PIslam…

When the IRA splintered and the "hard men" set up their own murderous organisation, they dubbed it the Provisional IRA, or PIRA for short. And, while no one would seek to associate the true religion of Islam with the IRA, there are plenty of parallels between PIRA and what the eminent Iranian writer, Amir Taheri, in the Sunday Times today dubs "Political Islam"… or PIslam for short.

This is perhaps to return the compliment, as it was the recently jailed low-life Abu Hamza who described Britain as a "toilet", while of course relying on the beneficent Council Tax payers of Hammersmith to pay his housing benefit and much more besides – and if that is not taking the p**s, I would like to see a better definition.

Taheri's piece, headed "We don't do God, we do Palestine and Iraq", starts with the assertion: "It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck. And yet it insists that it is not a duck." Today the visible Islam, the loudest Islam, he continues: "is a political movement masquerading as a religion."

He then goes on to offer three reasons for the excessive politicisation of Islam in the West, making a powerful and rational case, stating that there are 400 Islamic associations and societies in Britain operating through some 2,000 mosques. "Scratch any one of them," he writes, "and you will find that it is, in fact, a cover for a political movement."

However, the most powerful of the reasons adduced as to why politicisation of Islam has taken off in Britain is, Taheri writes, "its rapprochement with the extreme left over the past decade":

Today political Islam and the British extreme left are in coalition in a number of organisations, including the anti-war alliance. Muslims provide the street muscle and the "poor masses" that the traditionally atheistic extreme left lacks. In exchange the extreme left puts its experience in militant politics at the service of political Islam. Hatred of "bourgeois democracy", anti-Americanism and opposition to Israel provide the unifying factors of this unnatural alliance.

Thus, says Taheri, "Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration". He then tells us that: "Politicised Islam’s attempt at destroying individual freedoms is as much a threat to Islam as the inquisition was to Christianity… it is also a threat to world peace," concluding:

Politicised Islam is a form of totalitarianism. Its primary victims are Muslims. In many Muslim countries it has been exposed and can no longer deceive the masses. In the West, however, it has duped media, government and academia into treating it not as a political movement, but as a religion.

Necessarily, for a British paper, Taheri confines his comments to Pislam in Britain, but his analysis applies equally to the tranzi community and especially the European Union.

The European political élites and their fellow travellers in the media and elsewhere have also been duped into treating Pislam "not as a political movement, but as a religion". This, above all else, explains their inertia and their failure to support Denmark which has been at the forefront of confronting the enemy in our midst.

An illustration of how far the élites have lost the plot comes in a YouGov poll in The Sunday Times, which reports that 56 percent of respondents, compared with 29 percent, believed the Danish cartoons should have been published "in the interests of free speech" – a factor of nearly 2:1.

Crucially, 86 percent of respondents thought that the Muslim protests against the cartoons were a "gross over-reaction" and 67 percent thought that senior policemen like Plod Blair were too politically correct to deal effectively with Islamic extremists.

This is reflected in a similar poll carried out by MORI for The Sun yesterday, which found 93 percent of respondents agreeing that the demonstrators carrying placards calling for beheading and other acts of violence were unjustified, while 87 percent thought they should be prosecuted.

Thus does Andrew Sullivan write, also in The Sunday Times that "Islamo-bullies get a free ride from the West", commenting on the failure of the MSM to rise to the occasion and arguing that "the fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you." He adds:

And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano's famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

We have two media now in the world, Sullivan writes:

We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward for what is fit to print, to become an arbiter of sensitivity, good taste and political correctness. And we have web pages like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, data, images and opinions that readers can judge with the benefit of all the facts, not just some of them.

If you want to see why newspapers are struggling, he adds, surely this is part of the reason. They have forgotten their fundamental task: to provide information. He concludes: "In this new war of freedom versus fundamentalism I always anticipated appeasement. I just didn't expect the press to be among the first to wave the white flag."

But, if the press is waving the white flag, British politicians are not far behind, while the brave Europeans are cowering in their trenches, afraid even to put their heads above to parapets to see if it is safe to surrender.

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