improved” morality that made it not so bad to be bad, and at times, even “good” to be bad.
Personally, as a Christian father of six kids, a person of mixed cultural heritage and living in a country where my accent marks me as an outsider, I think my Christian friends sometimes have more in common with devout Muslims than lapsed or former Christians.
“If the United States is to avoid the fate of Europe, which seems destined to become Eurabia unless she can be re-evangelized with the Christian culture of life, it must heed the hard lessons and avoid the mistakes of multiculturalism and prevent any future mass migration of non-Christians into North America.”
Do we want really this?
What happens to Christians when they are persecuted?
Do they tend to slink off into a little pity party whimpering about the cushy lifestyle they are about to lose, or do they seize the chance to bear witness and say: “Fiat!”
And yet there is another writing, not Arabic, that I would heed: “hope remains while the Company is true.”
Some of that Company are still true to the principles of Western Civilization, are battling vigorously to remain true, and are consequently being attacked viciously for doing so–the countries of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Hungary.
“In Polish, ‘przedmurze’ or its Latin equivalent, ‘antemurale christianitatis’ is a term bestowed upon Poland after the fall of Constantinople in 1467 to describe Poland’s “Place in Europe” since the time of its conversion to Christianity (966 AD) in recognition of its ongoing defense of the faith. (Davies, “God’s Playground”)” from a footnote to the poem “Bogurodzica” by Denise Sobilo