Politicians remain in total denial over extremism
by Tim Stanley, Telegraph:
Rather than confront the real issue, the intelligentsia live in a fantasyland where death threats are the norm.
We were arguing in the Question Time green room before we even went live. Baroness Warsi, who is a Conservative in the way I am still 25, requested that I define an Islamist. “Admit it, you can’t, can you?”
“Leave it for the cameras,” I bellowed back: “I know perfectly well what it is, so do you. I need some air.”
I walked dramatically out the room, turned a corner and phoned a friend. “What’s an Islamist?” I asked. “I have a feeling it’s going to come up and I don’t know what to say.”
I do know what it is, of course, I was just looking for a definition that wouldn’t get me arrested or my head cut off. Welcome to Britain’s multiculturalism debate. We conduct it behind nervous smiles.
First question to the panel: can one speak one’s mind about other religions? Well, yes, haha – but… The Baroness said Lee Anderson’s infamous remarks about Sadiq Khan were obviously “racist”; David Lammy accused the Tories of “tearing us apart”; and Caroline Lucas suggested they have “lurched to the hard-Right”. That left me to hedge my way through saying “maybe we’ve got a problem”, bearing in mind my mother’s plea not to say anything about Islam (which rather suggests that we do).
This is a common experience: I find my view, which is about as wet as a conservative gets, is nevertheless so unusual and distasteful to the intelligentsia that when I voice it, I not only feel lonely, or wrong, but possibly insane. Did I dream the 7-7 bombings? That teacher driven into hiding because he showed a cartoon? The threats that shut down a Commons debate? It didn’t help that the news of George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale came through in the sleepy hours of Friday morning, made possible – or perhaps I imagined this, too – by Labour axing a candidate who spread conspiracy theories about Jews.
Read here (£)
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