Melanie Phillips—so serious, yet so unserious

Joseph Puder at FrontPage Magazine summarizes a talk given by Melanie Phillips at the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, of which Jeff in England says:

Here we go again….When in the history of political and cultural analysis have so many clever people failed to make an obvious conclusion after portraying so much of the problem? It’s like the devil has them in some kind of trance. And Melanie thinks Mark Steyn has given up, when she herself has given up by failing to call for a complete halt to Muslim immigration.

I have to agree with Jeff. Immigration is mentioned only once in Puder’s account of Phillips’s talk, even as it is mentioned only a couple of times, and very inconclusively, in Phillips’s book Londonistan. Puder/Phillips keep saying that the British, paralyzed by “political correctness,” are failing to oppose the “radicalization” of Muslims in Britain. They don’t once say that the British, paralyzed by liberalism (a liberalism shared by Puder and Phillips) are failing to stop the immigration of Muslims into Britain.

Whoops, there I go again, misrepresenting Melanie Phillips.

- end of initial entry -

A reader writes:

It’s funny, when Phillips says at the end she will not stop trying to bring Britain to its senses. No one asked, and what would that entail, Miss Phillips? It is so hard to get people onto the page of waking up to Islamic radicalism in their midst, that that has become her whole mission. What to do once enough people wake up, she doesn’t go into!

LA replies:

Yes, because, at bottom, how are British people supposed to stop the radicalization of Muslims? By controlling what they say? By controlling what they think? By controlling their inmost religious beliefs? To stop the radicalization of an alien people is beyond anyone’s power, which may explain why the British act “paralyzed” when told they must stop the radicalization of Muslims. What is not beyond the power of the British would be to stop the Islamization of Britain, by ceasing all Muslim immigration and removing many Muslims that are already there. Phillips herself has repeatedly pointed out that 25 percent—or is it 40 percent—of Muslims in Britain support terrorism. Seems to me that would be a good place to start.

Mark J. writes:

You correctly criticize Melanie Phillips for not going the final obvious logical step and calling for the end to Muslim immigration, but are you guilty of the same sort of thing when you vaguely call for “removing many Muslims who are already there”? We agree that the Islamization of Britain and the West must be stopped, and that that means Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate. (Which means we start screening immigrants for religious beliefs, I think, which is a whole can of worms in itself.) And since Muslims tend to have higher birthrates than Westerners (at least the non-Western Muslims do, I believe), we must reduce the number of Muslims in our nations to the point (zero?) where their higher birthrates can’t threaten us. You advocate removing “many Muslims” from Britain, starting with the 25 or 40 percent who are radicalized.

Easy to say. How in practical terms are the authorities to define what degree of radicalization warrants deportation (and presumably revocation of citizenship) and how do they determine who exactly has that kind of Muslim belief? Wouldn’t the radicals simply claim their right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, or at most go underground and work their proselyization out of site of the government? And how, in practical terms, could we here in the U.S. do the same sort of thing given that it would probably take a constitutional amendment?

I think the answer to these things is that we must agree as a people—at least the majority, non-Muslim part of our nations must agree—that Islam is incompatible with our civilization and must be entirely banned. We must advocate whatever changes to our Constitution or laws that that requires.

We must root out and ban the practice of Islam as a dangerous cult belief.

Anything less is a half-solution that leaves Islam in our midst and drives the radicals out of sight but leaves them the fertile ground of fellow Western Muslims who would undoubtedly resent our impinging on their religious practice and become radicalized again. It is the nature of Islam that is the problem and it cannot be allowed in our nations, period. And I don’t think it’s enough to say only that we have to keep Islam as nothing more than a minor influence in the West. How in practical terms would be do that?

Summing up, you criticize Phillips for becoming vague about the kinds of practical actions that have to be undertaken, but don’t you also become a bit vague about how exactly to remove many (but presumably not all) Muslim citizens from the West? Don’t we have to advocate the virtually total expulsion of Islam and Muslims (including immigrants, naturalized citizens, and even native-born citizens) from the West?

You may argue that we only need regain confidence in our own traditional civilization. But that doesn’t deal with the practical problems of a Western Muslim population who presumably would not abandon Islam for our beliefs, who reproduce faster than we do, and who would claim that bedrock Western values protect their right to practice any religious belief they want.

LA replies:

There is no contradiction. My own position has been stated many times: Muslims do not belong in significant numbers in any Western society, period.* .But this blog entry was not about my view of what to do about Islam in the West. It was about the contradiction in Melanie Phillips’ ideas of what to do about Islam in the West. Her position, that Islam as it now exists is at the very least dominated by jihadism, should logically lead her to call for the end of further Muslim immigration, along with the removal of a significant number of outright supporters of jihadism. That is the minimal position she must take if her incessant warnings about the horrors of Islam and Islamization are to be taken seriously.

*And I do not propose some instant mass deportation; that is absurd, utterly impracticable, and only makes people recoil from any idea of removal of Muslims. So the idea is not only absurd, but disastrous, since it convinces people that no removal of Muslims is possible and leads them to surrender.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 21, 2006 09:54 AM | Send