Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Gathering Shadows

A sobering read from author Douglas Murray, who attended the Pim Fortuyn conference on Islam and Europe recently.

The silencing happens bit by bit. A student paper in Britain that ran the Danish cartoons got pulped. A London magazine withdrew the cartoons from its website after the British police informed the editor they could not protect him, his staff, or his offices from attack. This happened only days before the police provided 500 officers to protect a “peaceful” Muslim protest in Trafalgar Square.

It seems the British police — who regularly provide protection for mosques (as they did after the 7/7 bombs) — were unable to send even one policeman to protect an organ of free speech. At the notorious London protests, Islamists were allowed to incite murder and bloodshed on the streets, but a passer-by objecting to these displays was threatened with detention for making trouble.

Murray is of the opinion that the jihad in Europe is winning. When he puts it like this it's hard to disagree. While the majority of the press has been cowed into silence by fear, only the bloggers have stepped up to print and re-print the Mohammed cartoons, to criticise the encroachment of dhimmitude. You can see the cartoons here.

Europe is shuffling into darkness. It is proving incapable of standing up to its enemies, and in an effort to accommodate the peripheral rights of a minority is failing to protect the most basic rights of its own people.

The governments of Europe have been tricked into believing that criticism of a belief is the same thing as criticism of a race. And so it is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous to criticise a growing and powerful ideology within our midst. It may soon, in addition, be made illegal.

Read it all.

No comments: