Islam

A new report on anti-Semitism in Britain makes uncomfortable reading all round. The study, a joint enterprise by the Community Security Trust and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is an in-depth exploration of anti-Jewish attitudes, the role of animus towards Israel, and the prevalence of prejudice in 2017. It is a sober analysis and the researchers tend towards restraint – sometimes a little too much restraint – in drawing conclusions from their data. It is this very interpretive modesty that makes the findings all the more concerning.

People sometimes accuse me of being an immovable pessimist about our continent’s future. And I normally reply with the simple truth that when the facts are pessimistic, I am pessimistic. Allow me to highlight three recent causes for pessimism. In my recent blog on the now routine, nay mundane, acts of terrorism occurring in Europe, I made one omission. In my defence it’s easy to do, not only because of the number of attacks, but because everyone moves on so fast. Even a few years ago, we used to linger for a little while over European citizens when they were slaughtered. Now we don’t even bother to learn much about them. The attack occurs, the good news story is searched for, and it’s all just yesterday’s news.

I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the clue’s in the name — was waiting to board a flight when he started ‘harmlessly’ talking about 9/11. There is no reason to believe he has any connections with extremists, but he was kicked off the flight because of security concerns and had to fly out of the UK with another airline. Although he was later offered a refund, he is now suing, claiming he was ‘racially and religiously profiled’ by the Virgin staff. ‘I know this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been a white man in his sixties,’ Mo complained. No, probably not. But if the world were comprised entirely of white men in their sixties, then 9/11 might not have happened.

There has been an unprecedented development this year in the Islamists' war on the West. For the first time their foot soldiers are singling out women to kill. Women have been the victims of terrorism before, murdered by paramilitary organisations such as ETA, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the IRA, because of their uniform or their beliefs, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but never solely because of their sex. In the era when Islamic terror groups hijacked aircraft it was rare that women were harmed. When a Trans World Airlines jet was hijacked in 1985, for example, the terrorists released all the women and children, including the Americans.

It’s official: people who talk about the problem of Pakistani men abusing white working-class girls have no place in polite society. Raise so much as a peep of concern about Muslim grooming gangs and you’ll be expelled from the realm of the decent. You’ll be shushed, exiled, encouraged to clean out your polluted mind. That has been the experience of Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, who quit as shadow equalities minister this week over her Sun article on the gang of largely Muslim men in Newcastle who last week were found guilty of 100 offences, including rape against women and girls. Published last Thursday, Champion’s article said: ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

If there was a buzzword from last summer then it was surely 'burkini'. The media got its swimsuit in a twist over France's decision to ban the Islamic garment from its beaches. Slow-witted Anglophone columnists – many of whom have a curious predilection for insulting the French – lapped it up and enthusiastically portrayed Islam as the victim of Gallic oppression. Those trusty custodians of liberal values, the Guardian and the New York Times, got particularly worked up, the former declaring in an editorial that 'women's right to dress as they feel comfortable and fitting should be defended against those coercing them into either covering or uncovering.

Today's Holy Smoke podcast responds to rumours that the Government is planning to betray parents who want to send their children to faith schools. As The Sunday Times reported: Ministers are expected to drop plans to allow Christian, Jewish and Muslim state schools to admit all their pupils from one faith after warnings that the move could heighten community divisions in Britain. A U-turn would jeopardise dozens of new free schools planned by faith groups, some to cope with the influx of Catholic families from Poland and other east European countries. Catholics said this weekend they would not open new state schools if they had to reserve half their places for children of other faiths, raising new school funding problems for the government.

The Big Sick is a rom-com that’s smarter than most rom-coms, which isn’t saying much, admittedly. It stars a Muslim man from a Pakistani background as the romantic lead, which has to be all to the good, and one character does pinpoint exactly what’s wrong with the internet: ‘You go online and they hate Forrest Gump… best fucking movie ever!’ (So true.) But at two hours it is overlong — Christopher Nolan had evacuated Dunkirk in that time, let’s remember — and it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. (Big sick, bad taste. Although, in fact, it’s not that kind of sick. This film may have the worst title of all time.