RUTHFULLY YOURS

A good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un is an adage mostly applied to boxing. And it is mostly true. Correspondingly, family units and small communities are vulnerable to raiding bands of pillagers. Cities are vulnerable to sieges by armed forces. Weaker nations are vulnerable to stronger ones.

This all seems terribly dated, does it not? Vikings sacking British monasteries, Muslim armies at the walls of Constantinople, storm troopers sweeping over the Maginot Line, are all relics of past times?

In fact, the difference between then and now is not the advent of a new moral age. Bad guys are as numerous as ever. If you for a moment doubt that, those in Israel don’t. If you think Israel is a special case think of the heady aspirations of North Korea and Iran, not to mention the “junior varsity” upstarts. And, without wishing to add to Russian fear-mongering, Ukraine and the Baltic states have reason to be anxious.

The difference between then and now is purely logistical. Enemies have to cross borders and sometimes open seas. Standing against them are the good guys; disciplined defence forces armed with advanced weaponry, allied across enlightened Western countries. They are ‘the thin red line’ between us and pillage, rape, massacre and enslavement. We can sleep peacefully in our beds.

Hold on, enemies within don’t have to breach borders or engage the thin red line. They are an entirely different kettle of fish. What do you do if the bad guys are on the inside?

The advice that British police give citizens is to “run and hide” from terrorists. Good advice when you’re not armed and armed police at the very (amazing) best will take eight minutes to turn up and kill the assassins, as in the London attack on  June 3. Be aware, they should add as part of their advice, “knife, gun, bomb and truck wielding assassins might take only seconds to kill you.”

Why we are concerned but not quaking? Yes, as I said, we have the police and army if needed, but also we have each other. We can rely upon each other. Not to defend us but to be like us. Hardly anyone in our street is a criminal or assassin. Moreover, to the extent criminals and assassins are among us they are not glued together as a cohesive force. Suppose they were? Suppose that the 23,000 known Islamic extremists in the UK and their support networks, their fellow travellers, and fair-weather brothers and sisters, were glued together by a common ideology and purpose?

Be afraid. They are glued together by an extremely widespread perverted and extremist view of their ‘noble faith’. Mind you, how tens upon tens of thousands of Islamic scholars and hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslim folk could get it all so wrong I must leave to your vivid imagination. It is beyond sense that this for example – “fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness” (9:123) – could be a given any kind of threatening interpretation. And those dastardly conservatives dispute the validity of Islamophobia. Really!

But back to the followers of ‘perverted Islam’. Take a typical British or Australian suburban street. No one is armed; no one is trained. One home-grown Islamist fighter with an AK-47 could subdue the whole street. How many it would need to control most large population centres? I don’t know, but far fewer than in the US, pound for pound, where lots of people are armed. But even there, the vast majority of people, left unprotected by the police, would be overwhelmed by relatively few trained insurgents.

And exactly how do you retake a suburban area populated by sick people, disabled people, old people, middle-aged people, young people, children, infants, babies and pregnant women, controlled by, say, tens of heavily armed fighters ready to kill hostages and die for their cause? How likely is this ever to happen? However unlikely it might be best not to take a chance.

I would suggest that it is time to nip the whole god-awful catastrophe in the bud before it goes any further. But this is what I don’t want except as temporary measures. I don’t want strip searches before attending any public events. I don’t want steel and concrete barriers built across every bridge and thoroughfare to prevent mad Muslims from mowing down pedestrians. I don’t want thousands of agents monitoring tens of thousands of Muslim maniacs to prevent them killing innocent people attending a pop concert. I don’t want armed patrols on street corners.

I want the problem solved in a way which preserves our way of life. How, you might ask?. Well I didn’t buy a dog so that I could bark at intruders.

Governments are elected and paid to keep us safe from harm inflicted by alien forces from without and within; and without turning us into inhabitants of permanently armed camps. I have some suggestions which are not meant to be exhaustive. Banning all further Muslim immigration would be a good start. And no, this is not religious intolerance. It is called self-preservation.

Extremists in the West who can be deported should be deported tout de suite. Extremist mosques should be closed down and all government funding and support of Islamic centres of learning, including schools, should be cut off. Social conventions, like mixed bathing at public swimming pools should be upheld by force of law. Sporting venues aren’t churches and shouldn’t be allowed to comport themselves as such by incorporating prayer rooms. I won’t go on. I haven’t been elected to government.

We have to get something straight before we are buried. Islam is a supremacist ideology wrapped in sharia law wrapped in a political agenda and all cloaked by the appearance of a (like any other, we are told) religion. This ‘religion’ ain’t like any other. Its adherents shouldn’t be allowed to escape into fantasy land by claiming to be peaceful and moderate without explaining how this is consistent with their scripture. And to be clear to dim-witted Islamic apologists, there is no religion without its scripture.

‘I am a Muslim but reject central tenets of my scripture, the very words of Allah and Mohammed, because I’m moderate’, is not a tenable position. It is a ludicrous position. The only viable step for a Muslim of moderate and peaceful disposition is to leave their faith like Hirsi Ali; not to go on pretending you’re a Muslim like Zuhdi Jasser and other so-called reformists.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics