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If the events of the last few months have shown us anything then it’s this. We have to stop tolerating people who have no interest in tolerating our ways of life.
That’s what I just said in a television interview in Britain which has since gone viral, clearly resonating with many people. And why did I say it?
I said it because of what’s unfolding in Britain, because of what is now staring us all in the face even if much of the ruling class refuse to see it.
Our elected politicians and democracy being intimidated and harassed by a radical, activist mob.
A politician murdered in his constituency office, a police officer murdered outside parliament, and a British soldier very nearly beheaded on our streets.
A teacher who is still in hiding because of serious threats to his life, who has been forced to accept he is ‘unlikely to ever return home’.
The highest rates of anti-Semitic hate for decades, leaving British Jews living in fear and wondering if they should just leave the country, their home, altogether.
The fact we have now spent five months watching thousands of people glorifying terrorist atrocities and, by supporting Hamas, implicitly calling for similar atrocities as those on October 7th to take place in the future.
A string of major terrorist attacks against our country and people, as well as dozens more ‘late-stage’ terrorist plots that were only just foiled by police.
Our major opposition party, the Labour party, increasingly in thrall not to the majority of ordinary British people but to minority sectional interests.
And the fact we now have a political, cultural and media class that is, very clearly, incapable of saying out loud what all these things have in common.
And what is that?
It is the growing threat from radical, violent Islamism.
It is the growing threat this barbaric, medieval, and backward ideology poses to our institutions, our values, our fellow citizens, our ways of life, and our rule of law.
None of this happened in a vacuum.
As I’ve argued previously, the rise of radical Islamism is being enabled and encouraged both by a radicalising woke left, whose obsession with identity politics and anti-West dogma is giving Islamists a helping hand, and by the specific policy of mass immigration, which is importing people who, put simply, hate who we are.
I didn’t agree with everything Margaret Thatcher said. But I did agree with her when, after 9/11, she warned the West was “harbouring those who hated us, tolerating those who threatened us, and indulging those who weakened us”.
The rise of radical Islamism and the ugly events of the last six months also reflect how Britain and other Western nations are so far failing to meet what the author and social critic Os Guinness calls a ‘civilisational moment’ — a defining and historic turning point which will ultimately determine their future.
Whereas Western nations were once held together by a sense of dynamism, confidence, shared values, and a clear source of inspiration, in recent decades they’ve lost this, allowing critical theorists, the woke left, and now radical Islamists to unpick and undermine their institutions and sense of identity.
Our leaders, meanwhile, appear utterly incapable of calling this threat by its name. Consistently, as we saw once again last week after the disturbing scenes in the House of Commons, they’ll talk about anything and everything except the actual thing that is now threatening our ways of life and civilisation.
We are told in newspapers our politicians face ‘growing security threats’ yet are not told what is the source of these threats. We are told by national columnists such as Hugo Rifkind that the real reason for spiralling anti-Semitism and threats to our security is not radical Islamism but, bizarrely, ‘middle-class students’.
We are told over and over again by the expert class that our visibly breaking model of multiculturalism, which prioritises group difference over commonality, has been nothing but an unalloyed success while that same class ignore what is glaringly obvious to the rest of us —we have imported many people who simply hate who we are, who hate what we believe, and who hate what we stand for.
We are told after politicians like Sir David Amess are murdered ‘we should be nicer to one another’ and watch what we say on social media instead of asking who murdered them, what ideology was responsible, and how can we remove it from our society.
And we are told after major Islamist attacks, after the murder of British families at pop concerts, that we should ‘not to look back in anger’ while ignoring the very real anger and hate many of our fellow citizens clearly feel toward us.
After one attack to the next, after one protest to the next, much of our ruling class go into Zombie-mode, telling us over and over again not to think about or talk about the very thing which lies beneath and unites all these events.
That thing reflected in the awkward fact that in recent years more British Muslims left Britain to join extremist Islamist groups such as ISIS and Nusra Front than were serving in the British armed forces.
That thing which, contrary to all the talk about the far-right, very clearly represents the main threat to Britain, which accounts for the vast majority of attacks carried out and thwarted and 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police’s live investigations.
That thing which draws strength from the fact there are thousands if not tens of thousands of Islamist sympathisers in Britain, some of whom the security services are actually telling us should be removed from the country but who have been allowed to stay on ‘human rights’ grounds.
That thing which is also drawing strength from the fact tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of British Muslims openly tell us they do not want to integrate fully into British life and would rather live a fully or partly separate Islamic life, under sharia law while sending their children to Islamic schools.
And that thing which will, almost certainly, become much more of a challenge going forward as, between 2010 and 2030, the percentage of Muslims in Britain is forecast to increase 94%, from 2.8 to 5.6 million, one of the largest increases in all of Europe.
If we are going to seriously meet this threat, if we are to going to seriously meet the civilisational moment we face, then like most British people I think it’s time we start to draw a few lines in the sand, which is what I said on television.
But what does that mean?
Well, for a start, we need to establish a new consensus in this country, we need an entirely new political and cultural consensus.
We must accept that the era of Western nations like Britain tolerating people who do not tolerate our values, rule of law, and ways of life has to come to an end.
I’m not talking about the toleration of difference here, which is central to any healthy liberal democracy; I’m talking about the toleration of intolerant extremists who actively loathe who we are and who, if given half a chance, would happily overthrow our country and civilisation.
So how do we start doing this?
Well, here are a few specific and tangible things I think we should be doing right now, some of which are already happening in other Western nations …
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