Mark Steyn writes that the political correctness of liberal societies such as England is harming moderate Muslims by virtually forcing politicians and police to look the other way at very illiberal acts:
Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together”, he’s talking drivel.
Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn’t do any harm to cheer ’em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?
Why are we surprised that “Muslim moderates” rarely speak out against the evil committed by their co-religionists when the likes of Mr Paddick keep assuring us there’s no problem? It requires great courage to be a dissenting Muslim in communities dominated by heavy-handed imams and lobby groups that function effectively as thought-police.
Yet all you hear from Mr Paddick is: “Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here.” This is the same approach, incidentally, that the authorities took in their long refusal to investigate seriously the 120 or so “honour killings” among British Muslims.
Just as the police did poor Muslim girls no favours by their excessive cultural sensitivity, so they’re now doing the broader Muslim community no favours. The Blair-Paddick strategy only provides a slathering of mindless multiculti fudge topping over the many layers of constraint that prevent Islam beginning an honest conversation with itself.
Unlike Malaya or the Mau-Mau or the IRA, this is a global counter-terrorism operation across widely differing terrain, geographical and psychological. We need to be able to kill, constrain, coerce or coax as appropriate.
Kill terrorists when the opportunity presents itself, as 1,200 “insurgents” were said to have been killed in one recent engagement on the Syria/Iraq border the other day. Constrain the ideology behind Thursday’s bombing by outlawing Saudi funding of British mosques and other institutions. Coerce our more laggardly allies like General Musharraf into shutting down his section of the Saudi-Pakistani-Londonistan Wahhabist pipeline.
But the coaxing is what counts – wooing moderate Muslims into reclaiming their religion. We can take steps to prevent Islamic terrorists killing us, most of the time. But Islamic terrorists will only stop trying to kill us when their culture reviles them rather than celebrates them.
As Steyn writes, it’s an enormous task, and one that so many in the West seem wholly unwilling to assist in.
David Frum has some related thoughts. Click here, and be sure to read the post immediately below it.
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