'Religion of peace' is not a harmless platitude

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To face Islamist terror, we must face the facts about Islam's history

The West�s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have �nothing to do with Islam�. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when �Jihadi John� cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the �Islamic State� and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. And, of course, it is what President Fran�ois Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a �noble lie�, provoked by a fear that we � the general public � are a lynch mob in waiting. �Noble� or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

If politicians are so worried about this secondary �backlash� problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists� actions on our peaceful compatriots and then deal with the primary problem � radical Islam � in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.

Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting �Allah is greatest� has �nothing to do with Islam� is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.

Last week, a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes, dipped a toe into this water. After the Paris attacks, he told the BBC: �The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Muslims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong.� Sadly, he proceeded to utter the second most lazy thing one can say: �These people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.�

Here we land at the centre of the problem � a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not. It is certainly not, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war. There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which � luckily for us � most Muslims live by. But it is by no means only a religion of peace.

I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts. Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernize, reform and de-literalize their faith. And � most importantly � we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.

It is not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a lie. The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number of people � Muslim and non-Muslim � have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years. But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.

The �cartoon wars� � which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 � are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him this week, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, �I wish we had addressed all this nine years ago.�

Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology � perverted or plausible though it may be � you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why � whether in Mumbai or Paris � the Islamists always target the Jews.

Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions. The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to �de-radicalise� extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn�t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.

There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn�t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the �Prophet� and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this �offensive� fact left out.

I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand. Again, that�s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven�t made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don�t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.

We may all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they look set to have serious consequences for us all. We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to �turn the other cheek�, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to �slay� non�believers and chop off their heads?

This is a problem with Islam � one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim. But there isn�t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that although Isis members are terrorists they cannot be described as heretics.

We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.

If this article makes you angry how can you argue that Multiculturalism is not designed to polarize society?

E Pluribus Unum?

This is banned but separation is not

Multiculturalism is the policy of encouraging the separate development of several cultures within a nation state. It is not about having Curry Houses and Balti restaurants, these just make for a varied national culture, it is not about hip hop or the Chinese New Year, multiculturalism is about encouraging people from different backgrounds to develop separately from the rest of society. Multiculturalism is not about diversity, it is a political movement with a clear and deliberate policy of deconstructing national cultures in favour of many separate cultures. It is a sad truth that 90% of those who say they support multiculturalism are actually anti-racist and pro-diversity: they have got no idea that when they say they support "multiculturalism" they are supporting a subversive political and philosophical movement within Western countries. It is probably the support of this ignorant faction that has allowed Multiculturalism, which is another word for "separate development" (in Afrikaans 'apartheid'), to become so embedded in Britain.

Multiculturalism in Britain was a policy implemented by New Labour with the intention of creating a revolutionary tension and change in society. It was a Soviet policy that was released in instruction packs distributed to the various, subversive, university "socialist societies" in the nineteen seventies, at the height of the Cold War. The policy was intended to destabilise the West. (See The Roots of New Labour). It failed in its primary objective because the British are a tolerant culture. It is amazing that British journalists, especially in the television media and BBC, have supported this policy with such zeal although this is probably due to the fact that many of these individuals also have roots in the British left wing movements of the 1970s and that multiculturalism is now seen as an 'answer' to how to accommodate nationalities within political unions such as the EU, Russian Empire and Chinese Empire.

Multiculturalism was more fully characterised in the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who proposed that the polarization of society should be an objective of social policy. Derrida was a malevolent force in modern philosophy whose ideas were largely designed to damage social structures. Curiously governments have permitted the appointment of post Marxist post modernists who support the ideas of Derrida to chairs in sociology and education in western universities so that social policy is now being guided by many people who believe that the objective of social policy should be the destruction of a structured society. Political commentators have not realised that socialism now relies on racial tension, not class war, to exacerbate political difference and create conflict (see Postmodernism-poststructuralism-postmarxism).

Apart from the obvious ill-effects of polarising people into ghettoes and opposing groups Multiculturalism also has some serious adverse effects that result from the fact that almost all non-western cultures have not undergone the changes that result from exposure to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Examples of the adverse effects of multiculturalism are: failure to identify with society at large, socialising solely with your co-religionists so depriving others in the neighbourhood of society, supporting the caste system and caste attitudes so that the poor are kept poor, excluding people from outside your culture from work, girls wearing restrictive clothing in school so that they cannot participate in the full range of lessons, forced marriage, setting up schools to teach Intelligent Design or Koranic ideas on biology so depriving children of a truthful education, supporting foreign powers against your own country so endangering our security etc. All of these adverse effects of multiculturalism and many, many more are evident in British life. The socialist elite argues that separate cultures within the UK should be encouraged to exercise these "freedoms" but each freedom that is encouraged within a separate culture deprives the whole of British society of other freedoms. Those who support multiculturalism generally just deny that these adverse effects will occur but some, such as the effects of restrictive clothing in young girls and the effects of a caste system etc. are simply inevitable because they are in the nature of those "freedoms".

Multicultural policies are apparent in a variety of institutions and exist wherever the intention is to increase the polarization and separation of people rather than to reduce it. The teaching of history in British schools has been heavily infiltrated and oriented towards polarization, for instance British children are taught about slavery and colonisation rather than about emancipation and the explosive development of European states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are taught about the US Civil Rights movement, which has nothing to do with the British but upsets black people, rather than the peaceful decolonisation of much of the British Empire. They are taught about the persecution of the Jews rather than the heroic struggle of the British and the global British cultural zone against the Germans, Russians and their allies that saved the Jews. Some of the legislation that treats groups of people as minorities and victims also polarizes society. The recent extensions to Equalities legislation in the Equalities Act that outlaw political discussion about belief are also designed to polarize society.

The social tension caused by multiculturalism must now be repaired and wholesale immigration into the UK, which is already overcrowded, must be stopped (See The benefits of immigration to the UK economy). Multiculturalism has already caused the outbreaks of terrorism associated with

LONDONISTAN

(many of the 9/11 terrorists stayed in the UK and the 7/7 terrorists were British) and will lead to worse problems as time goes on.

The coalition government has taken a sensible stand against multiculturalism (see State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron). The government should be supported in this stand and the New Labour appointed BBC governors and current affairs staff should be quietly removed to prevent the distorted coverage of the issue. Governments should oppose both institutional multiculturalism and institutional racism because apartheid is both a cause and a symptom of racism.

Many races in one culture is workable and may be desirable but separating the races into cultural ghettos will polarise society and cause perpetual strife, though not a full blown revolution and totalitarian government, as the originators of multiculturalism once hoped. It is time to finally cauterise the damage done to the social fabric of Britain by the Cold War and to move on to realist, liberal politics.

Multiculturalism has recently been adopted by those who are in favour of large scale political unions such as the EU as a desperate approach to the problem of the free movement of labour and how to contain multiple nationalities within a single state. This problem could be resolved by simply unwinding the EU back to the EEC without the destructive effects of multiculturalism.

If we continue with Multiculturalism we will end up with tribalism with all that that entails from corruption to nepotism to gangs, riots and terrorism.

The whole point of a modern nation with one culture was to stop these evils. Nations are the unit of cultural diversity and this must be respected.

See also:

The Roots of New Labour

Labour confirms that multiculturalism is bad

Diversity in the UK

A ranking of social evils

Multiculturalism and truth

Nations are the unit of cultural diversity

The Benefits of Immigration to the UK Economy

Against racism

The aims of Localism

Multiculturalism

H.F.718/MULTICULTURALISM

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Simon Heffer

ENGLAND

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'Religion of peace' is not a harmless platitude

To face Islamist terror, we must face the facts about Islam's history

By Dr Taj Hargey For The Daily Mail

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A REMINDER

HOW

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