Islam is good and original

But, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, where it’s good it’s not original, and where it’s original it’s not good.

Phew, am I glad I’ve managed to get this out in the nick of time, before such a statement will represent a shortcut to prison.

That time may come soon if the government succumbs to the pressure exerted by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (who is clearly the disinterested party here).

They insist that the government adopt as official their definition of Islamophobia, which according to them is “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness and perceived Muslimness.”

It’s good to know that our senior politicians still possess enough innate sense of style to come up with such lovely neologisms. Yet I do think we need to distinguish between Muslimness and another neologism, this one my own: Muslimishness.

This is the same thing as Muslimness, but without going the whole hog. Oops, forget the porcine idiom and don’t let anyone know I said it, for one expression of Muslimness may be cutting my throat.

Speaking of which, I wonder if the drafters of the proposed official definition would be amenable to us taking exception to some “expressions of Muslimness”, such as cutting the throats of those who say something Muslims don’t like.

If so, then also exempt from the charge of racism should be targeting such expressions of Muslimness as killing Jews, Christians and other infidels; flying hijacked airliners into tall buildings; blowing up public transport; driving vehicles through crowds of bystanders; spraying with bullets editorial offices of Western papers; desecrating Jewish and Christian cemeteries and places of worship; making women wear Halloween costumes; female genital mutilation; attempts to turn whole towns into Sharia areas; and especially the stoning of adulterers.

Anticipating a possible objection, I hasten to acknowledge that practitioners of the other two Abrahamic religions, Christians and Jews, are also eminently capable of doing horrible things, even if they do draw the line at some of the specifically Muslim practices.

But Muslims are the only people who do such things not in spite of their religion but because of it. Hence chaps like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Al Capone or Lucky Luciano were indeed nasty bits of work. However, it’s hard to insist that they murdered because their religions demanded it – that they were acting out their Judaismness or Catholicness, to use the verbal virtuosity cited above.

Would the new definition cover the observation that Islam is culturally incompatible with the West? I hope not, for this would make us ignore the evidence before our eyes.

If you travel around the UK, you’re bound to come to the same conclusion I’ve come to: for a Muslim to become a good Briton, he has to be a bad Muslim (that’s where my neologism ‘Muslimishness’ comes in).

Thus I have no reason to question the Britishness of Home Secretary Sajid Javid, but I do wonder how British are those schoolchildren in London’s Tower Hamlets, Bradford and Luton who go to Muslim schools, speak Arabic there and at home, watch only Muslim TV, listen only to Muslim radio and are taught that one day the country will become a caliphate.

I’ve seen reports that some of those tots don’t even realise they live in an English-speaking country. Will I be allowed to lament this situation if the new definition of racism is adopted?

We already have a whole raft of Race Relation Acts protecting racial minorities, including those that wish to become majorities, from abuse (and in any case Muslims aren’t a racial minority). We also have numerous laws criminalising personal attacks, including those motivated by religious hatred.

The new law (which is exactly what’s being proposed) is therefore redundant – unless, and only unless, it’s designed to criminalise criticism and to hamper the work of the anti-terrorist police.

Yet what interests me isn’t just the immediate consequences of the proposed law, but the real motivation behind it. The underlying urge is common to the Left, which is the margin where all the drafters reside.

They hate the West and everything it stands for – which happens to be the opposite of Muslim desiderata. That unenviable emotion leads them on a never-ending search for battering rams able to punch holes in the already crumbling walls of our civilisation.

One such battering ram, perhaps the weightiest one, is the promotion of unlimited Muslim immigration to a point where it more closely resembles colonisation. They know that the rapidly expanding Islamic enclaves threaten to engulf vast areas of Britain – which is exactly what they want.

However, this isn’t what most British subjects want, at least those who are sensitive to the menace. Nobody had asked them before turning their neighbourhoods into Kasbahs, and more and more of them resent that. Hence some targeting of “expressions of Muslimness and perceived Muslimness”, which is bound to intensify pari passu with the creeping Islamisation.

The Left, which these days boasts a cross-party parliamentary consensus, will fight any resistance tooth and nail, and not because most of them care about racial equality or Islam (Sadiq Khan is an obvious exception).

What’s at stake is their inner, visceral imperative to destroy, and their professed oversensitivity to Islamophobia, loosely defined, is only one of its manifestations. The entire programme of Corbyn’s Labour will serve the same purpose nicely and instantly.

And speaking of Labour, before they try to cast out the mote of Islamophobia out of our eye, they should first cast out the beam of anti-Semitism out of their own eye.

Oh well, I started with a paraphrase, so I might as well finish with one.