Excellent article by Peter Oborne in todays Independent.
Last week, Martyn Gilleard, a Nazi sympathiser in East Yorkshire, was jailed for 16 years. Police found four nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat. Gilleard had been preparing for a war against Muslims. In a note at his flat he had written, “I am sick and tired of hearing nationalists talking of killing Muslims, blowing up mosques and fighting back only to see these acts of resistance fail. The time has come to stop the talking and start to act.”
The Gilleard case went all but unreported. Had a Muslim been found with an arsenal of weapons and planning violent assaults, it would have been a far bigger story.
and
“There is a definite urge; don’t you have it?”, the author Martin Amis told Ginny Dougary of The Times: “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. Not letting them travel. Deportation; further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.” Here, Amis is doing much more than insulting Muslims. He is using the foul and barbarous language of fascism. Yet his books continue to sell, and his work continues to be celebrated.
The last para is frank in its admission.
We should all feel ashamed about the way we treat Muslims, in the media, in our politics, and on our streets. We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that we often like to boast is the British way. We urgently need to change our public culture.
A little hard to fathom though, considering the history of the British way.
If it were not for the seperation of the Qu’ran and Sunnah from our lives, ”tolerance, decency and fairness” would have been the sublime values that the Muslim community demonstrate to the wider public.
(Hat tip: Islamophobia Watch)
