The Future of Tolerance

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

                                                                                    W.H. Auden

                                                                                                                September 1, 1939

After tragedies like Westminster Bridge, Manchester, London, Tehran, Kerbala and Tal Afar, following each other with ever increasingly rapid succession, one runs into the danger of becoming nonchalant about such occurrences. As I am editing this piece, another vehicle attack occurred in Barcelona, down the beautiful tree-lined Las Ramblas, taking at least 13 lives and injuring more than 100. Communities will this time, like other times, go through the all too common grieving process. However, there is a hollowness and disingenuousness in the notion that one can mourn for people one did not know.

John le Carré’s character, George Smiley, the British intelligence officer, remarked in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

“I have a theory [that] each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”

This is not to say that sympathy and compassion are vapid or insincere – on the contrary, they are the mortar that bind society together. But too much of it, and specifically it alone, without any palpable follow up, is a waste of emotional energy.

This point is becoming more and more apparent with each new and increasingly frequent attack. For all the candles, hashtags and the calls for love-not-hate, who would be surprised if another attack would happen in a major city tomorrow?

The righteous anger one feels when one hears the news of young girls getting blown up at a concert or a 7 year old boy being run over in Barcelona is diffused by the apotropaic shows of emotion, which is apt to provide a false sense of catharsis – that we’ve done the rituals that come with the latest deliberate killings of innocents by ‘terrorists’ and we can pretend life is normal again for a bit. Until the next attack, when we get the candles out again.

And well-greased we might have to keep that drawer – according to Europol:

In 2016, a total of 142 failed, foiled and completed attacks were reported by eight EU Member States. More than half (76) of them were reported by the United Kingdom. France reported 23 attacks, Italy 17, Spain 10, Greece 6, Germany 5, Belgium 4 and the Netherlands 1 attack. 142 victims died in terrorist attacks, and 379 were injured in the EU. Although there was a large number of terrorist attacks not connected with jihadism, the latter accounts for the most serious forms of terrorist activity as nearly all reported fatalities and most of the casualties were the result of jihadist terrorist attacks.

In recent weeks, Australian police foiled an elaborate plan to detonate bombs on a plane.

What societies owe to the little girls killed at the Manchester concert, the pedestrians on London Bridge and the civilians going about their daily business in Tehran and Kerbala, the 200 ethnic minorities summarily executed by IS in Tal Afar, including women and children, the dead and injured shoppers at a Hamburg supermarket in Germany, the dozens of Shiites massacred in the village of Mirza Olang in Afghanistan, and people enjoying a summer day’s stroll down a famed boulevard, what we owe to the maimed and mutilated and their grieving families and friends who suffered these outrages all within the space of a few short months, should be to ensure that steps are taken to minimise the chances that attacks by Islamic fundamentalist jihadists should occur.

But, strangely, it seems that a large segment of the media and the political set cannot even do the first thing – call the problem by its real name. This Voldemort syndrome brings forth insipid language like ‘terror’ or ‘extremism’, catch-all phrases whose vagueness is designed to give wriggle room and escape clause to people who are disingenuous or afraid of backlash and which disguises reality and makes the important discussions about politics and culture bland and banal. It also massively simplifies and cheapens public opinion and withhold vital facts from the community.

So allow me to name the enemy’s ideology – it is mainly the Salafist, Wahhabi strain of militant, ultra-conservative Arab Sunni Islam. This is not at all generalising – there are millions of Arabs who are not Salafists or Wahabists; many Arabs, such as the Arab Christians, Arab Jews and the ‘wrong’ type of Muslims such as the Shiites, Alawites and Ahmadis are and have been the victims of the likes of ISIS and al-Qaeda and their predecessors for centuries.

How is this ideology spread in Europe? It is important to note that the 22 year old young man who blew up the concert goers at Manchester, Salman Ramadan Abedi, was born in the UK – his parents given asylum by the UK government from the Libyan dictator Gaddafi. As Douglas Murray summarised, Abedi “killed 22 people, one for each year this country has given him.”

As the Guardian reported, Abedi’s father is affiliated with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a terrorist organisation aligned with Osama Bin Laden, who tried to assassinate Gaddafi in the 90’s and “replace his regime with a hardline Islamic state.” Failing that, the family sought and received asylum in the UK. The Telegraph reported that living in the same suburb were other members of LIFG, including Abd al-Baset Azzouz, an expert bomb-maker, who left the UK to run a terrorist network in Libya. Abedi was given the opportunity to go to school and university by his adopted country and, using his student loan, flew to Libya to train as a terrorist and killed and maimed his fellow citizens. Do the people of the UK therefore have a legitimate reason to ask who the country is letting in and how those who wish to get in are screened?

We know where the brain washing occurs for people like Abedi and Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in Orlando, and Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the Paris attack in 2015 – in Saudi funded mosques and religious schools, from returning fighters affiliated with ISIS and other extremist organisations as well as in prisons, many of which have been allowed to become Islamist recruiting camps. But the governments have continuously failed to do anything about it.

Returning to the sympathy and fellow feelings that is the fabric of what makes a society, contrary to the notion that diversity is strength, what sympathy underpins are deep, shared fundamental principles that buttress a façade of shallow differences. Western society is not about nightclubs and pop music but a set of liberties with its history in the playhouse, in books and in a history where these liberties are fought over and paid for with blood and treasure. Hard as it is to face, this collapses when portions of the population in the society differ profoundly in these foundational principles and the host culture lacks the strength or will to impose its principles due to relativism, culminating in sloppy slogans like ‘diversity is our strength’. No society is stronger when their own citizens, whose views are so diverse, will go and kill their neighbours for rewards in the afterlife.

This is not to equate violence uniquely to Islam without subtlety, but it does point to the fact that cultures are not the same and while most Muslims, even religiously dogmatic, will not resort to violence, a significant proportion won’t necessarily mind if others are on their behalf for the spreading of Islam. This is because in Islamic tradition, despite internal differences between schools of Islam, a central tenet is that the world is divided into two houses: the Dār al-Islām (House of Islam), where Islamic law prevails, and the Dār al-Harb (House of War), the rest of the world ruled by infidels.

One illustration out of many towards this point: an extensive poll carried out by ICM Research in 2016 of over 1,000 British Muslims found that while 88% British Muslims believe Britain is a good place to live, only 34% of would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had been involved with jihadists. Not only do 32% of those surveyed refuse to condemn those who take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet, over 4% of British Muslims openly sympathise with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts. There is also an alarming support for social segregation, with 23% saying that Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations. 52% think homosexuality should be illegal in Britain, 39% agree with the statement that “wives should always obey their husbands” and 31% agree that a man should be able to have multiple wives.

This is also not to make a point based on race. It is all too easy (not to mention boring and wrong) to point to any criticism of Islam (an ideology) and impugn it with racism or ‘islamophobia’ (a word invented by Iranian fundamentalists as a propaganda weapon according to the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner). It is regressive as it economizes on thought. Words like these are largely wielded by people who don’t know anything (and don’t want to take the trouble to learn) about Islam, history or geopolitics but want to feel morally secure and superior. They unveil it like Medusa’s head and turn all discussion to stone.

Unfortunately, this reactionary instinct is propagated by the largely left leaning media and politicians. This explains the farcical case of the Southern Poverty Law Centre labeling Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Somali-born feminist who suffered genital mutilation and escaped an arranged marriage to a cousin, and who now fights for liberties for Muslims at the risk of her life and Maajid Nawaz, a practising Muslim who was a former radical Muslim turned reformer and who started Quilliam, a counter-extremist organisation, as ‘Anti-Muslim Extremists’. As someone who has read all 3 of Hirsi-Ali’s autobiographies and Nawaz’s book with Sam Harris, I can say with certainty that this is enough to make a cat laugh. Such perversion and lack of clear-sightedness is a symptom of this inability to separate ‘race’ from ‘ideology’, ‘criticism’ from ‘hatred’. This is why it is always the reformists, many of whom are Muslims or former Muslims like Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza, Tarek Fatah and Brigitte Gabriel, are most threatened with violence, censorship and ostracism.

This mind disease is also why that the UK government is so ready to ban people like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for opposing Jihad terror, but welcome people like Pakistani clerics Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri, who is banned from Pakistan for being too incendiary, and Muhammed Naqib ur Rehman and Hassan Haseeb ur Rehman, into the country for lecture tours, despite their unequivocal support of the murder of Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab and who bravely wanted to reform the strict blasphemy law in Pakistan.

It is why the Rotherham child sex abuse ring was allowed to flourish for years and the recent Newcastle child sex abuse is still reported, like previous such incidents, by the media to be run by ‘Asian’ men, willing to mislead their reader to think gangs of Chinese or Koreans are behind the gang-rape of young white girls across the UK. So much is the burden of this mental inconsistency that even a Labour minister, Sarah Champion, has called out for research as to why it is the case that the majority of perpetrators of sex-abuse of minors in the UK are of Pakistani origin. She said that “I genuinely think that it’s because more people are afraid to be called racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.” The former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips also called upon the British authority to acknowledge that most men in the grooming gangs are Muslims.

Good on them for having the guts to point out the obvious but they will undoubtedly suffer a lot of backlash. Indeed, Champion has been forced to resign her post in the shadow cabinet by Captain PC Mr Corbyn. Anderson’s famous tale of the Emperor with no Clothes is wrong in one vital point – the little boy who mentioned what is true would probably be killed by the mob who are either too afraid, too deluded or too ignorant to see what is in front of their eyes. This mindset is the road to civilizational suicide. This odd situation is encapsulated by Yeats:

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

So before the candles are packed up again, maybe we should start sorting out what society stands for and, increasingly more importantly, what it doesn’t and mustn’t tolerate. To shore up the centre and make sure it will hold. Then we may start treating Islam like an adult and have an adult conversation, uncomfortable though it may be, about the problems facing society that comes from the friction between different ideologies. Until then, we will have to tolerate another Barcelona about once every month. 

The same uneven application of values applies in the weird worlds of academia and the think tanks. Like the media, they choose to close off their minds the moment that the question of Islam comes along. Most bizarre is that you can get away with saying anything, absolutely anything, so long as it is flattering of Islam. It doesn’t matter how soppy, how sentimental, how completely unacademic it is: so long as it’s about Islam, different standards apply.

                                                                                                Douglas Murray

                                                                                                    Islamophilia, 2013