No more “Don’t look back in anger”. No more candles and flowers. No more vacuous talk about not allowing the terrorists to “divide us” or “change our way of life”. They are dividing us and changing our way of life. The evidence is all around us.
After the heinous attack in Manchester last week, the customary ostrich-like approach of our political elites will no longer do. We need an honest and sober debate about the threat of radical Islam in our society. And we need it urgently.
Not in a way that scapegoats ordinary law-abiding Muslims, but as a means to ensuring we face up to the sheer scale of the threat and give ourselves the best chance of overcoming it.
The attack on the synagogue by Jihad Al-Shamie was certainly a wicked act of antisemitism. But it would be naïve in the extreme to see it as only that. For as well as being rooted in Jew hatred, it was the latest manifestation of violent fundamentalism by an adherent of an extreme ideology that sees all non-believers as “infidels” – and therefore fair game.
TRENDING
Stories
Videos
Your Say
By my calculation, 15 of the 20 most recent terrorist attacks in Britain have been carried out by Islamists. These have included the slaughter of young concert-goers and the hacking to death of a member of parliament.
After each outrage, we are subjected to the usual blizzard of platitudes by public leaders who insist on preaching the gospel of diversity and tolerance while stubbornly avoiding any mention of the religion which lay behind the barbarism.
To focus on it would be ‘Islamophobic’, we are told. Which presumably is why these people – including the Prime Minister – were so reluctant to make any reference to radical Islam after the recent events in Manchester.
They want us to see the perpetrators as lone wolves acting without motivation rather than as foot soldiers of a creed whose precepts can be interpreted as justifying their savagery.
Of course, if a far-right activist had carried out the Manchester attack, liberal politicians and commentators would have been only too quick to attribute it to the growing expression of national-populist sentiment within these islands. But no such links are ever drawn when it comes to Islam.
Well, the status quo is no longer tolerable. When we see mutilated bodies lying outside places of worship, bollards being erected around our parliament, heightened security at our Christmas markets, innocent schoolteachers forced into hiding, cinemas pulling movies from their screens, and schoolchildren persecuted for accidentally scuffing holy texts, we are compelled to confront the evil that lies at the root of it all.
Paul Embery says the attack on the synagogue by Jihad Al-Shamie was certainly a wicked act of antisemitism
|PA
Appeasement has led to emboldenment. The constant pussyfooting and gutlessness in the face of religious bullying shames our political class and gives succour to the fundamentalists.
Britain has a problem with radical Islam. Not with the evangelical strains of Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism or Hinduism. But with a militant expression of the Islamic faith which finds resonance among too many who follow the religion – and which is increasingly creating fear in our communities and altering the contours of our society. We shouldn’t be afraid to say it.
Instead of launching a draconian crusade against “Islamophobia” (a junk term which has no place in serious debate), the Government should be facilitating the widest and frankest discussion about how we may defend our freedoms – particularly freedom of expression – against those who would destroy them. (Indeed, it is because of Islam alone that we now have a de facto blasphemy law in this country, and we all know it.)
If such a discussion ever took place, it must include a hard-headed assessment of the effect that state-sponsored multiculturalism – the sort that actively promotes separateness and difference and tells minorities that they should celebrate the fact that they have so little in common with the majority culture – has had in encouraging the growth of radical Islam and bringing about the wider social disintegration that is occurring throughout much of our land.
Paul Embery argues politicians shouldn’t shy away from taking whatever action is necessary to defeat the Islamist menace.
|PA
And we shouldn’t shy away from taking whatever action is necessary to defeat the Islamist menace.
If that means confronting those parts of the Muslim community – in the mosques, madrasas and even in private homes – where this violent ideology has been allowed to fester and grow, so be it. The time for niceties is over.
After each new atrocity, the political class expects us to suppress our anger and refrain from “weaponising” or “politicising” the incident.
As though there are no trends to be detected and no lessons to be drawn.
Until now, this ploy has been largely successful, to the point where some Islamist terror attacks have faded from public consciousness altogether (how many people remember, for example, the murderous rampage in a Reading park in 2020?) and many British citizens appear to have become inured to the threat that faces them.
What a sorry state of affairs.
It’s time to start looking back in anger.
More From GB News