So much of the response to the attacks in Manchester and London Bridge in the last few days has been of the utterly half-baked "We stand together / It's not about Islam" variety. It's easy to ridicule because like so much virtue-signalling it is a substitute for action.
So what action should be taken?
As long as the security services were able to keep attackers at bay, the status quo was defensible. But as they used to say of the IRA, the terrorist only needs to get lucky once: the police need to be lucky all the time. Events of the last couple of months demonstrate that there are enough would-be terrorists in Britain for the police to need an awful lot of luck. The current situation will not do.
We can't send Muslims home. For most, home is here. But we can come down much harder on those the security services suspect of terrorist involvement. Internment? Perhaps. There would be injustices, although personally I can't think of a greater injustice than that sustained by the murdered and their families. My reservation about internment is that the innocent are locked up along with the guilty, with the inevitable consequences of radicalisation both for the innocent themselves and their associates on the outside. Internment risks making more terrorists rather than fewer.
I think we have to consider how Muslims are radicalised. The most obvious way is via the internet. The software giants who have our society by the balls are privatising the profit they cream whilst shrugging off the social consequences. They do not want to hire moderators, proof-readers and lawyers. Besides, in the Californian La-La Land they inhabit the immediacy and freedom of the internet is part of its hey-guys-this-is-cool appeal. Who wants to be subject to the same responsibilities - er, stifling repression - as the print and broadcast media?
It baffles me that if, say, the Murdoch press provides a platform for defamation or incitement to violence it is subject to the law, but if Google does it they are merely allowed to apologise for failing to take the offending item down sooner. Social media companies must be made to take responsibility for the content they propagate. If this killed the internet (and it wouldn't), I seem to remember we managed OK before.
The other day I watched a lecture by the historian Tom Holland (well worth following on Twitter). Holland knows a good deal about Islam. He said something I've been banging on about for years - Islam needs a Reformation (I think my take was that we need a British form of Islam). I am not an expert, but I gather that a lot of British Islamic teaching is of the Wahabist variety, often funded by Saudi Arabia. The British Government needs to exert pressure on mosques to get their own house in order. It should consider banning foreign funding, if necessary closing down mosques which (or whose members) transgress.
It will be pointed out that this approach is hardly consistent with freedom of speech. But the libel laws already constrain what can be said, and our old principles - that the only other limits should be in circumstances where violence was threatened or likely to break out - worked well for more than a century (until the Blair government started to tinker with them).
The difficulty with some Islamic teaching is that it is essentially non-violent extremism. That's to say it teaches Muslims that the khufar (that's apostates like me) are trash. From there it is a short step to beheadings in Borough Market. Such non-violent extremism is not an exhortation to violence, but it is an act which lays the groundwork for such violence.
I like to draw an analogy with the constraints on freedom of speech placed on white British people in the 1960s. It was undoubtedly necessary in a society trying to assimilate black people that you could no longer refer to them as "nigger" or "Paki" (personally I think we are now approaching the point where such constraints are no longer necessary, since Britain is waking up to the fact that "race" is a pretty pointless way of trying to discriminate, and - as the Muslim terrorism crisis so clearly shows - the real battleground lies in the field of culture). In just the same way, Britain now needs to deal with the assimilation of 2 million British Muslims, encouraged by well-meaning multiculturalists to consider themselves separate. I think controls on what can be taught at the Mosque are now necessary and justified.
If Muslims disliked such controls and wanted to renounce British citizenship for that of Iraq, Libya or Syria, many would be happy to see them go.
In Tom Holland's talk I was particularly struck by his assessment that, although different and competing strains of Islam had been around for centuries, the relativist Reformation he sought was still along way off. He said that although he didn't think the Muslim Luther had yet been born, his parents or grandparents might yet be walking among us.
For me that is very cold comfort. That an enlightened liberal such as Holland (much too wet for my taste), should take such a view of Islam's prospects is bleak indeed.
I hope Mrs May is elected, not because I think she is any great shakes but because the prospect of a pro-immigrant anti-semitic Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, under the influence of hard-faced "community leaders" in East London and West Yorkshire, will be far, far worse. I hope May now puts her money where her mouth is and beefs up not only the Government's Prevent strategy (which the Labour party opposed) but its Control Orders and scrutiny of Mosques.
It will be said that you actually have much more chance of being run over by a bus than being killed in a terrorist attack; and this is true. But it is to miss the point, which is that unlike fatalities on the roads terrorist attacks have the effect of dividing people from each other. Britain cannot afford such division.
Enoch Powell was wrong in many aspects of his analysis of the consequences of immigration (not the least because he didn't understand the difference between race and culture, and didn't realise that black/white intermarriage would deal with many of the problems he foresaw), but one phrase from the Rivers of Blood speech haunts me. "It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre".
As long as we do nothing to address the growth of British Islamic extremism we are standing by and wringing our hands while others build the pyre.
