Robert Halfon, political director of Conservative Friends of Israel, reviews Michael Gove’s book Celsius 7/7:
“In stark terms, Celsius 7/7 suggests that just as Fascism subsumed tolerant nationalism and communism engulfed moderate socialism, Islamism has subjugated Islam…. In the bleak world that is painted by Celsius 7/7, it is the free West – just as in the 1930s – that has allowed this rise in Islamism to continue unabated. Through a mixture of short term self interest and so called ‘realpolitik’, it is the West that is the primary author of its own misfortune…. The West’s lack of will to deal with Islamism, is buttressed by huge sections of the media and elements of the left who view the conflict between the free world and Islamism as one of moral relativism and moral equivalence….
“Moral relativism and moral equivalence have provided a cloak in which the left can embrace Islamism as a means by which to express their hostility to capitalism, the West and particularly the United States. Israel becomes the prism which the left and media establishment can unite against. So Ken Livingstone can nakedly court the Islamic vote in London, by making seemingly anti Semitic remarks and virulent attacks on the State of Israel. We have a grotesque spectacle of the re-emergence of the red-brown coalition in which left wingers – previously campaigners for sexual equality and freedom of speech – form common cause with Islamists whose raison d’etre is repression of minorities and dictatorship.
“There are of course some honourable exceptions. Peter Tatchell being a prime example and the group of left intellectuals behind the Euston Manifesto.”
ConservativeHome.com, 21 September 2006
I was going to comment that, as an alternative to a red-brown coalition, Halfron proposes a blue-red one. Except, of course, that Tatchell and the Euston Manifesto signatories long ago abandoned politics that could in any way be categorised as socialist.
“The effort to silence the head of the Catholic Church is a grim joke, but not one to laugh at. Secularist glee at the sight of the Pope being anathematised in this clash of two, mutually exclusive, ‘infallible’ religions, needs to be tempered with awareness of the seriousness of the situation which is summed up in the outcry against the Pope. (As it was in the recent Muslim outcry against the Danish cartoons.) If the spiritual absolute monarch of a billion and a quarter Catholics can be treated like that, the cause of free speech and freedom to criticise religion, is surely in a very bad way….
In today’s Sun John Reid suggests that Muslims in Britain are not doing enough to combat terrorism. Following some initial conciliatory remarks, he writes that “the Muslim community must choose between accepting the propaganda of the terrorists and taking on would-be terrorists at every opportunity”.
The Government reacts tetchily to suggestions that British foreign policy has anything to do with the rise in radicalism among young Muslims.
“Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: ‘Racist!’ Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left….
In today’s Daily Express Mark Palmer writes: “Yesterday Ruth Kelly, Labour’s Communities Secretary, warned in her own, typically fuzzy way that multiculturalism might not be such a brilliant idea after all. Well, not at the minute, at least, when there are Muslim extremists waiting for every opportunity to stir the racial-religious pot…. ‘We’ve moved from a period of near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness’, she said.”