A fairly classy defense of Andy — acknowledging some substance to the criticisms of his article while providing some evidence as justification for the “thesis” he put on the table at the Wall Street Journal.
However, it also looks like a bit of a whitewash of the real problems he at least alluded to, even if he may not have really addressed them in the depth required — bit difficult to say for sure since the article is behind a paywall. But for instance, while Young did point to the 12.3% population of London being Muslim, that was in 2011 and who knows how much that has changed, probably increased, in the intervening 7 years.
And even that percentage looks to be rather problematic — how many cases have there been of wayward “trucks of peace” — clearly self-driving cars that escaped the laboratory early — in the interim? And how much flak did Boris Johnson get for calling hijabis “postal boxes”? An entirely appropriate term given the number of Muslim “mental patients” who have gone postal in England and other Western countries where we’ve foolishly let Muslims in the door. How many credible accusations of Muslim grooming gangs are there? How many school inspectors at Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) have been threatened for “raising concerns about the values being promoted in some of the country’s faith schools” (read: Islamic)? How many madrasas are schools for (Islamic) terrorist training? Etc. Etc. Etc.
No wonder the Archbishop of Canterbury argued that “Islamic rules are incompatible with British laws”. And no wonder that the late British philosopher Anthony Flew argued, in his review of Ibn Warraq’s Why I’m Not a Muslim, that “Islam is flatly incompatible with the establishment and maintenance of the equal individual rights and liberties of a liberal, democratic, secular state.”
One could charitably cut Muslims a bit of slack if they were giving any evidence of making serious efforts at reforming a “religion” that is fundamentally at odds with Western traditions, with the entire project of the Enlightenment. But the fact of the matter is they aren’t — and the facts are they rather vociferously and obnoxiously object to any attempts to bring them out of the 6th century and into the 21st. Cases in point being the burka/hijab, and the rather barbaric & inhumane practices they engage in during the slaughter of animals for food or bronze-age “rituals”.
But for instance, while this is specifically related to the situation in America, which might reasonably be construed to not exhibit the same problems in the same depth as in England, consider an article in the Federalist which interviewed a Dr. Zuhdi Jasser who “stands at the forefront of the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM)”. But the responses by the Muslim community for the MRM’s calls for reform were underwhelming to say the least:
We spent significant resources on this outreach over a period of ten months. We reached out through snail mail, e-mail, and telephone to over 3,000 mosques and over 500 known public American Muslims. We received only 40-plus rather dismissive responses from our outreach, and sadly less than ten of them were positive. In fact, one mosque in South Carolina left us a vicious voice mail threatening our staff if we contacted them again.
Does that at all look anything like a willingness on the part of the Muslim community to abandon its barbarisms, its commitment to an ideology, a “religion” that is fundamentally antithetical to the bedrock principles of Western democracies? Absent some indication of that, one might reasonably argue that the views of Anne-Marie Waters — head of the For Britain party — should be given far more weight and credence than they so far have been:
Reformers of Islam — we’ll close our borders until you’ve completed your reform. When Islam looks like secular democracy, we’ll talk. Deal?
Details of the debate I am taking part in tomorrow night. Islam and the West — Irreconcilable Differences? My answer is yes. Many.
Indeed. And we should be planning accordingly.
