Oil and Water: Islam and the West

Three Weekend Australian newspaper articles and two (December Issue) Quadrant articles got my attention after a planned outing was deferred and I had time on my hands. The articles, in order, by Gemma Tognini, Greg Craven, Greg Sheridan, Rachael Kohn and Daryl McCann were, and are, well worth reading. This isn’t a review. But, briefly, all turn on the horrific slaughter which occurred in southern Israel on October 7.

Tognini laments the sentiments expressed in the streets and on the Left; Craven, the parsing of evil; Sheridan, the incursion into the West of anti-Semitism via immigration from the Middle East and North Africa; Kohn, the subservient position of women in Islam; and McCann, the attitude of Arab states to Israel’s existence. Obviously, there is much more to each article. I’ve taken a liberty, for a purpose. That purpose is to use plain words to identify the underlying problem and the solution. More liberties to come I’m afraid.

All of the authors get close to identifying the problem and the solution without reaching a definitive denouement, at least so far as I’m concerned.

Tognini comments on “how far we have fallen” since Doc Evatt in 1947 “guided the UN vote” to establish the state of Israel. You don’t have to go back that far. I arrived in Australia in 1965. How far have we fallen since then; since later than then? And why, principally, when it comes to anti-Semitism? No prizes for guessing.

Craven manages to avoid mentioning Islam. Like Basil Fawlty not mentioning the war. The anti-Semitic Left and right get mentioned, and Hamas as the embodiment of evil. To wit, “in the dirty bomb assault against Western values, there is no Israel only a greater us. As far as Hamas and its allies are concerned, we all wear kippahs now.” Maybe, but if we’ve only got Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis and other like groups to deal with we don’t have serious problem. But we do have a serious problem.

Sheridan gets much more down and dirty and thus closer to the truth. But true to form, having identified the curse of Muslim immigration and referenced three books on the subject by Andrew Hussey (The French Intifada), Chrispher Caldwell (Reflections on the Revolution in Europe) and Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe), he proceeds to write: “Nobody wants a religiosity or ethnically discriminatory immigration program.” Sorry, yes they do; lots of hands shoot up, including mine. I’ve also read other scary books on the matter by Oriana Fallaci, Mark Steyn and Robert Spencer, among others. Perhaps they have coloured my concerns and made me more careful about who is invited into my country.

Kohn writes:

Assimilation to Australian values and norms of egalitarianism and freedom of conscience is therefore not going to happen smoothly and easily for Muslim Australians as long as they are beholden to the imams and sheiks who hold forth in the mosque and prayer hall, and appear opposed to contemporary interpretations of the Koran…

I am a literalist by inclination. All else, ‘contemporary interpretations’ and the like, are simply subjective imaginings. Imams are literalists too. The Koran, the very words of Allah are immutable, as are the sayings and doings of Muhammed (in the Hadith). Assimilation to Australian values is a dream. Not only is such assimilation not going to happen easily, it’s not going to happen at all.

Like Sheridan, McCann gets close to the truth. Some great stuff on the ‘victim versus the oppressor’ narrative which plagues much of the commentariat’s misguided analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, he refers to “Islamic revivalism,” dating back to the eighteenth century. What I don’t like about this way of putting things is that it might suggest that a more benign Islam once existed and might, possibly, exist again. I am drawing this inference, and concede McCann might not have meant it at all. But for me it’s a platform to make the point that there is no reason to believe Islam will ever reform; whatever that means. Some commentators have held out hope, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Heretic: Why Islam needs a reformation now) and Zuhdi Jasser (see my “Reformist Pipedreams, Islamic Reality, Muslim Accountability,” Quadrant, December 2017). Hope springs eternal.

Time to put up. I think Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. I think Islamists and knowledgeable Muslims know this. On the other hand, even leaving aside those comprising the deluded political and media Left, we traditional Westerners don’t know it; or most of us don’t. Many of us cling to some baseless Micawberish hope that fourteen centuries of conquest, and belief in Muslim superiority over all others, is a passing phase. It won’t pass. And 1.8 billion philoprogenitive Muslims will increase in number not die out.

Containment is the only feasible strategy. Part of that is to severely restrict, if not ban, Muslim immigration to the West. And to ensure so far as is feasible that no taxpayer support is provided to any institution, Islamic schools in particular, which teach or preach values inimical to Western values. Part is unequivocally to support Israel, the country in the front line of defending Western civilisation. Part is rediscovering national self-belief and ridding schools of the influence of teachers and curriculums which undermines healthy patriotism. This is a battle which must be won. The wider war will not be won; it just must not be lost.

On one side is Judeo-Christian civilisation, fashioned through faith in the one true God whose son Jesus Christ set enlightened new ground rules for treating each other decently. And it has borne much fruit. On the other is Islam, of which, as Churchill put it, “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”