“Islam Endangers Britain”

Ed West is a British columnist who writes regularly for The Telegraph. He is no progressive, and has always seemed sympathetic to our — i.e. the “Islamophobic” — viewpoint.

Thus it came as a surprise to many readers last week when Mr. West wrote a column admonishing people not to blame Islam for the murders in Toulouse. Despite the adverse reactions to his position — including an acerbic riposte from Mark Steyn — the columnist has not backed down from his position to any meaningful extent. He elaborated on the same theme yesterday in a column entitled “How Islam Became a Scapegoat for the Problems of Immigration”.

Readers are advised to read the whole thing to get the gist of Mr. West’s logic. As is often the case, commenters at the The Telegraph are more adept at deconstructing his arguments than any of the professional writers, Mark Steyn included.

In response to Mr. West’s inclusion of a quote from Christopher Caldwell (“Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture”), one commenter made these excellent remarks:

trinitythegreen (Yesterday 03:52 PM)

There is so much in your blog I would like to take issue with, but I don’t have the time or the space. So let’s just take that Caldwell quote.

It is obligatory to say or quote some praise in any article about Islam and that’s what that quote is here for. It’s like saying ‘OK. Islam has its faults but it is a ‘magnificent religion... etc etc.’

It isn’t. Just because it’s huge it isn’t great. It is violent, intolerant, implacable and unforgiving and it is hell bent on taking over the world. Just because not all Muslims wear suicide vests doesn’t make them ‘moderate’ because there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.

There are active Muslims and there are acquiescent Muslims but there are no moderate ones because the Koran is a handbook for applied savagery. And don’t give me the nonsense about how the Bible is just as bloodthirsty as the Koran because the Bible is descriptive and the Koran is prescriptive. The Koran commands that the unbelievers be slain ‘where you find them’, that a child’s education entails teaching them to believe Jews are descended from pigs and Monkeys, and all the good stuff in the Koran has been abrogated by the bad. And none of that is ‘out of context’ because the Koran IS the context.

Islam endangers Britain because it is utterly alien, with values that clash with our Christian values, because it teaches Muslims superiority over the rest of us, it is not simply undemocratic, it is ANTI-democratic, and that being the case is it a surprise that they refuse to integrate? The Muslim considers himself a victim, sees himself better than anyone else, and is steeped in self-pity.

There is a huge amount of crime, some of it almost unspeakably wicked, that is perpetrated by the followers of the prophet that wouldn’t be committed if Blair and his pack of thieves hadn’t thrown open the doors to any Muslim, his wives and his children, mainly to ‘rub our right-wing noses in it.’

Islam is no scapegoat. It is the problem. We see Poles and Indians, Czechs and Estonians, even West Indians and Zimbabweans come here and integrate, quickly or slowly, but they TRY, because their baggage is Christian baggage, not some seventh-century death cult.

Hat tips: JP and Gaia.