Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled 'racist'.
When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.
The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.
The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.
All this prevents us from acknowledging the principal reason why otherwise ordinary young men turn themselves into human bombs — religious fanaticism.
The British find this difficult to grasp because of its fundamental irrationality. Yet contrary to what we are being told, this terrorism is all about religion.
It derives from a cult of hatred and death within Islam — albeit one that moderate Muslims privately abhor — whose explicit aim is to destroy the power of the west and any expression of freedom by Muslims or others which prevents the imposition of the most repressive interpretation of Islam.
Whether this represents a hijacking of the religion is matter for theological dispute. But the fact is that it has not been challenged by any leading Islamic religious authority; indeed, they have endorsed it.
This hatred is further incited and inflamed by lies and distortions about the history and present actions of the west and above all about the Jews and about Israel — a world-view based on a wholesale denial and inversion of the truth which has poisoned the minds of millions.
Even moderate Muslims believe many if not most of these untruths, thus reinforcing the lethal grievance culture which is the sea in which terrorism swims.
Yet even to say such things is to risk accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. And now the government is bringing in a law against incitement to religious hatred, all in order to appease the Muslim community which seeks to outlaw altogether the drawing of any association between Islam and terror. Ironically, this law is definitely not designed to prevent extremist British imams — who, yes, are only a minority — from disseminating their bigoted hatred of the west.
This madness has simply got to stop. Our society has now been attacked in a way that means it will never be the same again, and may well be subjected to more such attacks. And yet the very irrationality and moral perversion that lie at the core of this onslaught are being used to prevent us from addressing it.
Such lethal equivocation cannot be allowed to continue. We have to tackle all the sources of this poison. London must no longer be Europe’s terror factory — the ‘Londonistan’ in which terrorists wanted in other countries are allowed to walk freely in our streets. Publications advocating violence should be banned. Charities funding terror should be proscribed and their assets seized.
Imams preaching violence should be prosecuted or removed from the country. Extremist Islamic websites should be shut down and those who log onto sites providing blueprints for bomb-making should be arrested. Extremist groups should be banned and their leaders locked up or deported. We should have special judge-only courts for cases where evidence is too sensitive to bring to a normal trial. The Human Rights Act which has made it all but impossible to protect this country should be repealed.
But above all, the responsible Muslim community and its leaders — who are the majority — must come out of denial and unequivocally condemn the extreme interpretation of Islam that is twisting the minds of the minority of zealots in its midst.
This war for civilisation won’t be won by practical action alone. What we are up against is a death cult which recruits its foot-soldiers through propaganda based on lies and distortions which inflame grievance into murderous rage. These lies emanating from extremists in the Muslim world have been further inflated by support from those in the wider community in Britain — mainly on the left — whose obsessive repetition of such falsehoods and disproportionate attention to the misdeeds of the west while ignoring Muslim atrocities have helped turn grievance into hysteria.
We have already paid a terrible price for multiculturalism and this cancer of moral inversion and irresponsibility. These are tough measures — but we must take them if our society is to be defended against this horror that threatens us all.
Multiculturalism under attack ...at last or should I say again
I recently posted an article Dishonest and Deadly by Bruce Thornton in which he asks Why does the West entertain such a wrongheaded notion as Multiculturalism?
A year ago I posted Melting post vs Multiculturalism and asked What is multiculturalism? Is it good or bad for America? If you believe as I do that the melting pot is better for America, then read How Multiculturalism Took Over America By Lawrence Auster In FrontPageMag
And now Melanie Phillips weighs in with This lethal moral madness
[...]This reasoning turns both logic and morality on their heads. It also masks some deeply alarming statistics. Far from being adherents of a ‘religion of peace’, huge numbers of Muslims world-wide support al Qaeda — 65 per cent in Pakistan, 45 per cent in Morocco. And in Britain, where the vast majority of Muslims are opposed to terrorism, according to an ICM poll carried out for the Guardian some 13 per cent of a Muslim community of 1.6 million support it.
These numbers are horrific. And yet in the debate which has been going on for the past week, Muslims have been presented not as the community which must take responsibility for this horror, but as its principal victims.
This moral inversion is the result of the cultural brainwashing that has been going on in Britain for years in the pursuit of the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism. This has refused to teach Muslims — along with other minorities — the core of British culture and values. Instead, it has promoted a lethally divisive culture of separateness, in which minority cultures are held to be equal if not superior to the values and traditions of the indigenous majority.
Even worse, multiculturalism causes the moral paralysis of ‘victim culture’, whereby to say an ethnic minority is at fault is to invite immediate accusations of racism. When Lord Ouseley reported on the 1999 race riots in Bradford, he concluded that many local people did not dare challenge wrongdoing among young ethnic minority people because they feared being labelled 'racist'.
When Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster, warned strongly against multiculturalism in the schools in the eighties, he was branded a racist and hounded from his job. Now those Yorkshire chickens have lethally come home to roost.
The moral bankruptcy of this victim culture is all around us. Thus the BBC instructed its journalists not to refer to the London bombings as ‘terrorism’ because this was a subjective value judgment. And yet it allowed John Simpson, its World Affairs editor, to call these terrorists ‘misguided criminals’ an astounding value judgment which diminished the nature of the atrocity.
The problem is that this inversion of morality can be lethal. Such is the ethos of political correctness in our public services that librarians who want to complain about the potential danger of young Muslims logging onto websites instructing them in making bombs or nerve gas are told to say nothing for fear of being accused of prejudice.
All this prevents us from acknowledging the principal reason why otherwise ordinary young men turn themselves into human bombs — religious fanaticism.
The British find this difficult to grasp because of its fundamental irrationality. Yet contrary to what we are being told, this terrorism is all about religion.
It derives from a cult of hatred and death within Islam — albeit one that moderate Muslims privately abhor — whose explicit aim is to destroy the power of the west and any expression of freedom by Muslims or others which prevents the imposition of the most repressive interpretation of Islam.
Whether this represents a hijacking of the religion is matter for theological dispute. But the fact is that it has not been challenged by any leading Islamic religious authority; indeed, they have endorsed it.
This hatred is further incited and inflamed by lies and distortions about the history and present actions of the west and above all about the Jews and about Israel — a world-view based on a wholesale denial and inversion of the truth which has poisoned the minds of millions.
Even moderate Muslims believe many if not most of these untruths, thus reinforcing the lethal grievance culture which is the sea in which terrorism swims.
Yet even to say such things is to risk accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. And now the government is bringing in a law against incitement to religious hatred, all in order to appease the Muslim community which seeks to outlaw altogether the drawing of any association between Islam and terror. Ironically, this law is definitely not designed to prevent extremist British imams — who, yes, are only a minority — from disseminating their bigoted hatred of the west.
This madness has simply got to stop. Our society has now been attacked in a way that means it will never be the same again, and may well be subjected to more such attacks. And yet the very irrationality and moral perversion that lie at the core of this onslaught are being used to prevent us from addressing it.
Such lethal equivocation cannot be allowed to continue. We have to tackle all the sources of this poison. London must no longer be Europe’s terror factory — the ‘Londonistan’ in which terrorists wanted in other countries are allowed to walk freely in our streets. Publications advocating violence should be banned. Charities funding terror should be proscribed and their assets seized.
Imams preaching violence should be prosecuted or removed from the country. Extremist Islamic websites should be shut down and those who log onto sites providing blueprints for bomb-making should be arrested. Extremist groups should be banned and their leaders locked up or deported. We should have special judge-only courts for cases where evidence is too sensitive to bring to a normal trial. The Human Rights Act which has made it all but impossible to protect this country should be repealed.
But above all, the responsible Muslim community and its leaders — who are the majority — must come out of denial and unequivocally condemn the extreme interpretation of Islam that is twisting the minds of the minority of zealots in its midst.
This war for civilisation won’t be won by practical action alone. What we are up against is a death cult which recruits its foot-soldiers through propaganda based on lies and distortions which inflame grievance into murderous rage. These lies emanating from extremists in the Muslim world have been further inflated by support from those in the wider community in Britain — mainly on the left — whose obsessive repetition of such falsehoods and disproportionate attention to the misdeeds of the west while ignoring Muslim atrocities have helped turn grievance into hysteria.
We have already paid a terrible price for multiculturalism and this cancer of moral inversion and irresponsibility. These are tough measures — but we must take them if our society is to be defended against this horror that threatens us all.
Posted by Ted Belman at July 17, 2005 05:25 PM