I’ve been blogging for 13 years, and my first post was about Islam in Europe :
I believed then that danger of Islam was exaggerated, by people who I normally agreed with such as Eric Raymond
I’ve changed my view on many things since then, from being a by-the-book Libertarian to something I had to find a new name for.
Only one thing that I wrote back then is definitely now not true:
The Muslim immigrants to Britain are integrating slowly into British culture.
This 2005 piece by me comes off looking especially bad now
This does not mean that Islam is dying out, just that, like Christianity, it is evolving into a form that makes less conflict with the practicalities of living in a developed society. I expect that in a hundred years Moslems will continue to recite the Koran and observe Ramadan, but what I am calling the “primitive” elements — intolerance of Western practices of commerce, sexual behaviour, freedom of expression, whatever — will have died out.
Among Moslems in the West, as well as the more Westernised Moslem countries like Turkey, this is already the case for the majority. And this is why the “primitives” are angry.
File that under “overtaken by events.” I did say then that it was more important for the West to be seen to win in Iraq than to achieve anything concrete, so maybe if that had been done then things would look different today. Perhaps what I predicted was at that time still possible, but whether I was wrong about that or not, the reality today is utterly different. It is moderate Islam that is declining, globally, not Islamism.
“Integration” now going backwards. Possibly that had already begun in 2004 and I hadn’t noticed, but I suspect it is something new.
Many of my online homies say that “moderate Islam” is a myth or mirage — that the history of Islam shows that it is inherently and inevitably violent and expansionist. Pitched against liberals who say that Christianity has an equally violent and aggressive history, they certainly have the better of their argument. But while the leftists are ignoring everything before the 1800s, the rightists are ignoring everything since. There was very little Islamist violence in the 20th Century. The Partition of India was a free-for-all. The major Islamic states, Egypt and Turkey, were secular socialist-nationalist in character.
Contrary to my previous assertions, the situation is getting worse not better, but it is still noticeable that Islamist terrorists in Britain are not in their national origins representative of Britain’s Muslim population. The ringleader of the 2005 train bombers was from a typical British-Pakistani background, but most of the others have come from Africa or the Middle East. Even Butt seems atypical since he came to the country as a refugee — most British Pakistanis did not come as refugees, but as Commonwealth migrants back in the 70s and families thereafter. Britain has been granting asylum to very few Pakistanis — 77 in the last quarter [pdf] .
Pakistani immigration was encouraged for economic reasons up until 1971, and since then it has been family-based. However, their numbers have increased tenfold over those 45 years, from 120,000 to 1.2 million. That’s plausible as bringing in existing family members plus marrying more and having two generations of children, but it’s towards the high end of what you would estimate. If there’s another significant contributor to that tenfold expansion I don’t know what it is.
Striking as those numbers are, my point is that those “normal British Pakistanis” are not the Islamic terrorists in Britain. They really are the “moderate Muslims” that are alleged not to exist (The child prostitution gangs such as the Rotherham one, on the other hand, are exactly from that typical background, one reason why I see that as a totally separate issue). My biggest worry is that by adding significant numbers of African and Middle Eastern jihadis into the mix, the whole British Pakistani culture could be shifted. The Muslim population of Britain doubled between 2005 and 2015 (per Ed West) and the non-Pakistani Muslim population was probably multipled several times. This was the effect of the “rubbing noses in diversity” — the Labour government changing the demographics of the country not even out of strategy but out of vulgar spite. That was a development I failed to imagine.
Waiting for Islam to become more moderate is no longer on the table. Forcing Islam to become more moderate is, I believe, thoroughly achievable with sensible policies. The fundamental is for law and society to be at least as tough on expression of tribalism from Muslims as they are on expression of tribalism from natives. This is currently very far from the case. I try to stay out of day-to-day politics, so when I retweet other right-wingers, it’s usually because they’re highlighting this disparity:
The other side of that is this story: In Germany, Syrians find mosques too conservative
Mosques in Western countries are now more extremist than those elsewhere in the world. This is a straightforward holiness spiral — within a community, you can gain status by professing stronger allegiance to that community’s symbols than anyone else does. In a functioning community, this tendency is moderated by the practical demands of society. But, even the large, stable, Pakistani communities in Britain are not truly functional — they are subsidised and supported by the wider society.
The wider society — the liberal West — is deeply opposed to putting any restraint whatsoever on the puritanism growing within the community. They are like the naive conservationists of the past who believed that by keeping out all predators they were allowing an ecosystem to flourish naturally, when in fact they were unbalancing it towards a destructive tipping point. It is natural and universal for religious extremism to come into conflict with its neigbours and be pushed back by them.
Basically, what I’m saying is that Tommy Robinson is a natural predator, and by suppressing him, liberal society is producing a Trophic Cascade in the extremist ecosystem.
It’s not only in a minority community that this mechanism should happen. I asked on Twitter, is there any Islamic country where the mosques are not subject to state supervision of doctrine? In majority Islamic communities, the pushback in favour of practicality comes from the state. Again, a liberal Western state disclaims any responsibility for pushing back on Islam, though it is a job that I understand most Islamic states consider necessary.
Update: It should go without saying that continuing to increase the Muslim population is also destabilising. As well as increasing the imbalance, in itself it is a sign of weakness which makes extremism more attractive and moderation less attractive. I am not saying any more than that it is not (yet) necessary to undertake more drastic measures such as mass deportations of long-standing residents. Since the continued importation of Muslims is the same political process as the active protection of extremism from its natural opposition, ending one means also ending the other.
We don't need these people, anyway. Even if they were mild-mannered, they would ultimately destroy our culture if enough were imported. If you put enough Germans in Japan to outnumber the Japanese, it will no longer be Japan; Germans will run the government, the official language will become German, German-style laws will be passed regardless of what the locals think of them, etc.
It's an invasion one way or another. Simply forcing Islam to become more moderate is not an option if you want to survive. You will be replaced — unless you defend your borders and your people (who are, in a very real sense, your extended family). Any children you have will be foreign pariahs in their own land, with no homeland to return to.
The observation that muslim countries monitor their mosquues and western countries dont is a good one.The rise of traditional and militant Islam coincides with western exhaustion after two world wars and the collapse of Christian faith in western Europe. Mass migration from MENA countries is also encouraged as a utopian borderless world by governments and NGOs.Men are high status in MENA and see no reason to integrate into the west. As the Z man often says, this will not end well.
The Muslim population of Britain doubled between 2005 and 2015 (per Ed West) and the non-Pakistani Muslim population was probably multiplied several times. This was the effect of the "rubbing noses in diversity" — the Labour government changing the demographics of the country not even out of strategy but out of vulgar spite.
I see, the growth of Islam in Britain is entirely the fault of the Labour Party, who have the mysterious ability to bring this about not only when they are in power, but also when (2010-15) David Cameron (Con, Witney) ruled the roost.
A very good example of FABTSOO, equal in chutzpah only to Margaret Mitchell’s complaint in Gone with the Wind about the hordes of mulatto (quadroon and octoroon) children supposedly left behind in occupied Atlanta by the Yankee soldiers.
I don’t see any significant difference in approach between the different sides of the chamber in the British Parliament. On a daily basis we are treated to television clips showing Jeremy Corbin, Leader of the Opposition, with Diane Abbott (not a Muslim, but just as irritating) immediately behind him, while on the opposite bench significant questions all seem to be answered by someone called Sajid Javid. Some further indication that the Conservative Party does not operate on a different ethical basis to the Labour is supplied by the suspension of the whip to Anne Marie Morris (Con, Newton Abbot) for ‘use of racist language’.
So in England, the Conservative Party considers the phrase “Nigger in the woodpile” to be racist, whereas I would only class it as indecorous. It’s definitely idiomatic English. The difference between us is not, I think, that I am to the right of the Conservatives, but rather that they are soliciting the votes of all sorts of people and have to adopt the bullshit and shibboleths cherished by each one of them, whereas I am not.
The story about the Labour Party wishing to rub the noses of the Tories in diversity can be traced back to various Right-wing newspapers which cited an interview with one Andrew Neather. However Neather afterwards clarified that they had misquoted him. “Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when the economy was running up against skills shortages,” Neather wrote in the Standard. “Somehow this has become distorted by excitable rightwing newspaper columnists into being a ‘plot’ to make Britain multicultural. There was no plot. I’ve worked closely with Ms Roche and Jack Straw and they are both decent, honourable people who I respect … What's more both were robust on immigration when they needed to be. Straw had driven through a tough Immigration and Asylum Act in 1999 and Roche had braved particularly cruel flak from the left over asylum seekers.”
I am a little concerned to hear you advancing Tommy Robinson as a natural antidote to Jihadism. The problem is that Robinson is fick and so are all of his followers. The American equivalent of this person would be Frank Silva Roque, who in 2001 was so enraged by 9/11 that he decided to ‘get himself a towelhead’ and went out and shot dead Balbir Singh Sodhi, a follower of the Sikh religion, itself historically one of the greatest victims of Muslim atrocities.
In a properly ordered society the government sees to Immigrant Control and does not farm it out to private enterprise. The problem with TR and all his followers is this: give them a gun to fire and they will probably miss, hitting an innocent bystander. Then there is the Anders Breivik syndrome, whereby you attack not the immigrants you hate, but your fellow countrymen who show too much sympathy with them. Finally, if you actually manage to take out an actual ‘towelhead’ within the terms of your remit, it will inevitably be one of the non-offensive kinds and not anyone who poses a threat to the state, which will be further weakened by the increased racial tension you cause.
So to what extent is diversity possible? There is conservative or natural diversity, as practised by the Royal Family. That is to say, we have a family with English, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian and Russian blood with occasional cousins who have married a Maori or a Chinese and even a remote ancestor who was Anglo-Indian.
Then there is functioning diversity. For example of this, we should look to a list of the victims of the 7/7 London Bombings or the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice. It follows that if you bomb the London Transport System or randomly assassinate pedestrians on the Promenade in Nice, you will take out a number of practising Muslims, as well as the kuffar. However, the Manchester Bombings refined this technique by placing the bomb in a stadium full of fans of an American teen singer, so no Muslims were injured at all. But the general message is that all the people killed in 7/7 etc, black white or piebald, were peaceably going about their business without harming anyone or causing inter-ethnic tension, and so form part of a diverse but functioning population.
But obviously once we factor the bombers themselves in we have passed into the realm of non-functional diversity. NFD is created by allowing the word discrimination to become a pejorative, when previously it was held to be the mark of a wiser being.
For example, you can eat every kind of shop-bought vegetables and many kinds of wild vegetables but you need to discriminate between the various kinds of mushrooms.
Not all immigrants are Muslims: not all Syrians are Muslims; not all nettles are stinging nettles, not all snakes are poisonous, and not all Muslims are jihadists. With the exception of Baha’is, I have not observed in you any awareness of Islamic sectology, (the Baha’is not usually being counted as Muslim: like the Unitarian Universalists who have evolved into something that is not ordinarily counted as Christian, though they do so retain many features of their Presbyterian origin) I proffer the following list, in approximate order of Jihad-proneness:-
Daesh
Al Qaeda
Taliban (subset of Deobandi)
Lashkar-e-Toiba
Sipah-e-Sahaba
Salafi
Wahabi
Deobandi
Barelvi
Sunni
Sufi (various Tarikat)
Shia
Druze
Bektashi
Alawi/Alevi
Ismaili
Ahmadi
– – – –
Baha’i