Spectator Diary
Spectator, 4 December 2009
December 6, 2009 Spectator Diary Spectator, 4 December 2009 Scottish audiences tend not to be – how to put this – entirely sympathetic to my general take on the world. And since the likely topics for this encounter are global warming and the Iraq war inquiry, the chances of this audience responding with enthusiasm to a right-wing warmongering certifiable neo-con Zionist climate-change denier with a posh London accent are about as high as Al Gore becoming a cheerleader for the Republican party. So it proves. To the propositions that man-made global warming is a scam and the Iraq war was justified, there is not merely hostility but open-mouthed incredulity. How could anyone sit there and say what all right-minded people know is totally unsayable?! Afterwards, I am deluged with emails running at around 70-30 in my favour. The editor tells me that the programme’s on-line public response has doubled on the strength of my comments on global warming alone. A number of viewers are outraged that I was ‘bullied’ on the show. Was I? It all seems sadly par for the course to me. • Speaking of which, I am upbraided by a couple of viewers for being too direct and uncompromising rather than trying to persuade people more gently to my opinion. I’m afraid I have come to the view, however, that on certain topics the irrationality is now so profound there is simply nothing that will persuade those gripped by the frightening group-think that has its thumb on the public wind-pipe. What’s important now is to speak up as clearly as possible for all those – and there are very many – who are in despair that what is patently and demonstrably the case is now so often unsayable. They are simply desperate to have a voice in a world whose collective mind seems to have become terrifyingly closed. Sometimes people wonder whether I am not simply ‘preaching to the choir’. But I now realise that it is terribly important to shore up and protect the choir from becoming demoralised and simply giving up the fight to defend what is decent and true. • If there is one thing more stressful than doing Question Time in Scotland, it is doing it on the very day that you move house. At breakfast time, I take possession of the keys to our new London residence and watch as the removal men hump boxes from the enormous van into which some three decades of possessions have been piled. My other half is rushing back from a speaking engagement in the Midlands to relieve me; at lunchtime I wrench myself away from cardboard chaos to board the train for Edinburgh, catching a dawn flight back to London the following morning to continue the Sisyphean task of unpacking. This is definitely not to be recommended as the most sensible way to make a serious life change. ‘You probably didn’t even have time to shed a tear as you bade farewell to your old home’, sympathises a friend. Well strange to say, although we had lived in that house for 28 years we left it without a qualm. The real angst was over what to take with us. Every few minutes we were being required to decide what to throw or give away. How on earth had we managed to accumulate quite so much junk? I discover that if the world is divided into hoarders and chuckers, I am a chucker. The instinct to make a fresh start, I find to my surprise, is irresistible. • Being a removal man, it appears, is a dangerous business. Pausing for a cuppa from lugging furniture into the van, one of the team tells us how he had once been shifting the possessions of a Middle Eastern diplomat who was being expelled from Britain when terrorists launched an attack; he dropped his box and ran but was hit by shrapnel in the leg. He proudly shows us his scars. How strange it is, he muses, that although as a Dubliner he grew up with the spectre of Irish terrorism it was the politics of the Middle East which had put him in hospital. He just can’t understand, he goes on, why people aren’t more worried about Iran getting the bomb. As for Israel, well he has nothing but the greatest sympathy and respect for the Jewish people and it’s really terrible all the things they have been through and how important it is to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again. Truly, this man should have been on Question Time. • Talking of Britain’s residual decency, it is noticeable how bigotry rises sharply the higher up the social and educational scale you go — especially when it comes to the Prejudice That Can No Longer be Named. Take for instance the disgusting comments of the former ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles, who questioned the presence on the Iraq war inquiry of the distinguished academics Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman since ‘both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism’. Or the equally disgusting recent Channel Four Dispatches programme, which claimed that a cabal of wealthy Jews had bought up the political and media establishment to serve the interests of Israel. There is now a distinct inverse correlation between bigotry and social class. Maybe the Equalities Commission might fund a study. |
Switzerland draws the line
The Australian, 5 December 2009
The Australian, 5 December 2009
Well, who would have thought the Swiss had it in them? The country that until now was known for nothing more exciting than banking, cheese and cuckoo clocks has secured its place in history by becoming the first in Europe to say to Islam: ‘thus far and no further’.
In a decision so controversial within Switzerland that it may be overturned, 57.5 per cent voted in a referendum backed by the ultra-conservative Swiss People’s Party to ban the construction of any new minarets on mosques.
Along with much of Europe, the reaction within Britain, where the government is pursuing a policy of engagement rather than confrontation to deal with its major problem of Islamic extremism, has been widespread horror.
After all, there are only four minarets in Switzerland, where the 5 per cent of the population who are Muslims are mainly liberally-minded Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Turks and who keep a low profile.
The ban is said to be illiberal, discriminatory and infringing the rights of Muslims to religious worship. Nevertheless, opinion is not speaking with one voice. In Britain as in Switzerland, feminists and some liberals have backed the ban because they are deeply anxious the encroachment of Islam within Europe will destroy women’s rights.
And France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel have both acknowledged that the Swiss vote reflects growing fears within Europe that the continent is being steadily Islamised.
This fissure in European opinion suggests the issue is rather more complex than the superficial consternation might suggest. The stock liberal view is that the state has no business telling a religious community how to construct its houses of prayer. And in general this is absolutely right.
But liberal societies also hold that minorities must not threaten or coerce the majority culture. If that precept is followed, then just like any other minority, Muslims should certainly be welcome to practise their faith. And many do so in just such a way.
The problem is that while many such Muslims sign up to democracy, human rights and the separation of religion and state, the Islamists who dominate the Muslim world are pushing the agenda of Islamising the west. And the minaret is a symbol of that religious aggression.
The suggestion that banning minarets attacks Muslim rights to religious observance could not be farther from the truth. For the minaret has no religious significance in Islam.
To Western eyes, it may seem nothing other than an architectural feature. But historically it has served as a symbol of Islamic political power and aspiration.
It is designed to help impose Islam on the surrounding society. As a powerful symbol of Islamic dominance, it is often constructed to be higher than other religious buildings specifically to send the message both to Muslims and those of other faiths and none that Islam is supreme.
That is why Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan described minarets as the ‘bayonets of the faith’. They are political instruments of religious domination. And that is what the Swiss have understood as a threat to their society.
For liberals, any issue taken up by a party they brand the ‘far Right’ is automatically made toxic by such association. But it is the issue that matters, not who is taking sides over it.
The West is so bamboozled by multiculturalism, the doctrine that all cultures must be held to have equal value and any differentiation is prejudice, that it cannot see the destructive absurdity of this fuss.
For while it is having a fit of the vapours over the so-called threat to religious freedom represented by the minaret ban, it is silent over the fact that in Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia there is no freedom of worship, no churches are allowed to be built at all and apostates from Islam are punished by death.
Islamism is encroaching in Europe and the West because liberals are so paralysed by their own nostrums they cannot defend their own culture — a vulnerability the Islamists are exploiting to the hilt. The Western response to the ban is characterised by fear of the Muslim reaction to it — thus demonstrating to the Islamists once again that terror and intimidation work.
Islamists themselves have given the game away. Both Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Council of Britain have said that mosques and minarets in European cities ‘are manifestations of the proudly indigenous nature of Islam in Europe’.
But Islam is not indigenous in Europe. The last attempt by the Islamic world to conquer Europe was repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
It is possible that the Swiss vote will now give courage to other European countries to stop the march of political Islam — and that future generations will talk of the jihad being repulsed at the gates of Geneva. But then again, Europe’s own death-wish may be just too strong.
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