Under Fire

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The New York Sun

How Tom Wolfe would love it. In a pure “Bonfire of the Vanities” moment, the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham, England, this week canceled the production of its latest play, “Behzti,” (meaning dishonor) written by a young Sikh female playwright. Her co-religionists were enraged by this no-punches-pulled portrayal of sex abuse and murder in one of their temples. As if to remind us what a tale of our times this is, the theater company made a point of not censoring the work. Instead, it rationalized its failure to stand up for artistic freedom on health and safety grounds.


Britons have been getting used to a few Reverend Bacon moments these days. Only last week, Charles Moore, one of the country’s most distinguished journalists and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, found himself on the receiving end of bitter criticisms from some prominent Muslims when he denounced the Blair government’s newly proposed religious hatred law. Mr. Moore had penned a characteristically eye-catching column in The Daily Telegraph, which he edited until last year, where he pointed out that one could go to prison under the proposed legislation for opining that the prophet Muhammad was a pedophile. His source? None other than the sacred “Hadith” of the prophet, a crucial source of guidance for Muslims, which relate that the earthly founder of Islam married a 6-year-old and consummated the marriage when she was 9.


No fair reader of the article could suppose that Mr. Moore believes this himself. Such are his faultless manners and his partiality to almost all forms of organized monotheistic religion that he has not an “Islamophobic” bone in his body, much to the irritation of some of his admirers. This devoutly Catholic family man is, thus, the antithesis of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was an equal opportunity offender toward all faiths and who met a terrible end at the hands of a young Muslim fanatic in Amsterdam in early November. Mr. Moore, rather, employed the conceit of Muhammad as a pedophile to highlight the illiberality and unworkability of the proposed religious hatred law. Yet the Muslim Association of Britain, which enjoys close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, nonetheless sternly advised The Daily Telegraph to remember the lessons of the Salman Rushdie affair.


The most frequent response that Mr. Moore has received from his compatriots in the days since this chilling analogy was drawn has been “you’d better change your address” or just “be careful.” As he points out, this may or may not be an accurate reading of the security threat to his person. But it does say something about the way in which much of the Anglo-Saxon majority perceive the risks of candid exchanges with wide swathes of the country’s Muslim minority, even now.


Few experts think that the proposed religious hatred law will secure many prosecutions: it will be hard to prove a level of hatred sufficient to result in violent acts. That, however, is not the point. The real impact of the law, which has received its greatest impetus from Muslim community groups seeking to acquire the same levels of protection afforded to Jews under successive race relations acts, is to copperfasten an official public climate of disapprobation, which cuts off certain avenues of discussion: if passed, it will have a “chilling effect” rather than create lots of free speech martyrs in search of a hundred virgins in heaven or whatever. It is, of course, a game that more than one can play. Indeed, this new gold standard of “don’t diss my culture” does much to explain why Sikhs were emboldened to behave as they did in Birmingham.


One prominent British figure told me – on condition of anonymity, of course – that the country is well past the “Bonfire of the Vanities” stage already. By this, he meant that we are no longer dealing with municipal loudmouths looking to chisel a bit of political advantage in an urban racial spoils system, Instead, he pointed out, something much bigger is happening. The appropriate literary allusion, my interlocutor insisted, was that of Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints.”


Published in 1973, this controversial novel envisioned a flotilla of millions of migrants making its way from the Ganges to Provence. A weak-willed Parisian political class and armed forces – terrified by a militantly multiculturalist intelligentsia that believe that the guilty racist West must engage in a massive act of self-sacrificial expiation toward the “wretched of the earth” – vacillates about what to do. But it finally admits the “invasion force” and the old France is thus destroyed forever by migrants who are rather less sentimental about their new “hosts” than their new hosts are about them.


The distinguished Briton believes that something akin to this is already happening in incremental form in his own country. Major cities such as Bradford and Leicester are close to boasting Muslim majorities; Birmingham may well have one, too, in 15 to 20 years. In many urban areas, Christianity – particularly of the kind professed by mainstream Protestant denominations – is rapidly becoming a folk memory as churches are turned into mosques for the country’s fastest growing religion. Indeed, certain eminent Islamic thinkers for some time have been talking about creating a “sacred space” where Muslims can develop a “separate but equal society” with their own shops and publicly funded schools. Some trenchant observers such as Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity contend that the Islamists eventually hope to declare Shariah law for all inhabitants in such zones.


The oddity is that although the views of many Islamists on such questions as the rights of women and gays would otherwise be dismissed by many British and European leftists as misogynistic or homophobic, they are nonetheless given something of a free pass by many continental progressives (with Holland as the most notable electoral exception to this pattern). That is because the “white” left and the Islamists have one thing in common: overweening loathing of America and Israel. Together, they may eventually succeed in achieving what the Soviets and the euro-communists and peace movements of the 1970s and 1980s never managed – namely the political decoupling of the United States from the Continent.


The New York Sun

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