Meanwhile, as ‘thought-crimes’ are diligently policed, real crimes go unpunished. After decades of Muslim-Asian sexual assault on white British girls was revealed, government social workers and police told the affected families that they didn’t pursue the allegations because they did not want to disrupt multicultural ‘social cohesion’, whilst journalists turned a blind eye to the story for fear of emboldening the anti-immigrant British National Party. Those who did raise concerns at the time were shouted down for political incorrectness and for being racists and ‘Islamophobes’. The result was an mass delusion amongst politically correct multiculturalist Britain that there is no special link between sex crimes and the Islamic faith.
By discouraging difficult questions being asked about taboo topics such as multiculturalism and Islam, the cowardly reluctance to talk frankly about Muslim sexual grooming gangs was an affront to open debate. When feminists and the New Left protect Islam from criticism and sacrifice the well-being, rights and freedoms of white working-class girls, it is not only free speech which is lost but feminist and socialist ideas, too, are sacrificed at the altar of multiculturalism.
With Islamic terrorism a fact of Western life, free speech becomes even more necessary concerning Islam and its Western immigration outreach. This must include the freedom to criticise, ridicule and mock Islam’s God, prophet and holy book. If such free speech offends or hurts the feelings of Islam’s adherents, then that is the price of their admission to the civilised West. Yet the identitarian Left seems to be more agitated about saying something rude about Islam than by acts of Islamic murder, sexual assault, anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc.
The ‘you-can’t say-that because it’s racist’ weapon has become so over-used in the identitarian Left’s multicultural arsenal that it is fast losing all discriminating ability and is increasingly becoming a conceptually empty, all-purpose shorthand smear which simply serves to abuse, shame and silence. Concerned about Muslim immigration? That’s racist! Matter closed.
Similarly, the term, ‘Islamophobia’, is used by the identitarian Left to guillotine debate, stifle inquiry and delegitimize criticism of Islam, despite widespread public concern about Islam and its value-system. In 2017, Chatham House in Britain released a poll which asked 10,000 Europeans in ten countries whether they agreed with the statement ‘All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped’. A majority of people in eight of the ten countries (including France and Germany), and 47% in the UK, agreed that it should be stopped. In France, in July 2017, another survey revealed that 60% of the public view Islam as incompatible with the Republic’s values. If democracy means anything, this Muslim immigration banns would be government immigration policy. If free speech means anything, there should at least be open discussion free from taunts of ‘Islamophobia’. Freedom of religious belief is a fundamental right but this does not mean respecting what the faithful believe.
The New Left does not agree, however, from a fear of transgressing multiculturalist orthodoxy and thus being branded ‘Islamophobic’ or racist. The Marxists of yore, and in certain countries, today, cut their political teeth with criticism and ridicule of Christianity (its political quietism, its homophobia, sexism, opposition to voluntary euthanasia, clerical paedophilia, etc.) Anti-Christian blasphemy was an indispensable companion to broader radical political and social struggle. Commit blasphemy against Islam, however, and the New Left will descend like a ton of bricks on the blasphemer.
The old Voltairian chestnut of ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ has been reconfigures to ‘I disapprove of what you say, therefore you may not say it’. The Left, has unforgivably, been at the forefront of this assault on free speech.