CAPITOL IDEAS: The Death Wish Revisited
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS Tom B e t h e l l The Death Wish Revisited is the first in all history to breed and indoctrinate its own destroyers, educating at the public expense the barbarians who will...
...Muslim and other groups are encouraged to regard their own culture as meritorious as that of the host country...
...I thought of Muggeridge while reading a new book called Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, by a British journalist, Melanie Phillips...
...Extremist leaders soon learned to hide behind equal-treatment laws and non-discrimination statutes...
...The European Union represents a more active bid for self-immolation...
...Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe, covering some of the same ground, notes that Muslim immigrants to the U.S...
...With over 600 pages, the book tells us more than most people will want to know about this "castle of lies," but it will stand as alasting record...
...In America, the forces of disintegration encounter a powerful home-grown resistance that is unknown in Western Europe...
...That is why the situation is so dangerous...
...It goes without saying that the Christian schools teach "religion" at its blandest-the principal virtues inculcated being broadmindedness and nondiscrimination...
...It didn't take long for the Muslims to demand their own, which have now materialized...
...Muggeridge foresaw "Christendom's setting sun," falling birth rates, and the ugly incoming tide of abortion...
...The bad cultural habits, laws, and institutions self-imposed by the West over 40 years, in Europe particularly, will make these outbursts of Islamic terror hard to deal with...
...On the day that four Britishborn Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves up in the London underground, Britain's deputy police commissioner said on TV: "As far as I am concerned, Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together...
...habits...
...Christopher Booker and Richard North tell the full, remarkable story in the second edition of The Great Deception, the title alluding to the mendacity that has informed the whole undertaking...
...The death wish of the Western intelligentsia is mirrored by the Muslims' own "death wish"--for us...
...Phillips attributes it to "postwar exhaustion, the collapse of the British Empire and therefore of national purpose, postcoloniai flagellatory guilt of the kind that white liberals have made their specialty...
...The older generation had grown up before multiculturalism ruled...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Begnery Publishing...
...Melanie Phillips connects the dots between multiculturalism and Islamic terror, and that is her real achievement...
...W HAT HAS CAUSED THIS LOSS of self-confidence...
...What lay ahead was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the triumph of capitalism, rising prosperity, and the Soviet collapse...
...The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, attacked the way in which it had divided the country and harmed social cohesion...
...Britain is currently locked into such a spiral of decadence, self-loathing and sentimentality that it is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for selfimmolation," she writes, echoing Muggeridge...
...The Muslim schools are not expected to be quite so feeble...
...Over the past four decades, she writes, British life has been transformed by multiculturalism, a doctrine holding that British culture as it has matured through the centuries has little to recommend it...
...Islam, which has risen in proportion to the Christian decline, is like an avenging angel, returning in a spirit of retribution...
...5EPTE~BE~ 2r THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49...
...She overlooks a major cause-the collapse of Christianity in Europe...
...He marveled at the boundless enthusiasm of the visiting intelligentsia, particularly clergymen, for the Soviet regime...
...An unintended consequence was segregation...
...In Nottingham, Phillips writes, "the police handed out green ribbons after the London bombings to express solidarity with Muslims...
...I recently re-read his article, reprinted in Orthodoxy, a collection of articles from The American Spectator...
...The Imams in their mosques saw all too plainly that they weren't expected to assimilate, yet they were entitled to subsidies...
...It is a conscious attempt to obliterate the nation states of Europe, their customs and Islam, which has risen in proportion to the Christian decline, is like an avenging angel, returning in a spirit of retribution...
...The problem has been inflamed by "faith schools...
...The very idea of Britain was thought to be anachronistic, "responsible for all the ills of the world, from racism through colonialism to war...
...When once Christian countries cease to take their faith seriously, there is hell to pay--perhaps more literally than we might imagine...
...Her book, seemingly composed in a sustained fury, is an impressive diatribe against a blinded elite, unable to see that "an aggressive religious fanaticism [combined] with the multicultural ideology of victimhood has created a state of paralysis across British institutions...
...Islam was still dormant when Muggeridge wrote...
...The idea of a death wish had occurred to him when he was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s...
...Also multiculturalism, and the rise of Muslim fanaticism...
...P]arts of some cities would soon be "black holes into which no one goes without fear...
...Anything by Booker is worth reading, and this is surely his most important work...
...integrate far more successfully than they do in Europe...
...In short, involving the many in the death-wish of the few...
...They were pacifists, yet the tanks in Red Square raised their spirits...
...It has been underway for a long time, and this is where we should locate the death wish that Muggeridge discerned in Moscow in the 1930s...
...There was nothing, it seemed, they liked better than being shown round the anti- God museums...
...I N BRITAIN, THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTEMPT to deny that Islam is the problem...
...Of the newcomers to Britain, many wanted to identify with a nation whose values and history they admired, and "within which their separate ethnic identities could flourish under the umbrella of a shared sense of national identity," Phillips writes...
...silencing all warning voices, scorning the faith that might yet avert the catastrophe...
...Government education in Britain has long embraced Catholic and Protestant schools, with salaries and other expenses paid out of taxes...
...A Christian revival is essential, and that could take decades...
...But the idea of a Western death wish takes on new resonance with the revival of Muslim belligerence...
...CAPITOL IDEAS Tom B e t h e l l The Death Wish Revisited is the first in all history to breed and indoctrinate its own destroyers, educating at the public expense the barbarians who will overthrow it, brainwashing its citizens to expect and even welcome its downfall...
...The police chief worried that they were experiencing"Islamophobic attacks...
...She is Jewish, lives in London, and was once a liberal, I gather...
...In fact, those who had come to Britain earlier, in the 1950s, did assimilate better...
...War, disorder, and impoverishment replace peace, law, and prosperity...
...The expression of British values "became synonymous with racism" and measures to oppose that sin became cudgels to berate the majority...
...He warned that the country was "sleepwalking towards segregation" along the lines of ethnicity and religion...
...The Muslims set up their own enclaves in Leicester, Bradford, Leeds, and Luton, in addition to parts of London...
...But Muggeridge's fears of a collectivist future were not borne out...
...The same forces are at work in the United States, although with less potency...
...Lebanon, once half ChristJan, has shown us what happens when Arab Muslims fill the void left by Christianity in retreat...
...Since the London bombings, Phillips writes, there has been anxious discussion about the possible ill effects of the multicultural obsession...
...Even before Hezbollah's assault on Israel, the once smart shops of Beirut were being transformed into dusty souks...
...While multiculturalism supposedly treats all cultures equally, the "agenda of equality actually promotes the radical deconstruction of majority culture, the idea of the nation itself and the values of Western democracy...
...Pope John Paul would call it a culture of death...
...Only about 5 percent of nominal Christians in Europe are practicing...
...The interesting thing is that Muggeridge got the big picture right without seeing the threat that lay ahead--Islam...
...More recent newcomers found something different: 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2006 T O M B E T H E L L Britain was no longer willing to assimilate them to a national identity because it no longer had any belief in it, and certainly did not admire it--or even necessarily know any longer what it was...
...The British steered clear of them as much as possible, although some of the more impressionable young, seeing that here was a group that still believed in something beyond mere tolerance, signed on to the cause, however wicked it might be...
Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7
