The joy of Islamophobia

Whenever I hear the word ‘Islamophobia’ used, I remember this literary dialogue:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

No wonder my late mother-in-law insisted Alice contained all the philosophy anyone would ever need. In this case, Lewis Carroll sensed our civilisation was declining and he identified lexical laxity as a telling symptom of that downward slide.

Which is to be master is these days beyond doubt: precisely the groups facilitating the demise of the West. They wield the hammer, and it’s language that’s on the anvil, ready to be beaten into any shape, no matter how awful. The word ‘phobia’ is a case in point.

The dictionary defines it as “an uncontrollable, irrational, and lasting fear of” something or other. Hence, when Boris Johnson in his usual offhand manner describes Geert Wilders as an “Islamophobe”, one would be within one’s right to assume that Mr Wilders is scared of Islam and its practitioners irrationally and uncontrollably.

But that’s not what Mr Johnson means, is it? Flippantly louche he may be, but he is neither a fool nor an ignoramus. If he uses a word in any other than its true meaning, that’s simply to remind us “which is to be master”.

If Mr Wilders is scared of Muslims, his fear is about as rational as anything can be. Muslims make no secret of their intention to murder him, rendering it impossible for Mr Wilders to step out without burly armed bodyguards in attendance. And since he does appear in public as often as any politician must, Mr Wilders seems capable of controlling that fear very well indeed.

Johnson knows this as well as anybody. Hence he uses the word ‘Islamophobia’ in its Humpty Dumpty meaning of refusing to accept the woke fads mandated by our would-be masters. Thus ‘transphobia’ means opposition to any aspect of force-feeding society with the sub-culture of mental disorder. It doesn’t mean that any such opponent screams and runs away whenever he espies a bearded woman walking towards him.

And ‘Islamophobia’, as used by Johnson and his ilk, means a rebellion, however tacit or mild, against the sub-culture of ‘multicultural inclusivity’ our masters use as the sledgehammer to smash our real culture.

We are still allowed to find fault with Islamic terrorism, coyly termed ‘Islamist’ by our masters. The implication is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Islam, even if suicide bombers scream “Allahu akbar!” when pulling the cord. They are only guilty of scriptural literalism, taking the hundreds of Koranic verses calling for violence at face value.

That great Islamic scholar George W. Bush put that in a nutshell immediately after 9/11: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”

That Muslims started assaulting Christendom even before Mohammed’s death in 632 AD and have never stopped has nothing to do with Islam. It may suggest doctrinally hostile intent in English, but not in Humpty Dumpty. There it means peace.

This sustained history of violence has ebbed and flowed, flaring up today, abating tomorrow, only to splash out again the day after. The weapons have varied, from cold steel to missiles to – and this gets us back to Geert Wilders – what a jihad ideologue once described as “the womb of every Muslim woman”.

The much-maligned ‘displacement theory’ is based on calculations spinning out of that part of the female anatomy. A sustained growth in the Muslim population of Western countries will eventually turn them Islamic if unmatched, ideally outpaced, by a concomitant growth in the indigenous population. Whether such growth in the Muslim population comes from immigration or a high birth rate is immaterial.

While I find plenty wrong with the monomaniac exponents of this theory, I see nothing wrong with the theory itself. In fact, it brings back to memory the mathematical problem that tortured me as a schoolboy. It was about a swimming pool with two pipes, with water flowing in through one and out through the other. Depending on the flow rates, the old water could be completely replaced, and don’t ask me for any details.

In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq outlined a dystopic fantasy of a Muslim France. But the problem with modernity is two-fold: it both preempts satire and enables dystopic fantasies to come true. If mathematics still works, the danger does exist.

Nor is it just long term. A large minority of cultural aliens, not to say hostiles, can damage the host culture even if the minority is well-behaved and doesn’t threaten to become a majority. I don’t know enough about the demographic trends to make mathematical predictions, but anyone who thinks Muslim minorities are well-behaved needs to have his eyes, ears and indeed head examined.

That makes large-scale Islamic immigration a serious problem. Fearing Islam is thus both the prerogative and duty of anyone who wishes to hang on to whatever little is left of our civilisation. There’s nothing irrational about it.

In 2022, net migration to the UK reached a record-breaking figure of 745,000. Three-quarters of a million. In one year. And most of that migration was Islamic. The inflow pipe in that swimming pool is working overtime.

Yet I don’t blame Islam for this, even though I can’t see how anyone can take that patchwork quilt of a religion seriously. It is what it is, but the problem is that the West isn’t what it used to be. It is losing its nerve and self-confidence at the same rate and for the same reasons as Rome did during the period described by Gibbon.

Whatever the relative physical strength of Christendom and Islam during different periods of history, the former’s metaphysical strength was always going to allow it to triumph in the long run. It’s that metaphysical strength that the West has lost, just as Rome once lost it.

Like Rome, we’ve become so tolerant that we welcome and even enforce bogus equality among all creeds. Our own is long since lost, and we propose to counter religious fanaticism with beatific smiles and meaningless bien pensant phrases. By burying our own creed beneath the multi-culti pile, we are putting our civilisation six feet under.

The word ‘Islamophobia’, with its implicit glorification of multi-culti diversity and opprobrium of anyone finding anything wrong with it, is at least a good illustration and possibly even proof. Our own unique identity has become so diluted that it has lost its taste, flavour and strength.

A barbarian onslaught doesn’t cause this enfeeblement; it merely emphasises it. And any attempt to resist is doomed to failure unless the West recovers its erstwhile inner strength.

That doesn’t mean Islamic penetration shouldn’t be resisted – thank God for opiates relieving the agony of incurable cancer. But the disease remains just as deadly even if the patient has his senses befuddled.