The Arab world on the brink...but of what?
Well, what a turn-up for the books. Those same liberal circles which flayed the neo-cons alive for pursuing the apparently ludicrous idea that democracy could ever come to the Arab world are now hailing the current upheavals in that same Arab world as .. a democratic awakening.
Maybe it will be so. For sure some at least of the elements involved want true freedom and human rights. But that particular argument against the neo-cons was not wrong (and before anyone flies to their keyboard, let me clarify that what I support, and have always supported, is the principal belief that drove neo-con thinking -- not that democracy in such countries was necessarily achievable, and certainly not overnight, but that there is a moral duty to defeat the jihad in order to defend the west. And that was always a very different matter).
Anyway, back to the crisis at hand. There is no doubt that, in large measure because of the mainly subterranean debate that has been taking place within the Arab and Muslim world as a result of events on and since 9/11, there are powerful yearnings there for democracy and human rights and for an end to the tyranny and oppression under which the inhabitants of such places generally live.
The unhappy fact is, however, that in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere in the Arab world where ferment is growing against the tyranny of their regimes, the crucial infrastructure of the rule of law, independent judges and police, free press and so on that are the necessary precondition of democracy just don’t exist.
As a result, when tyrants there fall the outcome is generally not the emergence of a free society but a tyranny far worse even than the one that has fallen – an Islamic theocracy. That’s precisely what happened, let us not forget, in Iran in 1979, when the fall of the Shah was greeted with acclaim by the Iranian people who wanted an end to his police state – but what they got instead was the Ayatollah Khomeini and the beginning of decades of Islamist oppression and tyranny far worse than under the Shah.
The unrest in Tunisia has apparently been driven by liberal elements. But the likely outcome is that the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Islamists who want to overturn all secular Islamic rulers and in turn conquer the rest of the world for Islam might now move into this vacuum. Accordingly, the imminent return to Tunisia of the important Muslim Brother Rannid Ghannouchi, who has announced his decision to go back after more than two decades in Londonistan where he comfortably resided having been convicted in Tunisia of bombing an airport – and as Gabriel Scheinmann notes, who has of course been feted as a moderate by the New York Times and other dhimmi dummies – suggests that hailing the brave new democratic dawn in Tunisia may be distinctly premature.
As this mood of revolt snowballs, there has been unrest too in Yemen and Jordan. But the really terrifying prospect is Egypt, after six days of violent clashes in which untold scores of people have reportedly died. Egypt is the home of the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite its ‘cold peace’ with Israel, it is a fulcrum of Nazi-style Jew-hatred which it exports to the Arab and Muslim world. And it is strategically crucial for the west because of the trade and shipping routes it controls in the Suez Canal; it is particularly significant also because of its size and military power.
Through the tyrannical measures which have caused him to become so hated, Mubarak has suppressed the Muslim Brothers – but only just. The nightmare has always been what will happen when Mubarak departs the stage – a development that Obama actually appears to be trying to accelerate, having belatedly discovered the attractions of promoting democracy in the Arab world at the very moment that the Islamists are poised to take control. This is but the latest astoundingly inept or malign action by Obama against the interests of America and the west. An Islamist Egypt would alter the dynamics of the entire region – Jordan would surely not be far behind -- and pose an urgent and acute threat to the western world. That nightmare, it would seem, now might be upon us.
Daily Mail, 31 January 2011
One week ago, I suggested on this page that some gay people were in danger of turning into the new McCarthyites by demonising and attempting to silence all who disagreed with the gay rights agenda.
Given the point I was making, it followed that I was expecting a reaction which would amply bear out the truth of what I had written. The response, however, exceeded even my expectations.
For during the past seven days, I have been subjected to an extraordinarily vicious outpouring of hate and incitement to violence, via email, the internet and in the mainstream media, and much worse besides.
In my article, I expressed concern that attempting to bar a Christian GP from the government’s advisory council on drugs because of his views on homosexuality, bombarding the school curriculum with irrelevant gay references, and prosecuting Christian hoteliers for refusing to accommodate gay men in the same bedroom were examples of a frightening intolerance.
The response to this warning against an attempt by the gay lobby to silence dissent? An eruption of tweets on Twitter suggesting that I should be killed. Yes, really.
Apologies if the hideous and obscene language shocks some readers, but examples of such tweets included: ‘Someone just kill Melanie Phillips please’; ‘your homo phobic rant equals that which comes out of a dog’s rectum. Kill yourself you ****’; and ‘throw her in the Thames’.
And emails to me included such epithets as ‘vile, poisonous, horrible old woman’, and ‘people like you should be silenced as you insight (sic) bigotry and fear. Go and suck a tail pipe, get cancer, GET RAN OVER BY A TRAIN. I hope your ******* house burns down’.
All this because, having acknowledged the legitimacy of trying to protect gay people from true prejudice and discrimination, I suggested that Christians should not face discrimination againsttheir beliefs!
If the gay lobby had set about trying to prove my point, it could hardly have done a better job. Indeed, the total inability of those who subjected me to such abuse to realise that they are, in fact, spewing out the very hatred, intolerance and incitement to violence of which they are accusing others would be hilarious were it not so terrifying.
For this is nothing less than a totalitarian mindset which turns truth, justice and rationality inside out. In the Independent, gay columnist Johann Hari furiously demanded why I thought it was ‘wrong to protect gay children’ from bullying. Eh? What on earth was he talking about?
What I actually wrote about was the grossly inappropriate flooding of school subjects such as maths or science with irrelevant gay references. Yet he accused me, in effect, not only of being indifferent to the bullying of gay children but of fomenting attitudes which cause them to be bullied.
But there is nothing to suggest that anything I have ever written has had anything to do with the victimisation of a gay child — let alone other supposed crimes Hari hurled my way (if he’d had a kitchen sink to hand, doubtless he’d have hurled that, too).
If anything incites hatred, this vicious attack is surely it — a graphic advertisement of the totalitarianism of which I was warning. For such libellous and Orwellian distortions help create the witch-hunt atmosphere (indeed, in several messages I was actually called a ‘witch’) that leads directly to the open incitement to violence and murder on such appalling display during the past week.
The key distinction I have always made is between gay people — against whom I have no harsh feelings — and the gay political agenda. (And I seem to recall that once upon a time Hari himself paid tribute to me for making just such a distinction.)
I am firmly against all bullying and prejudice. It has always seemed to me quite wrong that people should become targets of prejudice or discrimination on account of their private sexual behaviour.
After all, it is the essence of a liberal society that people can behave as they wish in private — so long as others are not hurt by it.
The key word, however, is ‘private’. And the problem with the gay agenda, it has always seemed to me, is that it has sought instead to commandeer the public sphere by dictating a profound change in the moral norms of our society — indeed, to destroy the very idea of moral norms at all.
It is this view that has produced the foaming hysteria. ‘How dare you say we are trying to destroy the idea that hetero sexuality is normal — of course, gays are just as normal,’ goes the cry.
But, of course, once again they are merely making my point for me. What they also fail to acknowledge is that I have exactly the same concern about other aspects of ‘victim culture’, such as family lifestyle choices, multiculturalism or militant feminism.
Whether it is dealing with lone parents, women or gays, ‘victim culture’ holds that all these groups are entitled to exactly the same outcomes in life — children, promotion, equal pay or marriage benefits — as anyone else, regardless of the fact that their circumstances may be very different.
Because this thinking starts from the premise that such groups are the victims of those with power — whether these are men or heterosexuals — their members are therefore deemed to do no wrong, while the so-called ‘victimisers’ can do no right.
By definition, therefore, victim culture and the ‘rights agenda’ that fuels it turns truth and lies, victim and aggressor, fairness and injustice upside down.
To oppose the gay rights agenda no more means that one is anti-gay than to oppose multicuturalism or extreme feminism means one is anti-black or anti-woman.
What really alarms me, and the reason why I bang on about the dangers of these different rights agendas, is that they are eroding the bedrock values that underpin our free, tolerant and liberal society.
By overturning moral norms and hijacking language in this way, they are hollowing out our culture. More frightening still, as has been so graphically demonstrated by the reaction to my article, they are also rendering people increasingly incapable of rational thought.
And that makes our society intensely vulnerable to the radical Islamists whose inroads, for very similar reasons, we are also not allowed to discuss without being tarred and feathered as ‘Islamophobes’.
But here’s the really awful irony in all this. Gay people are dreadfully persecuted under fundamentalist Islam, which dictates that they should be killed.
Arguably more than any other British journalist, I have repeatedly warned against the lethal threat that radical Islam poses to the life and liberty of gay people, among many others.
The tragic fact is that, through their undermining of the moral codes of Western society, the gay lobby is making it more likely that this society will not have the wherewithal to defend itself against Islamisation — and if that becomes the case, the likes of Hari and the Twitter mob would finally understand what true anti-gay bigotry looks like.
Gratifyingly, I also received in the past week many messages of support. Clearly, there remain millions of tolerant folk who have not severed their links with reality — and who are sickened by having their fair-mindedness thrown in their own faces as ‘bigotry’.
Well, I have news for the bullies of the victim culture. Their attempts to silence those who defend truth, justice and decency will not succeed.
The more they attempt to do so, the more they open everyone else’s eyes to what they actually are — the West’s new cultural totalitarians.
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