I make and have never made any secret of the fact that I dislike much of Islam. There are only a few sects in Islam that I have any time for and I admire them because they differ greatly from mainstream Islam in that they don’t counsel hatred for non-Muslims, don’t oppress women and don’t have a murderous attitude towards LGB people. I dislike Islam with the same intensity that I dislike Nazism and Communism and any other ideology similar to them and I slag off Islam for the same reasons that I would slag off Nazism, Communism and other oppressive ideologies.
However my dislike of the ideology of Islam does not extend to many Muslims. I know that there are Muslims who do practise their faith, or rather their interpretation of it, in a peaceful manner and in a way that is respectful of the fact that Britain and its culture is based on Christianity. I know that these Muslims are as horrified by the Islamic Rape Gangs as non-Muslims are and who bring their families up to abhor the beliefs and practises that created such gangs.
I’ve dealt with Muslims who have contributed fiscally to Britain, started businesses that pay taxes and who have served all those around them not just Muslims and who look down on those Muslims who just take welfare and breed other welfare burdens. There are Muslims out there who are genuinely peaceful and who have no truck whatsoever with any of the alphabet soup of jihadi groups that exist in the UK, who don’t attend mosques with extremist preachers and who have taken the best not the worst bits of Islamic theology into their hearts and amplified them. These are the Muslims who are as disturbed by the extremist and aggressive public prayers on the street and who believe that expressions of faith should be for the home or the mosque. These Muslims are also the ones who see no difference in worth between men and women and who would be as pleased to see their daughters become doctors as they would see their sons take the same path and are not the same sort of Muslim who would entomb their female relatives in a burka or a chador or badge them with a hijab.
There are Muslims who whilst believing that Mohammed is their prophet and had positive qualities when compared to others at the time, also accept that some of his behaviour was contextual for his time and not something to be emulated to the letter in the modern world. There are Muslims who would save a life no matter what that life was and who would as readily rescue a Jew, a Christian or a Hindu as anyone else for to them life itself is sacred regardless of whose life it is. I’ve met LGB Muslims who put the fearsome Islamic restrictions on LGB people and activities into the context of the time they were written and who believe that they should not be applied today. I remember chatting to an Gay Muslim who said that ‘Allah created me as an LGB person and Allah is perfect and doesn’t create rubbish’. He believed that Allah created him as a Gay man and may have made him Gay for some reason known only to his deity Allah.
I have no problem with these sorts of Muslims. They are the sort of Muslims who would readily die for King and Country because that’s the sort of people they are. They are decent individuals even if they may be decent in spite of Islam rather than because of it.
However the time has come for these decent British Muslims to take a stand. To raise your hands and your voices and join with others of all religions or none, who are concerned about the growth of Islamism and those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with Western societies.
The country is dividing along religious grounds. We now have a situation where Islam is increasingly on one side and an alliance of Christians, British nationalists, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and atheists are on the other. One side believes in the supremacy of Islam and in an Islam in its most fundamentalist form untainted by social and religious intercourse with those of other belief systems and the other believes that Islam should not be given an especial place in British society and that we should be free to believe and say what we want about any and all ideologies. One side wants to censor any criticism of Islam whilst the opposite side wants free debate.
I can understand to a certain extent that there is fear among some settled and integrated British Muslims, fear of social opprobrium, fear of the extremists from within Islam and fear that the British state will not back them up or protect them if they so speak up.
Speaking up, being the contrarian in the room is scary and I know this because I belong to a non-Orthodox Jewish community where I know having a conservative viewpoint or wanting Israel to win this latest existential war by any means necessary, makes me an object of scorn. I refuse to pray for the ‘Palestinians’, refuse to cheer pointless and dangerous calls for a two state solution or for the sort of ‘peace’ that will see Israelis live forever in fear. I’m an oddball and sometimes it’s not nice being the oddball and because of my viewpoint I’ve had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous Leftists but at least it’s honest work. However I know that my fears about what my own community might do to me for my contrarianism is limited to being asked to find a new synagogue. I don’t, as many Muslims who challenge extremism do, have to live in fear of physical attack by some nutcase of my own faith. No bearded Hassid or pink haired genderfluid Reform Rabbi is going to send the heavies in for saying ‘destroy the Mullahs of Iran’, but a Muslim might have to worry about some Jihad addled thug killing him if for example he questioned some tenet of Islam.
As society in Britain starts to divide into broadly two tribes it’s time for those Muslims in Britain who have embraced us and our ways and who have been assets to Britain to speak up. Not just speak up but do what is necessary to defeat the extremists and the mental fundamentalists. Tell us and the relevant authorities about treasonous preaching in the mosques, about the extremists on the streets and the gang rapists who have lived all too freely in your communities and who have no shame about their behaviour.
British Muslims, give up your wrong’uns, the thugs and the criminals, those who promulgate hatred against Christians and Jews and the huddled conspiring jihadis who yearn to turn the whole world into one run by the very worst aspects of Islam, the sort of Islam that maybe you or your parents or grandparents, decided that they didn’t want anything to do with and escaped to Britain from. Remember the criminals and extremists in your community are the ones who make the lives of you and your co-religionists a misery both here in the UK and overseas, remember it is those who will not bend in their belief who have massacred countless Muslims in Muslim lands. They, along with the rapists, supremacists and the criminal detritus of your community are also the ones who have caused a growing hatred to grow against Islam and their actions bring hatred to you, the decent human being who happens to be Muslim as well as to the wrong’uns.
I do not want good people hated along with the bad therefore the good should speak up, not to be one of the all too numerous taqiyya artists who lie about Islam to non-Muslims that the Islamic community has produced, but to be a person who is honest about matters of faith and is not debating primarily for the purpose of dawa. Be honest and say there are good bits about you faith but there are also bad bits just as there are good and bad people. Do what the British Jews did and construct a British way of being Muslim just as Jews created the Minhag Anglia or the British way of being Jewish.
I want to see more of the sort of Muslims who make me want to dance around my kitchen singing Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu coming out of the woodwork, out of wherever they are hiding and speak up and work for the benefit of all. I know you are out there but we all need to see you, hear you and show us that you are decent. I don’t want to see good people trapped with those who are bad or whose ideologies are bad and to avoid that I want to see all those who are good among Britain’s Muslims and who are loyal to the nation and respectful of Britain’s heritage, pick our side and take a stand with your fellow decent human beings.