Those who know me and know my writing understand that I do not hate or despise individual Muslims. I take the view, as does the excellent but Islamocritical Religion of Peace site, that we should not judge the Muslims we know by the Islam we know and also that we should not judge Islam by the Muslims we know. In other words we might come to a concrete and well evidenced understanding that Islam the ideology is awful and has, in our opinion, morphed into an ideology that enslaves and degrades and not elevates its adherents, but we should not treat those who are the adherents to this ideology as if they want the entirety of the ideology they are following. Similarly we should not think Islam is decent or indecent as an ideology just because the Muslim we might know is good or bad.

Every person with a belief, whether it be spiritual or secular, interprets that belief in their heads, I know and understand that there are Muslims who are clever enough and thoughtful enough who would save my life because it’s my life, because they understand and accept and obey the Quran verse 5:32 but ignore and reject with abundant repugnance the following verse 5:33. I know this because I do the same.

I accept my 613 religious rules but I also accept that not all of them are practicable in the modern world or even, in the light of accumulated knowledge between now and the Bronze Age Levant, desirable. To give but one example, I’m a non orthodox Jew, the equivalent of the Muslim woman who wears a Hijab because everyone else in her community is wearing them and who is otherwise thoroughly modern and open minded in her outlook. She might be disappointed if her eldest son is a screaming Queen, but she’s not going to get all Medieval on his arse. She wears the religious badge, but she accepts other, later knowledge and interprets her faith in the light of that knowledge. That’s what I was taught we should do with the Jewish Mitzvot or Commandments. We should live by them and not die because of them by following them blindly, with no background knowledge or critical thinking about them (other Jews may vary). We should obey them but build on them and interpret them afresh but in the light of both previous and latter knowledge and do that in every generation (again other Jews may vary). I’m more likely to burn down my house in my search for the Halachically perfect, Shabbat compliant coal fire* than a Muslim woman like this is going to be a terrorist or take part in some other awful action.

The point I’m trying to make is everyone makes their own decisions about their faith or their ideology, some take it to what might look to some as extremes whilst others do not. Are there Jews or Christians who could be called ‘extreme?’, of course there bloody are. There’s always going to be some subset of any religious or secular ideological group that will go a bit too far, I’m sure you can find them. However there are undoubtedly more Muslims who take an extreme view of their faith than those of other monotheistic faiths. But there are also millions of other Muslims who do not take that path and decide to gloss over and reinterpret in the light of later knowledge the nasty bits of their religious theology just as Jews and Christians do, for example the stoning of adulteresses? Nah no thanks, no need for that in this day and age. (The Rabbis laid down strict regulations about witnesses anyway, so that it didn’t happen.) There are others who are Muslim who maybe are imprisoned by those with a more literal and strict interpretation of their sect of Islam, like Afghan women or free thinking Iranians or Gay men and women in Gaza who are also in the ‘not a threat’ grouping.

There are hundreds of thousands of Muslims like I’ve described above in Britain, decent people who are a universe way from the jihadist headcases, just as there are tens of thousands of Jews like me, people who interpret some basic rules laid out in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age in the light of later knowledge, but maybe not so anoraky as me about coal fires. They are not and are never going to be violent extremists. They are workmates, the people who serve you in shops, nurses, doctors, that nice guy Mohammed in the tyre shop. They are not, never have been and probably never will be a problem for the rest of us. They are the Muslims as I’ve said many times before who make me want to sing Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu and dance around my kitchen. Decent people living decent lives who don’t deserve any public opprobrium.

I don’t want any of these decent people to be harmed or hurt in any way. I want them to be treated as the decent people they are.

However I’m worried that they might be caught up in something unwanted and unjustified. Britain is undergoing what could be called a convulsion at the moment. Long suppressed anger at the undue influence of certain Islamic community figures and movements on politics, including clan based allegiances, thereby creating adverse conditions for the indigenous Britons; Muslim crime and the suppurating sore of Muslim majority Rape Gangs; Muslim anti social behaviour and anger at Islamic norms being imposed on the majority, is starting to break out. Belfast is I believe just the start of what might happen. I can see disorder like what happened in Belfast breaking out elsewhere.

There’s likely to be trouble as the summer progresses, I can’t tell you when or what might spark it off, after all, even 5 years ago who would have expected the Southport Atrocity or the attempted decapitation in Belfast? However it may go off in such a way that no ‘Nudge Unit’ or policing action would be able to contain it.

The informational genie about problems related to migration and Islam is well and truly out of the bottle and the UK Government’s attempts to censor knowledge of Britain’s problems might make things worse. If the Government think that counter narrative information is a problem on the internet now then they’ve not considered how information can get mangled and amplified and falsified in Samizdat or in a telephone tree information distribution system for example. It’s my belief that a free and open exchange of information about Britain’s problems is necessary in order to attempt to solve them and that can be facilitated digitally, in print and in person. I can argue back to a nutter online or at a meeting or in print, I can’t do that to a closed Samizdat or telephone tree group especially if it’s a group that’s all nutters all the way down. Oh, and not even the Soviet Union under Brezhnev managed to completely stamp out Samizdat.

But I digress. The crux of the point I’m trying to make is that there are a whole lot of decent, loyal, contributory Muslims who would vomit at the idea of violent Jihad or taking part in a gang rape. They are not a problem for me or any other reasonably thinking person,but they might be a ‘problem’ for some. There are those who cannot see beyond the religious ‘badge’ and engage in violent hatred because of that. They and the ‘King Mob’ that they so often follow, refuses to judge by the content of a person’s character or the way they have lived their life, it’s just the badge that matters to them. The badge could be religious such as in the cases of Roman Catholics during the Gordon Riots or Jews in Tsarist Russia, or it could be political such as in the conflicts between Socialists and Nazis and the Nazis antecedents or in those places and times where a person’s religion determines their politics.

It could be the case that some of Britain’s decent Muslims might be in for a challenging time. I don’t want to see harm come to Mo from the tyre shop or anyone like them but it might come their way. I don’t want it. I don’t encourage it. I don’t incite it. I do however have a tendency to be pessimistic in my estimations and therefore predict that we are all in for some of those ‘interesting times’ that that Chinese geezer warned about.

But there could be an off ramp, a way to not run into a path of destruction for all of us. However it’s one that might have to come from the Muslim community itself and it might involve some people stepping out of their comfort zone. Taking this off ramp might be uncomfortable for both Muslims and to a lesser extent non-Muslims.

It’s time for Britain’s Muslims to speak up and stand up and stand alongside the rest of the decent people of Britain.

British Muslims might need to form organisations that represent Britain’s decent, integrated and contributory Muslims. They need to say about the extremists and their community’s criminals ‘not in my name’. This organisation needs, for credibility and trust reasons, to be built from the ground up and with no input or support from the British government. The reason for this group to be ground up rather than top down is that such an organisation should not be dominated by the same sort of Islamic ‘community leaders’ that have failed so dismally at representing moderate, free thinking, integrated and secular Muslims. It needs to be properly representative of Britain’s ordinary Muslims and it must be scrupulously separated from government or government linked NGO’s because fewer and fewer Britons are inclined to trust initiatives where they can perceive the hand of the UK government in them. Any organisation that is seem to be linked either with troublesome religious currents within Islam or the UK government might be rejected as either ‘Taqiyya’ or ‘Nudge Unit bullshit’ by the majority of Britons and fail dismally.

Islam is not a monolith any more than Christianity or Judaism are. Whilst there are undoubted problems from Muslims who hail from some particular currents or cultures within Islam, there are others who don’t come from those troubling religious and cultural currents and who are appalled and disgusted at what some of their co-religionists are doing in Britain. There are critically thinking Muslims and Muslims who have genuinely thrown their lot in with the rest of us and in my view they need much better representation in society than they are getting at present.

The critically thinking and integrated and loyal Muslims who may well be our neighbours and friends need to speak up and organise with others to put their case, show they are with us and to gain the benefits of standing with us. Too often the British state has ignored or sidelined integrated and contributory or liberal minded Muslims. The state has gone off on a search for ‘authenticity’ when it looks for Muslim representatives and it has treated some seriously worrying extremists as representing the entire Muslim community, even though they might not be all that representative.

It’s looking increasingly likely that the British Muslim community is, so to speak, drinking at the Last Chance Halal Saloon. Much of the British public seems increasingly fed up with Islam or rather some manifestations of Islam and the national cultures that some Muslims come from. This dislike didn’t come from nowhere, it wasn’t formed Ex Nihilo, it was formed due to the behaviour of some Muslims. Maybe it’s time for the decent British Muslims of which there are hundreds of thousands to speak up against the bad people, bad Quran interpretations and bad cultures that exist in Britain’s Muslim communities?

Sure it’s going to be difficult for them to do this, they are going to get all sorts of shit thrown at them by Islamic extremists and such like and will face a lot of community pressure for washing dirty communal linen in public. However that might be preferable to them saying ‘nothing to do with me’ and ignoring their own communities problems. This is because if the balloon does go up then King Mob and his adherents are not going to distinguish between an Islamic wrong’un or a decent individual who just happens to be Muslim. There may come a time when some madman who is part of an equally maddened mob turns up a an innocent Muslim’s front door armed with a flaming torch, the madman is not going to think ‘Have I got the right person?’ The madman and his mob will commit an act of violence and not think about who they are attacking.

I don’t want to see the innocent rolled up with and punished along with the guilty. That goes against any reasonable conception of justice. I don’t want to see those who are decent confused with those who are not and this is why I want the decent ones in Britain’s Muslim communities to speak up, speak out and stand alongside the rest of us. Together we can repair the damage that has been done by identity politics, top down multiculturalism and the State’s habit of ignoring the voices of the reasonable. We can avoid disaster but it’s going to take a lot of work on all sides. So please my Muslim friends, speak up and show us all that you are not like the others. Battle lines are being drawn up, choose the side that gives you and your families the best and most expansive future. That side is our side. Doing and saying nothing will make you look as if you are on the wrong side, the side dominated by extremists who will think of you as little more than cannon fodder in the upcoming potential conflicts.

* No matter how hard I try I cannot create a coal fire that does not need stoking between sunset Friday Night and sunset Saturday night. I am forced by the Laws of Physics and Chemistry to chuck half a bucket of coal on the fire followed by a layer of Anthracite on a Friday night and a half bucket of coal on a Saturday morning. Mechanical methods of depositing coal in the fireplace are outrageously expensive, dirty, dangerous, or would cause a quadrupling of house insurance. This is one of those situations where one of Elon Musk’s robots might come in handy, it would be fun to have my own Fireplace Golem. Luckily I have a neighbour to help.

Links

Quran verses 5:32 and 5:33

https://quran.com/al-maidah/32-33

Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a3N7JJh3Wg&list=RD1a3N7JJh3Wg&start_radio=1