Thursday, February 07, 2008

But they sure play a mean pinball


Melanie Phillips hits right on my last post:
melanie_regina.jpg

Last night's Moral Maze, on which I am a panellist, discussed the Home Office guidelines which advise officials not to call Islamists Islamists or Islamic terrorists Islamic terrorists but to use instead euphemisms based on the premise that the jihad against the west is not a war of religion but merely 'violent extremism' and that the jihadis are not jihadis but 'criminals'. So gripped is the Home Office by the belief that speaking the truth to Muslims will 'alienate' them that its Orwellian attempt to manipulate the language descends into pure farce when it suggests that even the word 'Islamophobia' should be avoided since this

can be misunderstood as a slur on Islam and perceived as singling out Muslims (even though it indicates we are positively addressing their concerns).
Alas-- with the sole exception of witness Anthony Browne from Policy Exchange, my own view on all this was drowned out. I found the programme deeply troubling, indeed terrifying, since it revealed so much deep denial of the blindingly obvious among otherwise intelligent people who on this subject appear to be impervious to facts and to reason itself. (There was also a notable performance by a young Muslim who, when I asked him how Islamic terrorism could be un-Islamic when it was endorsed as a religious duty by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, one of the pre-eminent religious authorities in the Islamic world and who has a significant following among British Muslims, declared with a straight face that Qaradawi was in a minority of one).

If people really are incapable of seeing that what we have to fight is religious fanaticism operating through a strategy of mind-bending intimidation and coercion, and instead succumb to that very intimidation and coercion, then we are indeed finished.

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