Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  In the current crisis over British Muslims, there is great anxiety about separate Islamic schools because of fears that such separate education may promote segregation and even hostility to Britain. Yet in a speech at the Foreign Office Conference Centre at Wilton Park in Sussex in 1996, Prince Charles called on Islamic pedagogy and philosophy to help young Britons develop a healthier view of the world. Praising Islamic culture in its traditional form for trying to preserve an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West,” he went on to say:

  There is much we can learn from that Islamic world view in this respect. There are many ways in which mutual understanding and appreciation can be built. Perhaps, for instance, we could begin by having more Muslim teachers in British schools, or by encouraging exchanges of teachers. Everywhere in the world people want to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts, as well as our heads.26

  Traveling extensively in the Arab world, the heir to the throne is used by the Foreign Office as a point man for British interests. But he has never once visited Israel, Britain’s supposed geopolitical ally in the region. The less charitable might also consider that his infatuation with Islam is all the more strange considering the punishments meted out to adulterers under Sharia law.

  It was the Prince of Wales who was a prime mover behind the building of the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, which became the clerical epicenter of the jihad in Britain. Flanked by Muslim leaders, the Prince would tour this dilapidated corner of North London in the early 1980s with wealthy businessmen and local councilors in tow, pointing out the ideal nature of the location.27

  Clearly, he had no idea it was to be hijacked by such extremists. But this was not simply an unfortunate episode of innocent blundering. For the heir to the British throne—who when he becomes King will be the symbol and embodiment of British national identity—has displayed a profound attraction to Islam at the expense of his country’s founding faith, so much so that like British Muslims themselves he appears to be unable to acknowledge the great threat throughout the Muslim world of resurgent extremism. And at a time when Britain’s fundamental values are under attack, its future monarch is preparing to abandon them with an explicit aim of replacing them by the “spiritually superior” forces of Islam.

  The promotion of multiculturalism had another unforeseen effect. The culture of separate groups replaced the universal vision of humanity in which all individuals shared the same national project on equal terms. By making such a fetish of the promotion of minority cultures as proof of Britain’s antiracist virtue, it encouraged British Muslims to start campaigning for public recognition of their religious agenda by the state. As the writer Kenan Malik observed, by the late 1980s the focus of antiracist protest in Bradford had shifted from political issues, such as policing and immigration, to religious and cultural issues: a demand for Muslim schools and for separate education for girls, a campaign for halal meat in school, and the confrontation over The Satanic Verses. As different groups began asserting their identities ever more fiercely, so the shift from the political to the cultural arena helped create a more tribal city. Secular Muslims were regarded as betraying their culture. This process was strengthened by a new relationship between the local council and the mosques, which were now looked to as the voice of the community. This marginalized secular radicals and allowed religious leaders to reassert their power.28

  And as multiculturalism thus unwittingly fomented Islamist radicalism in the sacred cause of “diversity,” it simultaneously forbade criticism of Muslim practices such as forced marriages or polygamy, or the withdrawal of children from school to be sent for long periods to Pakistan. Even to draw attention to such practices was to be labeled a racist. After all, were not these customs now said to be morally equal to British traditions, such as equal rights for women and the protection of children’s educational interests? And so, as British identity was steadily eviscerated by multiculturalism, real human rights abuses on British shores were studiously ignored and its victims left abandoned in its name.

  Despite its promotion of multiculturalism, the Labour government has displayed persistent unease about the progressive fragmentation of British society and its weak sense of national identity —without ever acknowledging that the one helped create the other. Accordingly, it has tried to beef up community cohesion by promoting citizenship education and citizenship tests for new immigrants. But these initiatives merely institutionalized the hole at the heart of British national identity. Paying lip service to notions of duty and social responsibility, they subscribe to the doctrines of secular human rights, multiculturalism and antidiscrimination.

  Far from being the essence of British citizenship, these doctrines are in fact foreign to British identity, which is founded instead on Christianity, the common law and the history of an island people—of which both newcomers and indigenous citizens remain ignorant. The government’s Race, Equality, Faith and Cohesion unit in the Home Office says that the idea of citizenship is “founded on an understanding of the responsibilities that citizenship entails, such as tackling racism, sexism and ageism and embracing diversity and cultural differences.” 29 But the principal responsibilities of a citizen are to the laws and institutions of the country. The British government has now redefined them to be instead responsibilities to an ideology—and one that threatens to dismember the very meaning of citizenship itself.

  Hand in hand with this progressive negation of British identity has come a systematic repudiation of its values. At the heart of multiculturalism is a radical notion of egalitarianism, in which everyone’s culture and lifestyle has equal validity and moral stature. This extreme type of individualism, which replaces objective standards by subjective opinions and feelings, has been translated comprehensively into the moral sphere governing personal behavior. Morality has been privatized, so that instead of asking the question “what is right?” the individual now asks “what is right for me?”

  After the war, authority was junked in favor of boutique values centered upon self-actualization. Religion—the restraint on behavior —was substantially replaced by therapy, which diagnosed such restraint as unhealthy repression. The slow death of Christianity in Britain meant a transfer of belief from messianic redemption to a secular utopia. Saint Paul yielded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the doctrine of Original Sin was replaced by a doctrine of Original Innocence. Instead of fallen mankind redeemed by a savior on the cross, the goodness of mankind had to be redeemed from the corrupting effects of authority of any kind. Instead of salvation by faith or by good works, the association of free and unfettered spirits would create heaven on earth.

  But secular humanism had opened Pandora’s Box. Detaching values from religion meant there was no reason to adhere to any frameworks at all. The elevation of the individual and the attack on authority opened the way to an even more fundamental attack on the culture— the nihilistic doctrines of postmodernism, which reduced everything, including the concepts of truth and objectivity, to meaninglessness.

  This offered a perfect opportunity to the left. The fall of communism brought to an end the dream of class war. During the 1960s, the decade in which so many of our current leaders remain firmly stuck, the most influential thinker was the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. He grasped that the most effective means of overturning Western society was to subvert its culture and morality. Instead of mobilizing the working class to take over the world, the revolution would be achieved through a culture war, in which the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by the values of those on the margins of society. And this would be brought about by capturing all of society’s institutions—schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police, voluntary groups—and making sure that this intellectual elite all sang from the same subversive hymn-sheet.

  In Britain, Gramsci’s revolutionary aims have been acco
mplished to the letter. The intellectual class was overwhelmingly captured. The moral codes of society were profoundly subverted and weakened as all the barriers fell. Previously marginalized groups, such as never-married mothers or transsexuals, now became the arbiters of morality, which was defined in their “nonjudgmental” image in order to spare their feelings. Teachers resisted transmitting a belief in marriage or saying that premature sexual activity or drug-taking among their pupils was wrong. Instead they set out the facts and let children decide for themselves.

  The British cradle-to-grave welfare state promoted a culture of rights that systematically eroded the notion of social duty and substituted an unshakeable belief in personal entitlement. This combined with the therapy culture to give everyone a reason to have a grievance. Resentment became a weapon of social advantage; bad behavior by those identified as “victim groups” was either ignored or deemed to “prove” their victim status; and more and more interest groups were formed to claim the rewards. State monopoly over British schools and universities meant there was no challenge to these ideas, which all aimed to uncouple citizens from the traditions and established values of the nation. And faced with this rout, the Church of England merely wrung its hands and dutifully followed suit. As a result, the three pillars of national identity—family, education and church—have all crumbled. In their place, victim culture is enforced by a doctrine of “human rights” that ruthlessly enforces a prevailing secular and nihilistic ideology.

  The consequence of this moral and cultural relativism is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. Such moral equivalence rapidly mutates into moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority. This is on repeated display over a wide range of domestic issues such as family breakdown, drug abuse and the various demands of the “victim culture,” including the response to examples of Muslim aggression.

  Alan Buchan, who owns and edits a newspaper called the North East Weekly in Aberdeenshire, published an article opposing a resettlement center for asylum-seekers in his area. As a result, he was charged with inciting racial hatred. But Dr. Yaqub Zaki, deputy leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, was not charged after he said that he would be “very happy” if there were a terrorist attack on Downing Street and would not mind what happened to the “inmates” of No. 10.30

  Such a climate of moral inversion has turned Britain and Europe into fertile territory for manipulative propaganda by both terrorists and their ideological bedfellows. There is a tendency to equate and then invert the behavior of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defense is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified. This was on display in Britain immediately after 9/11, when there was a groundswell of feeling that America “had it coming to them.” It means that Palestinian or Iraqi suicide bombers are seen as victims because they are “up against” powerful states, which by definition are oppressive. It means that people think one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. And it means that fear of Islamist terrorism takes second place to fear of the fear of Islamist terrorism, or “Islamophobia,” the insult hurled at anyone who dares criticize Muslims or Islam.

  Obviously, there is prejudice against Muslims in Britain just as there is prejudice against other minorities, and this is to be deplored. However, although there was some rise in anti-Muslim incidents in Britain particularly in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings, there has been no great outbreak of violence against mosques or desecration of Muslim graves, unlike attacks on the Jewish community in Britain. When polled, most Muslims reported no incidents of prejudice against them.31 Even after the July bombings, 80 percent of Muslims polled said they had experienced no hostility against them as a result.32

  Nevertheless, the claim of Islamophobia is deployed as a weapon to shut down legitimate and, indeed, crucial debate on the basis that to criticize a minority faith group is by definition an act of prejudice. A report published in 2004 by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia claimed that British society was “institutionally Islamophobic” and thus held Britain responsible for Muslim extremism. 33 In the authors’ view, it seemed that every disadvantage associated with the Muslim community—poverty, overcrowding, poor educational achievement, unemployment and so forth—was evidence of institutional Islamophobia. In 1997 the Runnymede Trust, an independent think tank on race relations, had similarly reported that Islamophobic discourse was part of everyday life in Britain and was driving Muslims into the arms of extremists. Examples of such prejudice included claims that Muslim cultures were “monolithic” and “unchanging” and “intolerant of pluralism and dispute”; the perpetuation of stereotypes about Islamic fundamentalism or mistreatment of women; mentioning Islam as a successor to Nazism and communism; claims that Islam’s adherents use their faith mainly for political purposes and for strategic and military advantage; linking such a critique to opposition to immigration; dismissing Muslims’ contribution to debates about Western liberalism, modernity and secularism; and the acceptance of such anti-Muslim ideas and sentiments as increasingly respectable.34

  But the alleged false assertions about Muslims in this list are without exception true, at least in part. They characterize attitudes that are politically dominant within the Islamic world and are driving global terror. Of course, not all Muslims subscribe to these attitudes. A small minority in Britain are horrified by them all. But a troubling number of British Muslims subscribe to all of them and the majority subscribe at least to some. To deny such attributes and seek to suppress any discussion of them at a time when Britain faces physical attack from the ideology they represent—which, contrary to the report’s claim, is an example of a faith being used “for political purposes and for strategic and military advantage”—displays a spectacular proclivity towards national suicide.

  The “antiracist” Asian writer Kenan Malik has suggested that Islamophobia is a myth and is being exaggerated to suit politicians’ needs and silence the critics of Islam:The more the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more ordinary Muslims believe that they are under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, it stokes up anger and resentment, and it makes Muslims more inward looking and more open to religious extremism. It also creates a climate of censorship in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobic. The people who suffer most from such censorship are those struggling to defend basic rights within Muslim communities.35

  In other words, it is not “Islamophobes” who are helping create Muslim extremism and violence. It is, on the contrary, those who conjure up the specter of Islamophobia.

  And meanwhile, accounts of what is really going on are systematically being suppressed. This account by an ethnic-minority, Christian primary school teacher paints a frightening picture of a society that is committing national immolation:On many occasions I have attended conferences with other colleagues in education from the north of England. According to my colleagues in these multicultural areas, their schools consist of at least 75%-100% Muslim children. White British children are in the minority and often feel intimidated. The daily grief their staff endure is unbelievable. White, British female teachers are often insulted by their own pupils, suffer sexual harassment from young Muslim males and are intimidated by Muslim fathers (in their own classrooms) who have no respect for women. Parents aggressively handle their own children, undermining school codes and ethos in front of the children. One colleague said she was told by a father [that] if his daughter did not achieve academically, she (the teacher) should tell her that she is stupid, lazy and useless and let him know so that she can be beaten at home! This is a regular occurrence in schools—especially Church of England schools, and teachers have their hands tied as opposition would be br
anded as religious hatred and racism.

  Heads and governors are frightened to step a foot wrong in their own schools, lest they offend the community by upholding Christian values and denying the right for Muslim children to pray during the day. There is so much fear that paralyses and I believe actually prevents clear religious dialogue because Christianity is seen as inferior and submissive to the wishes of Islam. I work in a predominantly white school. I am the only ethnic minority teacher on staff, and there are only a handful of children from ethnic minority groups. Even in this predominantly Christian school, there is fear of being associated with Islamophobia and racism. Many people are afraid to talk about religion these days. Religious discussions are seen as taboo, as they may cause offence.

  We actually held a themed “multicultural week” this year, and the person who coordinated it decided not to cover any religious education during the week as it could upset some people. So we looked at the nations of China, India, Pakistan without even a mention of their religious beliefs and festivals! As our area is not very multicultural at all, there weren’t even any minority groups who could visit and share their culture. Needless to say, the children were left with a very narrow and unrealistic view of the places and the cultures they were studying. I know that this is only a brief mention or a snapshot, but when I think of all the multicultural schools across Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and London, there must be thousands of children (British Christians and British Muslims) who are seeing Christianity undermined while Islam forces its way in. These children, shaped by our example and actions now, will be Britain tomorrow.36