RUTHFULLY YOURS

Where to start with Baroness Warsi? According to an advance report in the Daily Telegraph of a speech she is making this evening at Leicester University, the Tory party’s co-chairman will say that

Islamophobia has ‘passed the dinner-table test’ and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial.

Oh really? Prejudice is a hostile view which is unsupported by evidence. Clearly there are people who are indeed prejudiced against Muslims, usually on the grounds of their colour or some more general distaste for foreigners of any kind and their religion or customs. But such people certainly have passed no ‘dinner-table test’ of respectability.

No, what Warsi is calling ‘prejudice’ is talk about Muslim extremism or Muslim terrorism. Because look at what she reportedly goes on to say:

The notion that all followers of Islam can be described either as ‘moderate’ or ‘extremist’ can fuel misunderstanding and intolerance

Remarkable. When people fail explicitly to differentiate ‘moderate’ Muslims from ‘extremists’ they are tarred and feathered as ‘Islamophobic’. But now Warsi says that to differentiate in this way is also ‘Islamophobic’.

Of course, that’s because what she means is that any mention of any Muslim being extreme is itself ‘Islamophobic’. Now where have we heard that before? From just about every Muslim community spokesman every time there is an act of Islamic terrorism – two words which it is not permissible in such quarters to utter together.

This tactic, as we all know from innumerable examples, is designed to intimidate people into not acknowledging reality and discussing the most pressing issue of our time – Islamic extremism and the war against the free world being waged in the name of Islam. For sure, Warsi reportedly urges Muslim communities to be clearer about their rejection of those who resort to violent acts. But her attempt somehow to pretend that these acts have nothing to do with the fact that they are committed by Muslims all but vitiates her challenge. For if she herself is denying what these acts actually represent, then urging her community to be ‘clearer about their rejection’ of them becomes meaningless.

She is expected also to say terror offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam. But no-one does so. The suggestion that to condemn some Muslims for violence or extremism is to condemn all Muslims is an absurd canard. People like myself make strenuous efforts always to acknowledge the many Muslims who pose no threat to anyone. Yet that distinction is precisely what Warsi says is evidence of prejudice!

In her speech she is expected to say:

It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of “moderate” Muslims leads; in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: “Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim”…In the school, the kids say: “The family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad”.

But hang on — there is a division between those British Muslims who are happy to live as British citizens under one law for all and thus subscribe totally to British and western values of democracy and who thus pose no threat to anyone at all, and those who want instead to live under sharia and as such are attempting to subvert Britain and the west in order to negate its democratic values and human rights and replace them by an Islamic theocracy.

Yet Warsi is saying this distinction is in itself evidence of bigotry.  So what does that tell us about her own views about sharia in Britain? Does the co-chairman of the Conservative Party support the encroachment of sharia – or does she want it to be resisted on the basis that as a British democrat she supports secular human rights and one law for all? We now are entitled to demand, in the light of her expected remarks, that the co-chairman of the Conservative Party answers that question.

The fact is that, while a very high proportion of Muslims are neither extreme nor violent, the evidence suggests that a terrifying number are – either supporters of Islamic terrorism (some 2000-plus according to the security service) or those who want to live under sharia law in Britain and/or Islamise the country and its institutions (some 40 per cent-plus, according to various polls).

In such circumstances, it’s remarkable how little prejudice there is against Muslims. And it’s the denial that there is any problem with any Muslims or with Islam, the  refusal to halt the process of Islamising Britain and the attempts to censor and stifle discussion that really inflame people to boiling point.

Indeed, there are deeply totalitarian attempts across the west to suppress any association between Muslims and extremism or terrorism and isolate and punish any who make such an association.

Yet now the co-chairman of the Conservative Party has associated her party with such attempts. Indeed, her sinister attack on the media for spreading the ‘prejudice’ of which she complains has to be seen as a direct threat to journalists like myself and others who speak and write about the Islamic jihad against Britain.

Not only is this an attempt to censor debate, but it is an example of the Orwellian discourse by and about the Islamic world in which words have come to mean the precise opposite of what they actually mean. It is the mind-bending formulation which, in the mouths of some Muslims, effectively says to the west: ‘If you say again that Muslims are extreme or violent we’ll kill you’.

It is essential that this kind of verbal bullying and blackmail is faced down. Yet now the co-chairman of the Conservative Party has associated her party with this mind-twisting intimidation.

Over at Coffee House, James Forsyth has disclosed that the text of Warsi’s speech wasn’t cleared with Number Ten. It will be very interesting to see how much of what has been trailed survives and how much will be, ah, finessed. But whatever she actually says later on, the damage has been done. For this is what she was intending to say. And that tells us everything we need to know about Baroness Warsi.

Instead of using her unique platform to  defuse extremism by telling a few home truths to the British Muslim community about its inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation, Warsi has merely poured fuel onto the flames.

Warsi has now outed herself as at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process. Either way, how David Cameron now deals with her will tell us much about how the Prime Minister will deal in turn with the great civilisational crisis that Britain now faces.

Here is the text of the speech that Baroness Warsi actually delivered. Lots of gracious references to Christians and Jews — but also note the disreputable suggestion that certain Old Testament passages provide excuses for stoning people to death for adultery and the like.

The fact is, however, that unlike Islam Judaism has always mediated such passages through rabbinic interpretation, with the result that such activities have not been tolerated. Jews pose no threat to anyone — other than those who try to wipe them out. The sly insinuation that Islam is inherently no more dangerous to life, liberty and human rights than is Judaism is quite wickedly false — and all too telling.

This is also why the equation of ‘Islamophobia’ with Jew-hatred is so odious. That’s why some of those supporting Baroness Warsi today for her stand against anti-Muslim ‘bigotry’  themselves display vicious bigotry towards the Jewish people. Prejudice, as I said below, is based on faleshoods of one kind or another — lies, distortion, absence of evidence. While some people are indeed prejudiced against Muslims, most of what is termed ‘Islamophobia’ arises from entirely rational and legitimate concerns. Jew-hatred does not.

In short, this is all about the difference between truth and lies. And in western society, where the very notion of objective truth has been written out of the script, many can no longer grasp that difference. That is the real crisis for the west — and Baroness Warsi has now shown us, twice, that she is part of the problem, not the solution.