IN A recent Daily Telegraph podcast, Jacob Rees-Mogg defended the right of Muslims to proselytise freely in this country as follows:
‘I think that Muslims should be entitled to say that people should convert to Islam – that is what their faith believes – as I am entitled to say that if you want to save your soul, you should all become Catholics, and . . . repent and believe the Gospel . . . Should I not be allowed to say that? And therefore, if I’m allowed to say that, surely the Muslims should be allowed to say that you should do whatever the equivalent Muslim formulation is.’
It is not clear whether he was speaking of private exchanges between individuals, or public gatherings. Naturally the former fall outside the scope of the law, but if he was approving the latter, entirely different considerations come into play; as, indeed, they did with regard to Catholics at a time when the Roman church was closely intertwined with politics.
It was not until the Papists Act of 1778 that Roman Catholics could exempt themselves from suspicion of being potential traitors to king and country by taking an oath of loyalty to the reigning monarch and abjuring the Pope’s claim to either temporal or spiritual authority in Great Britain.
Like Roman Catholicism in Tudor England and throughout the 17th and most of the 18th centuries, Islam is not simply a religion: it is a supranational, quasi-political ideology, and one which, being entirely alien to our culture, offers a far greater challenge to our laws and to representative government than ever Catholicism did.
While Mr Rees-Mogg equates Muslim ‘extremists’ with the IRA, and acknowledges that they are ‘a real problem’, he appears not to take account of the non-violent, but insidious, jihad which is being waged against the West by many of the allegedly ‘moderate’ Islamists who would convert us to their religion.
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler is a French anthropologist who has made an in-depth study (‘The Brotherhood and its Networks: an Investigation’) of the methods being used to entrench Islamic norms in Western countries by the hydra-headed Muslim Brotherhood: an organisation formed in 1928, a mere four years after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, with the goal of establishing a global Islamic caliphate. More ominous than the terrorist threat, she says, is the legalistic Islamism practised by the Brotherhood, which attacks the laws, the rules and the values of European societies, subverting them from within.
In ‘The Strategy for Islamic Cultural Action Outside the Islamic World’, a publication by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization which was strongly influenced by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the leading intellectuals of the Brotherhood, the constant refrain is that young Muslims born in non-Muslim countries must not, at any price, be allowed to assimilate into the host culture. To that end, a programme of education in mosques and Islamic Centres, to inculcate the Arabic language and the ‘pure’ Islam allegedly practised by Muhammad and his companions, must supplement state education: the aim being for Muslims to achieve economic co-existence with the host population while ‘preserving their spiritual and moral superiority’.
However, the programme of the Brotherhood does not stop at preventing young Muslims from being subsumed into Western cultures; their plan is to make Islamic practices the norm for all. In our trustful naivety, we are to be led slowly into the jaws of a sharia which may swallow us whole, should demographics and the exploitation of an electoral system unable to cope with the Muslim block vote result in a full Islamic takeover of these islands. The Brotherhood actually believe that, once we have experienced the Islamic way of life, we will prefer it to what they perceive (with some justice) to be the decadence and immorality of our own civilisation.
So how is the Brotherhood’s dense web of innocently-named cultural and educational organisations, its network of Islamic Centres and ‘charities’, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by freedom of thought, freedom of association and freedom of religion to assimilate us, step by unwary step, into sharia compliance?
By ‘entryism’, certainly: insinuating its members and supporters into positions of authority in schools and universities and hospitals; into institutions, into political parties, into the media and think-tanks and advisory bodies, gradually shifting our vocabulary and the way we operate, with the help of DEI, and frequent cries of ‘Islamophobia!’ and ‘Racism!’
Also by establishing its members and supporters as ‘community leaders’ who address government on behalf of those they ‘represent’: official mouthpieces, and de facto chieftains of the essentially tribal colonies which have been allowed to grow up in our towns and cities.
However, in her new book, ‘Le Djihad par le marché: Comment l’islam radical s’empare du marché halal’ (‘Djihad through the market: How radical Islam is seizing control of the halal market’) Florence Bergeaud-Blackler focuses on a less recognised method of spreading Islamic norms throughout indigenous Western societies, in defiance of the will of their majority populations (see her interview, in English, with Maral Salmassi here).
Though we are accustomed to use of the term only in relation to meat, ‘halal’ and its opposite, ‘haram’, simply mean ‘pure and permitted’ and ‘impure and not permitted’ respectively, and are used generally by Muslims to indicate compliance or non-compliance with sharia; not merely in relation to food, but to cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, travel, tourism, finance, everything: creating ‘a daily framework of obedience’ that lays down laws governing virtually the whole of life.
The natural extension of this is what Florence calls ‘the halal economy’, an economic ecosystem combining the market in halal products with Islamic finance and certification, generating both money and authority. As whole areas of towns and cities are taken over by Muslims, non-Muslim residents must either accept the imposition of blanket halal – no pubs; no dogs on the street; assaults on women who dare to go unveiled; etc – or move elsewhere.
Where food is concerned, the temptation, in cities with large Muslim populations, must be for local businesses which wish to survive to go completely ‘halal’, since even the proximity of something ‘haram’ on their shelves is held to contaminate everything around it.
Perhaps the most potent threat to the survival of native European cultures is Islamic finance, which instead of interest (usury being forbidden in Islam) features the sharing of risks and profits. A lot may be said in favour of a system which refuses to make money out of money. However, halal finance is also an excellent way of enforcing other Islamic norms upon a host population crying out for investment, since anything financed by Islamic structures must adhere to religious principles.
A number of government buildings in London are already sharia compliant, their ownership having been transferred to Middle Eastern banks and businessmen to finance an Islamic bond; and though there may be little objection to civil servants being deprived of alcohol and pornography during working hours, it seems a little harsh to deny them the odd bacon sandwich; while, for women, the possibility of a future insistence upon the niqab is daunting. Far, far worse, though, is the fact that our own failing financial system is leading to the widespread acquisition of British land and property by Islamic interests eager to remake our country in their image.
With the internet awash with Islamic propaganda (just see what a Google search on some of the most contentious issues throws up, page after page) it would be pointless to make Muslims’ overt attempts to convert people to their religion illegal: but their more insidious tactics, in service of a long-term strategy of non-violent conquest, should surely be laid bare and opposed by any government committed to the interests of the indigenous peoples of these islands.
The ‘Strategy for Islamic Cultural Action Outside the Islamic World’ states plainly that it ‘calls for . . . the safeguarding of Muslims’ cultural identity against the pitfalls of ideological and political trends which do not match our civilisational identity.’
What about the ‘civilisational identity’ of the native population?
Successive governments have opened our borders to overwhelming numbers of incomers whose religion and ‘civilisational identity’ does not match our own; who believe our culture to be inferior; and who are working stealthily, and with an evangelical determination, to undermine and replace it.
We cannot outlaw attempts to convert us to Islam. We can but hope that at the next general election we will have the chance to vote for a party, or alliance of parties, whose manifesto faces up squarely both to the implications of the approaching demographic disaster and to the aspirations of the Brotherhood, and which has devised a detailed and practicable programme to ensure the continued supremacy of British culture and identity in the only country we can call our own.
