How Western Liberals Helped Create Radical Islamism

by Emmet Scott (November 2012)

But what a difference a decade makes! Or should I say, two or three decades.

The West as a whole became aware of the new Islamism in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini made his historic flight from Paris to Tehran and began the process of turning a modern semi-industrialised society into a backward theocracy. This may have been the point at which the West took notice, but it needs to be stressed that much of the groundwork had been laid in the previous decade. Yet that groundwork was laid as much in the West as in the Muslim world: For it was in the late 60s and early 70s that the societies of Western Europe and North America finally severed the link with their Judeo-Christian past. This was the decade that saw the dawn of the Permissive Society. Within little more than ten years socialist or liberal administrations in almost every western country had legalized abortion, relaxed censorship, provided for easy divorce, and introduced legislation which essentially gave financial encouragement to single parenthood. This rapidly led to the decline of marriage and sky-rocketing rates of illegitimacy. A spin-off of the latter, not felt so much at the time, was social breakdown on an unparalleled scale.

Yet can even the most doctrinaire leftist deny that modern Britain, with its spiralling crime, family breakdown, vulgarity and celebrity obsession, and general social disintegration, is an easy place to hate and a difficult one to identify with? And surely only the most wilfully blind would fail to see that the militantly secularist world-view promoted on television and the media is profoundly alienating to anyone from a traditional or religious background.

Emmet Scott is the author of Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (New English Review Press, 2012)

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