Rod Liddle finds it ironic that “it is the Charles Moores of our world – the high church, High Tory Right – who are the most persuasive and clear-headed in their public antipathy towards Islam and towards those who would, under the banner of political correctness, afford this still primitive creed some sort of equivalence with post-reformation Christianity”.
On the other side are “those Left-liberal multiculturalist commentators who continue to delude themselves that Islam as a whole is easily compatible with the Western notions of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, democracy and equality. As a result, we now have a false dichotomy – between something called moderate Islam and this rogue creature, extremist Islam”.
Banning a marginal figure like Omar Bakri is, from Liddle’s perspective, irrelevant. It is Islam as a whole that has to be taken on, by “ensuring that Muslim schoolchildren receive a secular education and banishing the hijab”.
I’m always amused by these commentators who preach the virtues of “post-reformation Christianity”. This would include the US Christian Right and Ian Paisley, would it?