The following unpublished letter to the editor illustrates considerations
that have become increasingly politically incorrect to discuss candidly
in the West including increasingly here. A prominent British politician
with whom I shared the text labeled it a “brave” letter. Since I held no
elective office, it wasn’t really brave on my part; but it would clearly
have been brave for a British office holder to write such a candid letter.
With “safe spaces” in our colleges and universities and the like, it is also
coming to be increasingly difficult for our political leaders to candidly
discuss many pressing issues. We need to elect to office knowledgeable
people who are not afraid to tell it like it is.
4 West Eden Court
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48108
USA
Tel. 734/477-9942
November 18, 2015
Sir,
The statement by Gideon Rachman (The clash of civilisations revisited,
Comment, Nov. 17, 2015) that “life in multicultural nations, most of
which have large Muslim minorities, offers a daily refutation of the idea
that different faiths and cultures cannot live and work together” should
not go unchallenged.
As is well known in 1968 when Enoch Powell give his infamous Rivers
of Blood speech on the perils of mass immigration he was labeled an
extremist and racist very much in the politically correct style that has
prevailed in the West to this day. Since then the UK has had large
scale immigration with a large Muslim contingent and it has had blood
in its streets perpetrated by people from the Muslim community. The
same has been true now in Madrid, Paris and even on a street in Boston
in my own own country, not to mention 9/11.
Clearly correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But when a
concept like jihad is core to a belief system like Islam there certainly
are grounds for believing that the relationship is causal and not just the
result of Gulf Arab money radicalizing the Muslim world as Rachman
seems to assert. On this score, I would simply cite an incident from
the very early history of my own country.
After John Adams and Thomas Jefferson met with Tripoli’s envoy in
London in 1786 concerning the seizure of American ships in the
Mediterranean they reported to John Jay: “We took the liberty to make
some inquires concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war
upon nations who had done them no injury…The Ambassador answered
us, that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written
in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledge their
authority, were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war
upon them whenever they could be found, and to make slaves of all
they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman who was slain
in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” (The Diplomatic Correspondence
of the United States from the Treaty of Peace to the adoption of the
Present Constitution, Vol. II, p. 342).
Given Surah 47 and other passages of the Koran on jihad and the
Muslims’ own account of Muhammad’s life and sayings, it is simply
disingenuous for Western politicians to assert that “Islam is a religion
of peace” or that the nub of the problem does not lie in the core of
Islamic ideology or beliefs.
In the face of a failure of our prominent columnists, top political leaders
and influential opinion makers in the West to fess up to the problem here,
our best hope would seem to be the likes of a Nigal Farage and his UKIP,
a Marine Le Pen and her National Front and a Geert Wilders and his
Party of Freedom. If that won’t work out, we are likely in the West to
get a fascist solution and the total destruction of the positive liberal
values that the West achieved with so much blood and tears
Sincerely yours,
John Howard Wilhelm, Ph.D.,
Economics