CONSTANTINVS MAXIMVS
07-19-2004, 12:12 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/18/do1805.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/07/18/ixop.html
By Jenny McCartney
(Filed: 18/07/2004)
During the 1930s, a single, malevolent figure popped up in almost every page of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher's notoriously popular Nazi newspaper: The Jew. Hook-nosed, greasy, avaricious and libidinous, The Jew was regularly implicated in rapes and criminal conspiracies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/i/t.gif
German readers - frightened by the threat of Bolshevism, a political movement with a disproportionate number of Jewish leaders - found the lurid evocation of this "enemy within" ever more mesmerising, terrifying and enjoyable.
Eventually, as even the most casual student of history knows, many ordinary Germans were either unable or unwilling to distinguish Streicher's grotesque caricatures from the ordinary Jewish families who lived next door.
Last week, in the BBC's undercover expose of the British National Party, it became apparent that the far-Right in Britain has a new target: The Muslim.
For the moment, the BNP has suspended its public attacks on black people, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs - although such groups are still vigorously vilified in what passes for BNP in-house banter - and has devoted its energies to promoting the idea that every male British Muslim is a religious fanatic who is biding his time to assist in the corruption and overthrow of the British state.
Nick Griffin, the increasingly eloquent BNP leader, was secretly filmed telling a fired-up meeting that British Muslims were perpetuating a "massive rape wave" designed to spread Islam across the West by impregnating white girls.
He advised listeners to join the BNP "otherwise they [Muslims] will do for someone in your family". In another scene, a BNP activist fantasised about machine-gunning worshippers in the local mosque.
This BNP strategy - in which The Muslim is repeatedly caricatured as a violent, duplicitous fundamentalist with a voracious sexual predilection for white women - is beginning to pay dividends. In the recent Euro-elections, the party polled 800,000 votes.
Many British people - worried by the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the mounting numbers of asylum seekers - are dangerously receptive to the BNP's notion that British Muslims pose a lightly slumbering threat to British culture and democracy.
The BNP's vivid portrait of a generic, violent Muslim radical bears no resemblance, of course, to the vast majority of Muslims, who live peaceably with their non-Muslim neighbours.
But - as the BNP would have it - that affable schoolteacher who lives next door, spends most of his free time gardening, and attends the mosque once a week, is just lying low until he gets the call from his "brothers" to attack. Quick, better get in there first!
What is deeply disturbing is the leakage of these insidious views beyond the sealed circle of far-Right activists. Quasi-respectable thinkers are now apt to spout a garbled combination of Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations, carefully selected and interpreted quotations from the Koran, and assorted chunks of simplified history to "prove" that Muslims are an inherently warlike, intolerant people.
Those who would freely own up to differences in Christian creeds - between, say, Creationists and the Church of England - will admit to no such shades of grey in Islam.
They will happily equate the likes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist Egyptian cleric who backs Palestinian suicide bombers, with Dr Zaki Badawi, the respected representative of the majority of British Muslims.
Dr Badawi has roundly condemned both suicide bombers and al-Qaeda, and specifically reminded British Muslims that Britain is an "abode of peace" in which one can be both Muslim and fully loyal to the British state. What more does he have to do: walk down Pall Mall wrapped in a Union Flag?
One might, in cooler moments, reflect how odd it is that such a "warlike" people - apparently so desperately eager to seize the sword and lop off Christian heads, and so terrifyingly efficient at so doing - have in fact been the victims of two of Europe's most brutal and recent repressions: that of Srebrenica, the UN "safe area" in which 7,000 Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995 while UN peace-keeping troops stood idly by, and Kosovo, in which the UN intervened to protect Kosovar Albanian Muslims from a similar fate.
There has not yet been an al-Qaeda attack in Britain, despite repeated warnings from our government that one is "inevitable". In the miserable event of such an attack, the BNP would certainly be delighted with its galvanising effect on far-Right recruitment.
And there is little doubt in my mind that assaults on peaceful, law-abiding British Muslims would increase, fanned by an increasingly hysterical rhetoric - already in place - that encourages non-Muslim Britons to see each and every Muslim citizen as a threat.
The British should indeed be alert to threats to our civilisation, so long as that civilisation remains representative of fairness and tolerance. On present evidence, the greatest threat to our civilisation - the true "enemy within" - comes, not from British Muslims, but from the far-Right and its culpable band of fellow-travellers.
By Jenny McCartney
(Filed: 18/07/2004)
During the 1930s, a single, malevolent figure popped up in almost every page of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher's notoriously popular Nazi newspaper: The Jew. Hook-nosed, greasy, avaricious and libidinous, The Jew was regularly implicated in rapes and criminal conspiracies.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/i/t.gif
German readers - frightened by the threat of Bolshevism, a political movement with a disproportionate number of Jewish leaders - found the lurid evocation of this "enemy within" ever more mesmerising, terrifying and enjoyable.
Eventually, as even the most casual student of history knows, many ordinary Germans were either unable or unwilling to distinguish Streicher's grotesque caricatures from the ordinary Jewish families who lived next door.
Last week, in the BBC's undercover expose of the British National Party, it became apparent that the far-Right in Britain has a new target: The Muslim.
For the moment, the BNP has suspended its public attacks on black people, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs - although such groups are still vigorously vilified in what passes for BNP in-house banter - and has devoted its energies to promoting the idea that every male British Muslim is a religious fanatic who is biding his time to assist in the corruption and overthrow of the British state.
Nick Griffin, the increasingly eloquent BNP leader, was secretly filmed telling a fired-up meeting that British Muslims were perpetuating a "massive rape wave" designed to spread Islam across the West by impregnating white girls.
He advised listeners to join the BNP "otherwise they [Muslims] will do for someone in your family". In another scene, a BNP activist fantasised about machine-gunning worshippers in the local mosque.
This BNP strategy - in which The Muslim is repeatedly caricatured as a violent, duplicitous fundamentalist with a voracious sexual predilection for white women - is beginning to pay dividends. In the recent Euro-elections, the party polled 800,000 votes.
Many British people - worried by the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the mounting numbers of asylum seekers - are dangerously receptive to the BNP's notion that British Muslims pose a lightly slumbering threat to British culture and democracy.
The BNP's vivid portrait of a generic, violent Muslim radical bears no resemblance, of course, to the vast majority of Muslims, who live peaceably with their non-Muslim neighbours.
But - as the BNP would have it - that affable schoolteacher who lives next door, spends most of his free time gardening, and attends the mosque once a week, is just lying low until he gets the call from his "brothers" to attack. Quick, better get in there first!
What is deeply disturbing is the leakage of these insidious views beyond the sealed circle of far-Right activists. Quasi-respectable thinkers are now apt to spout a garbled combination of Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations, carefully selected and interpreted quotations from the Koran, and assorted chunks of simplified history to "prove" that Muslims are an inherently warlike, intolerant people.
Those who would freely own up to differences in Christian creeds - between, say, Creationists and the Church of England - will admit to no such shades of grey in Islam.
They will happily equate the likes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist Egyptian cleric who backs Palestinian suicide bombers, with Dr Zaki Badawi, the respected representative of the majority of British Muslims.
Dr Badawi has roundly condemned both suicide bombers and al-Qaeda, and specifically reminded British Muslims that Britain is an "abode of peace" in which one can be both Muslim and fully loyal to the British state. What more does he have to do: walk down Pall Mall wrapped in a Union Flag?
One might, in cooler moments, reflect how odd it is that such a "warlike" people - apparently so desperately eager to seize the sword and lop off Christian heads, and so terrifyingly efficient at so doing - have in fact been the victims of two of Europe's most brutal and recent repressions: that of Srebrenica, the UN "safe area" in which 7,000 Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995 while UN peace-keeping troops stood idly by, and Kosovo, in which the UN intervened to protect Kosovar Albanian Muslims from a similar fate.
There has not yet been an al-Qaeda attack in Britain, despite repeated warnings from our government that one is "inevitable". In the miserable event of such an attack, the BNP would certainly be delighted with its galvanising effect on far-Right recruitment.
And there is little doubt in my mind that assaults on peaceful, law-abiding British Muslims would increase, fanned by an increasingly hysterical rhetoric - already in place - that encourages non-Muslim Britons to see each and every Muslim citizen as a threat.
The British should indeed be alert to threats to our civilisation, so long as that civilisation remains representative of fairness and tolerance. On present evidence, the greatest threat to our civilisation - the true "enemy within" - comes, not from British Muslims, but from the far-Right and its culpable band of fellow-travellers.