“He’s not a prophet. He’s a bad boy!”
From The Life of Brian
THE ARAB SPRING has taken a nasty turn. One which many commentators believed it would, once the dictator’s departed the stage. Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy, all heralded the Spring as the midwife of democracy throughout the Arab world. In the case of Libya they even leant a hand with its birth by destroying from the air, all off Gaddafi’s heavy weaponry.
Today, throughout the Arab world, protesters are laying siege to American embassies, after a video was posted on the internet insulting the prophet Mohammed. It started in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where the American ambassador and three others were killed after an angry mob laid siege to America’s embassy.
Now the protests have spread to Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Nigeria, and the Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have called for a million people to protest peacefully against this depiction of the Prophet after Friday prayers.
The Muslim Brotherhood have never been stronger and must now believe their time has come. The Brotherhood was kept on a very short leash by Mubarak, Hussein and Gaddafi, before they were themselves driven from power; encouraged by the West. It is clear, especially in Egypt, that the Brotherhood have become the main beneficiaries of the Arab Spring and their influence throughout the Arab world and beyond is taking root.
As I have written in other blogs, the Muslim world has never been cleansed of its medievalism. Unlike Christianity in the West, the Muslim world never enjoyed a Renaissance; was never subjected to a Reformation, or the liberating oxygen of an Age of Enlightenment. Which is why today a little known video of little artistic merit and grossly insulting to the Muslim faith, has brought about such a tide of anger.
If such a video of this type was made attacking Christ, it would no doubt anger the few remaining practising Christians in the UK. But our secularist society would have shrugged it off and we would all have gone about daily our lives, thinking the photos of Kate exposing her breasts while relaxing on holiday, and being published by the Frogs, of a far greater significance.
The quote at the head of this piece was from the Python film, The Life of Brian (1979), and the film caused much outrage at the time of its release; but the indignation and fury did not result in the deaths of Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, John Cleese, and Michael Palin; or even our ambassador to the Sea of Rome.
Ever since The Life of Brian, the Christian Church has been an easy target for humorists - without any kind of criticism, even from the Anglican Church. I am sure there is as much humour to be made at the expense of Islam as there is with Christianity. But of course, it takes courage to tackle Islam in the way the Python team chose to do with Christianity.
IT IS A FRIGHTENING PROSPECT that the Western democracies now face, regarding the Muslim world. Dictators, who understood their societies far better than the West’s modern political classes ever did: and who served our interests well by keeping Islamic fundamentalism at bay through their, at times, brutal treatment, are no doubt looking either down or up at us in the West, and experiencing a kind of ephemeral shardenfroida before taking up their final residency in whatever part of the ‘other side’ they find themselves competing for.
As with our domestic politics, our leaders have displayed their total naivety when tackling foreign affairs; and the Arab Spring in particular. Domestically, they allowed into the UK over two million Muslims to seek residency; while believing that the Muslim world would jump at the chance to become democratic.
But it was not only UK politicians, but politicians throughout the whole of Europe whose idealism replaced the sound rational judgement that they believed themselves to have had. So we, on the continent of Europe, are hosts to over 15 million Muslims, at a time when Islamism is on the march against the West and its Christian values …although they may have concluded (as many in the West have done) that Christianity and its Western leaders, lack any kind of spinal fortitude to oppose them.
Our leaders in the West are willing to bend over backwards to appease the Muslim world, and would no doubt like to see the maker of this video handed over to Muslim mobs for summary execution, without trial. It would calm down the situation until a comedian at some working men’s club in Hull cracks the wrong kind of joke which is published via a mobile phone onto the internet; and sets off another round of Islamist protest.
It is a common belief, summed up in a simple expression that has transgressed the decades since his death, that, “Enoch was right”.
The kind of belief that was, once shared within range of a microphone, could end a political, or celebrity career; now takes on a more serious and reflective purpose. Enoch was indeed right. He, unlike the Westminster corralled political classes and media today, saw what could happen when cultures mixed without the continued dominance of the host culture over all others; to which alien cultures had to comply if they wished to remain British citizens. Powel was no racist, but a strident opponent of communalism, which while in India, he found so destructive.
For communalism, read multiculturalism. When India gained its independence from Britain, its Muslim population demanded its own independent state and it cost over 100,000 lives to bring about. Enoch better understood the dangers of multiculturalism than his accusers (filled with idealism) ever did.
TODAY’S POLITICAL LEADERS have been moulded their whole lives by political correctness and a belief in multiculturalism; which, in terms of allowing millions of Muslims to seek and take up residency in this country or the European continent, will bring about a sizable fifth column once our politicians begin to smell the coffee and realize the true significance of the Arab Spring.
Today our politicians, whether in Europe or America, still seek to appease this medieval religion, whose many semi-illiterate followers, have been exposed to nothing more than the Koran, but can nevertheless frighten the West’s politicians into an apology for an act regarding freedom of speech, which they are supposed to believe in as a corner stone of democracy.
The West must show to the ever growing Islamist Arab world, as it once did the communist one; its preparedness to act to defend Western democracy. This new, and soon to be a more radical and anti-western variant of Islam will, if the West continues its appeasement of it, become convinced that a Western Caliphate is no longer a dream
No comments:
Post a Comment