Mark Steyn: Blunkett's ban will fan the flames

The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 07/13/04 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

A couple of years back, I mentioned the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and received a flurry of lively e-mails. It was Valentine's Day 1989, you'll recall, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his extraterritorial summary judgment on a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims were marching through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed.

A reader in Bradford recalled asking a West Yorkshire officer on the street that day why the various "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they'd been told to "play it cool". The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to "F--- off, or I'll arrest you."

Isn't that pretty much how it's likely to go once David Blunkett's new protection for Islam is in place? If you're the "moderate" Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, you'll be invited to speak at the "Our Children Our Future" conference sponsored and funded by the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Work and Pensions. But, if you express concern about ol' Mullah Moderate, an Islamic lobby group will file an official complaint about you.

Indeed, after Sir John Stevens, Met commissioner and event co-sponsor, said he didn't want his officers on the same stage as the imam, the Muslim Association of Britain filed an official complaint about his comments. By the time you read this, Sir John might have already called for himself to be investigated by a Royal Commission and found guilty of systemic Islamophobia.

As for "Our Children Our Future", when it comes to children, the imam certainly has the future all mapped out: as he has said, "Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation." Thank heaven for little girls, they blow up in the most delightful way.

If an Anglican Bishop were to commend a career as a suicide bomber to his Sunday school charges, you'd certainly hope to be free to question his judgment on the matter. Not that Anglican bishops ever say such things, of course. They're lost in anguished debate on whether they should just have celibate gay deans in long-term relationships or go for full-blown robustly active gay bishops, and all the thanks they get for their painful efforts to keep up with the times is wholesale public mockery of Christianity up and down the land - i.e. my old friend Alistair Beaton's satirical Iraq-war song, We're Sending You a Cluster Bomb From Jesus.

Meanwhile, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the Western world, but Blunkett wants us to pretend that it's a wee delicate bloom which has to be sheltered from anything unpleasant. The other week, the governor of one of those Nigerian states that now lives under sharia called for the burning of all Christian churches within his jurisdiction. Every Friday, on state TV and radio throughout the Arab world and in mosques somewhat closer to home, the A-list imams call for the killing of Jews and infidels. Well, good luck to them. But, if they can dish it out so enthusiastically, couldn't they learn to take it just an eensy-teensy-weensy bit?

One of the reasons Arab nations are in the state they're in is because of the inability to discuss Islam honestly. I was in Amman for the Jordanian election last year and one of the things you notice is that, although the city does a reasonable impression of a modern dynamic capital and its press is, by the standards of the region, free-ish, its stunted political culture is subordinate to its religious culture. That's why, for example, Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code - which effectively licenses "honour killings" - always gets renewed when it comes up in parliament.

That's another reason the British Government should not be in the business of helping coercive lobby groups further stifle debate. Islam raises political questions that Judaism or Buddhism don't - the suggestion, for example, that Muslim women should be exempt from the requirement to be photographed on national identity cards. Without Blunkett's law, there'll be the odd crusty type from the shires huffing on BBC phone-ins that if Muslim women think it's insulting to be made to remove their hejab for ID cards, they should bloody well have thought about that before moving to Britain.

With Blunkett's law, we'll discuss such questions, if at all, between tightly imposed government constraints explicitly favouring one party to the dispute. I know which one of those options any self-respecting liberal democracy ought to prefer.

In The River War (1899), Winston Churchill's account of the Sudanese campaign, there's a memorable passage which I reproduce here while I'm still able to:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science - the science against which it had vainly struggled - the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

Is that grossly offensive to Muslims? Almost certainly. Is it also a rather shrewd and pertinent analysis by one of Britain's most eminent leaders? I think so. If Blunkett bans the sentiments in that first sentence, the sentiments of the last will prove even more pertinent.

[Drawsing]

Steyn may or may not be of Jewish heritage, but he now attends a baptist church...or at least that is what I read somewhere.

[Undertow]

It was Valentine's Day 1989, you'll recall, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his extraterritorial summary judgment on a British subject

All about the love, those Muslims.

[third try]

Ping - Love that Churchill quote!

[pgkdan]

He's quoting Winston Churchill in both instances.

[knighthawk]

Ping