Islam Rides the Snake
by David Solway (May 2023)
The Princess Burns the Efrite to Death, Edmund Dulac, 1914
In a BBC interview on January 4, 2008, the senior prelate of the Church of England at the time, Rowan Williams, argued in favor of recognizing certain aspects of Sharia law. Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Justin Welby, current leader of the Anglican Communion with its see in Canterbury, essentially reiterates the sentiment. Indeed, the continuing rise of Sharia courts in Britain, part of an effort to turn various British cities into Islamic states as promoted by the Islamic Emirates Project, is gathering momentum.
According to Soeren Kern, a senior analyst of the Groupo de Estudios Estratégicos in Madrid, the UK is riddled with “Sharia law enforcement zones,” with as many as 85 Sharia courts, constituting a parallel legal system. Kern cited Bangladeshi-born Lutfur Rahman, former and current mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, who is “dedicated to changing the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam’.” Rahman’s dictate is gaining pragmatic strength. This state of affairs is, for the most part, winked at by the authorities. The U.K. is no longer OK. True to form, Oxford’s Magdalen College has replaced its annual St. George’s Day banquet for April 23, 2023 with a formal dinner celebrating Eid, the Islamic holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
It sometimes looks as if Sweden might predecease the U.K. as a viable, sovereign Western democracy hurtling into the Islamic abyss. Pat Condell delivered a memorable and chilling account of the advanced state of the country’s Islamic plummet, which should be consulted by anyone who still believes that coddling the Islamic demographic is a sign of enlightened thinking, social justice and the benefits of unmonitored diversity. Hopefully, this situation may be changing with the recent election of a Center-Right coalition headed by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who has vowed “to set the country on a new course on immigration.”
We see the love affair with Islam and multiculturalism being pursued in Denmark, Austria, and Holland, where prominent individuals have been prosecuted on the grounds of “hate speech” for warning against the Islamic aim to subvert the liberal traditions of these countries. Norway is rapidly becoming a kind of earthly Jannah (Arabic for the heavenly garden, or Paradise) for Muslim immigrants. In other countries, parties seeking votes in the many Muslim enclaves that checker the social and political landscape will continue to “make nice.”
What is occurring in Europe is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Events there will soon be appearing in a North American theatre near you and, indeed, they already have. Given the lobbying and propaganda efforts by radical Muslim organizations like CAIR, ISNA and the NCCM, the spread of Muslim influence on university campuses, and the recognition of the Muslim Brotherhood as a partner in dialogue, the die appears to have been cast. The media for its part has gone soft on the menace and is busy promoting the Muslim agenda, rarely identifying jihadists as Muslims but as “lone gunmen,” of “Asian origin,” or as psychologically troubled individuals. As the expression has it, terrorists tend to “get away with murder.”
The Islamic fact is now solidly entrenched and continues to bore ever more deeply into the body politic, with the collusion of the Democrat and Liberal administrations in the U.S. and Canada, a significant portion of the judiciary, the press, and the vociferous left-wing intelligentsia. The European experience is being imported wholesale into our countries. Pointing this out is quickly denounced as Islamophobia. The truth is that official elements have succumbed to an epidemic of Islamophilia.
Corresponding to this love-in with Islam—schmoozing with terrorists, to quote Aaron Klein—we note the demonization of Israel in the mainstream media, the court of public opinion, the European Union, the United Nations, the majority of NGOs and the current administrations in America and Canada. This is a sign not only of collective bad faith, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context.
Even a cursory reading of the major Islamic texts and a modest familiarity with the historic predations of Islam would be sufficient to clarify the issue. We might say that the long-standing movement to promote Islam as a social good is proto-Woke, defined as the effort to pass off palpable absurdities and social dislocations as a forward-looking cultural development. As noted, the U.S. is not exempt. As the Muslim campaign accelerates, Dearborn will not be confined to Michigan.
This mammoth aberration goes hand in hand, in almost every European country and “progressivist” North America, with the privileging of the falsely irredentist Palestinian “narrative” that a mere modicum of applied research would categorically expose as a fiction. The isolation of Israel as an “apartheid state” is another preposterous distortion. Apartheid is in fact an institutional practice justified in Islamic scripture, as exemplified by the concept of dhimmitude rooted in surah 9:29 of the Koran which stipulates “submission” of non-Muslims “until … they feel themselves subdued.”
What we are really witnessing in Europe, the U.S., and its outriders in Canada and Australia—the synoptic West—is the doleful spectacle of a civilization in denial, a myopic civilization that in most of its cultural and political centers will not recognize it is under attack, trapped in a defective simulacrum of what is “out there.” It seems haplessly incapable of mounting meaningful resistance, let alone launching a counter-attack against an apocalyptically-inspired adversary—what Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism describes as the unwillingness to understand that “a liberal society must be, when challenged, a warlike society; or it will not endure.” Similarly, Michael Ignatieff writes in The Lesser Evil that “liberal societies cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us.”
The inability to take the measure of a committed and imperial adversary, intoxicated with a sense of its own triumphal inevitability, is a terminal decision. The turn against reason and the civilizing imperative is merely another sign, regrettably one of many, of the West’s complicity in its own demise.
Table of Contents
David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast