Since so much rubbish has been written about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, here's some more.
Demonstrations don't accomplish anything. So what if one and a half million people demonstrated in Paris yesterday? That won't stop the Islamists. And it won't give us a free press. When a Danish newspaper published anti-Islamist cartoons nearly a decade ago, no British newspaper saw fit to allow its readers to see what the fuss was about. In fact you can now view the cartoons online (just google Danish muslim cartoons). But when people burble "we can't let the Islamists win", they are averting their eyes from the truth. The Islamists have already won.
Free speech - already circumscribed by libel laws and public order legislation - has been further diminished by fear. Even those doughty tellers of truth to power, Private Eye, didn't publish the cartoons. They are afraid. Many a journalist came out with the self-exculpatory line about only publishing stuff which was newsworthy. But what could be more newsworthy than protests in London calling for the beheading of cartoonists?
And I don't blame the hacks. I'd do the same if I were one of them. Perhaps however I might seek a profession in which hypocrisy wasn't quite so inherent. The Guardian's donation of £100,000 to Charlie Hebdo smacks of a guilty conscience. This is the newspaper, remember, that regularly silences comments it doesn't like on its website. For example, it censors references to its use of offshore companies to avoid tax, to Polly Toynbee's second home in Tuscany or to Alan Rusbridger's expensive grand pianos (even when comments are made by its own staff). Comment is not free at the Guardian, and hardly anywhere else either.
I said the Islamists have already won, but it might be more accurate to say they are already winning. There's a lot we can do to fight back. Firstly, Muslims across Europe who deplore the Paris attacks could do a great deal more to make public their revulsion. For details of how one has done so, see below. They could also help more to expose people preaching hate, in mosques and on the internet. Secondly, being in a hole, we could stop digging. Since the likes of the Kouachi brothers spring from amongst Muslims, and since Islamist terror is far and away the greatest internal threat to the UK, HMG could stop making matters worse by simply halting all immigration from Muslim countries. Why take the risk?
(A month after I wrote this post the BBC did a survey about British Muslim attitudes. With characteristic reluctance to face the results squarely it was headlined "Most British Muslims 'oppose Mohammed cartoons reprisals'"; but lower down the story acknowledged that 27% "had some sympathy with the motives behind the attacks". Extrapolated to the 2.7 million British Muslims, that's a total of rather more than 700,000. When we already have in excess of half a million Muslims who feel like this, the argument for allowing any more in is not immediately obvious.)
Many Muslims say, "This is nothing to do with us, and nothing to do with Islam". It's certainly true that the killers of Lee Rigby were bad apples. But they were apples falling from a Muslim tree. They weren't stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, Anglicans, Quakers or lovers of fine wine. They were Muslims.
That says something about Islam. In particular, it says that the religion is absolutist in terms of a division between the faithful and the unbelievers. It has not made the accommodation with relativism which other religions in the West have been doing for centuries. It regards law as God-made, not man-made. Its political history shows it to be impatient of democracy and it has little conception of the Enlightenment idea of free speech.
Outrage, resentment and violence - and the conspiracy theories that inform them - serve as palliatives for an Ummah (or global Muslim community) that reads little, writes even less, has not invented much in recent centuries, is economically less productive than comparable peoples and wields little political or military power in the contemporary world.
OK, I didn't write that last paragraph. Who did? Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States.
In case you think this is over the top, and are minded to apply the "R" word (Muslims being a race, right?) the Times today reports two incidents. In the first, a Saudi Arabian blogger has received 50 lashes in a public square today for a post in which he criticised the link between the Wahabist clerics and the government. Meanwhile in Egypt an engineering student has been sent to prison for three years after announcing that he is an atheist. This is the attitude to free speech which obtains when Islam dominates a country's mind-set. It is an attitude which successive UK governments have imported, despite the protests (some of them undoubtedly motivated by racism) of the generality of the population. As the numbers of Muslims grow, so will their - quite justifiable - demand for representation. In microcosm you can see it in the Trojan Horse schools scandal in Birmingham.
For many Muslims free speech, however qualified, merely means their right to practise their religion. It is, ironically, why many Muslims come to Britain. The wife of Djamel Begha, the jihadist mentor of the Paris killers, is currently living in Leicester. According to the Torygraph she brought her family to England so her children could be brought up "in an Islamic environment" (Incidentally she is living in a four bedroom house rent free and is entitled to about £1,500 per year in child benefit. Oh joy).
The Mayor of Rotterdam had it about right. Interviewed on Dutch TV, he said "It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom. But if you do not like freedom, in Heaven's name pack your bag and leave. There may be a place in the world where you can be yourself. Be honest with yourself and do not go and kill innocent journalists. And if you do not like it here because humorists you do not like make a newspaper, may I then say you can fuck off".
Amen to that. So I am not Charlie Hebdo. I am Ahmed Aboutaleb, the courageous (and Muslim) Mayor of Rotterdam.
