When a Muslim man blew himself up at a concert venue in Manchester, England, killing over twenty people, I didn’t hold my breath like the American media did. I knew immediately what had caused it. Salman Abedi was the son of Libyan “refugees, ” described by neighbors as “very religious,” who purportedly flew the Libyan flag outside their Manchester residence.
An unspoken rulebook is developing for these kinds of tragedies. First, we must make certain that Islam is not named as a cause of the act, even when it clearly is. Second, we must speak of prayers (presumably the Christian variety) and solidarity. And, finally, as the American media intones over and over, we must not politicize the tragedy. Of course they succeed magnificently in politicizing it. And it’s exactly the politics of cowardice now regnant that will make the next tragedy possible. When will the people say enough? When will we demand meaningful change to immigration policies that are rendering whole swaths of Europe unrecognizable? Parts of Manchester today, for example, may as well be Tripoli; whatever else may be said of them, they are no longer English.
The first wave of Muslim migration that began in the 1960s in Britain has produced communities that have no desire to assimilate. In an effort to create a sort of time warp of the countries they knew, these people have brought along the most unevolved, uneducated, illiberal, regressive imams imaginable. Today, you can find more progressive ideas among imams in Lahore than in Birmingham. It’s an outright colonialism of the kind Western academics and liberal politicians are bound to condemn, if anyone European were accomplishing it, that is.
Meanwhile, Western politicians, most notably those on the Left, seem to care more about being called Islamophobic than they do about preventing Islamic terror. The absurdity is practically sublime. In the wake of the massacre of gays in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida by a Muslim (the biggest mass shooting in America to date), the mayor of that city proclaimed a “Muslim Women’s Day.” Tone-deafness aside, I might, as a feminist, have found some cold comfort in that, except we’re talking about the kind of event where the hijab is claimed to be empowering. But when it comes to plumbing the depths of insensitivity, no American politician has come close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. I wondered aloud at what the people of Manchester must be thinking when I read her statement: “People in the UK can rest assured that Germany stands shoulder to shoulder with them.” Really? No more unbelievable statement has crossed the English Channel since Ribbentrop was foreign minister. After all, it is Merkel who has endangered Europeans by sweeping in masses of “refugees” with virtually no vetting at all. The exact costs of her deplorable lapse in judgment will not be known for a generation. It must be said that the mayor of Manchester has lobbied against Prevent, a British program designed to combat Islamification. I hope he’s doing some soul-searching right now.
President Obama went to Cairo on an apology tour praising Islam while calling for Americans to be humble. This is no time for humility or political correctness. It’s a time for strength. I was pleased to see President Trump call it as it is in Riyadh, naming “Islamic extremism” as a fundamental problem in the world. The American Left is quick to claim that poor whites in this country act against their own self interests politically. Truly, we can see the splinter in our neighbor’s eye while ignoring the beam in our own. I wrote an article in January arguing the merits of President Trump’s temporary travel ban on people originating in extremist countries, which—while not as fulsome as I might have liked—seemed rational and temperate to me. Incidentally, this was an article first published by the Left-leaning Huffington Post and just as quickly censored. When it finally saw the light of day in the Washington Blade, written as it was from a gay man’s perspective, gay luminaries of questionable wattage immediately wrote to call me racist, or ignorant, or some combination. More recently, commentary on the mass incarceration and murder of gay men in Chechnya has variously blamed Putin or even Trump, but the Left has not dared to observe that Chechnya is a semi-autonomous “republic” with a population that is more than ninety percent Muslim. In fact, in no Muslim country are gay people safe. But truth-telling in the Western tradition is most often branded heresy.
Why has the Left abandoned responsible answer-seeking to the likes of Marine Le Pen (according to NPR, Muslims make up about 8% of the French general population, but sixty percent of the prison population)? After all, our values—women’s rights, bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, gay rights, not to mention religious freedom and democracy generally—are most endangered by Islamification. In no country where Islam is allowed full flower are our values respected; they are, in fact, brutally repressed. And what has long been the self-defeating mindset on the issue in much of Europe, where imams who preach violence are protected in the name of diversity, yet criticism of their diabolical ideology—even when it is absolutely factual—is repressed as inciting hatred, is now becoming the norm in the United States. In the wake of my article in the Blade, a group of mostly Muslims demanded that I apologize and be fired. I suppose one could fairly add freedom of speech to the list of endangered values.
The Left in the United States still has the chance to support a responsible politics of immigration reform that also is sensitive to questions of race and the need for the United States to continue to be a refuge for oppressed peoples. It isn’t too late for us. The question is whether we will have the courage to do so. How many Orlandos and Manchesters can we ignore?