Death of Democracy?

by Sally Ross

It has often been noted that totalitarian ideologies exploit democratic freedoms precisely in order to destroy freedom and abolish democracy. Democratic societies preach tolerance, very well, the clever totalitarian loudly demands tolerance for his own activities while scrupulously obliterating the conditions that make tolerance possible. ….Roger Kimball  The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art

The Gatestone Institute is a New York based think-tank which is “dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report…”  Yesterday the second part of a two- part article entitled Death of Democracy? was published at their website. The two articles are by Dr. Denis MacEoin, a UK-based Islamicist and Senior Fellow at the Institute.  None of the contents of these two articles will be news to readers of The Iconoclast but both provide a good summary of ‘where we are and how we got to where we are’ and provide some useful bullet points.

 Part 1 deals with the failure of multiculturalism, giving specific examples from the UK.

•  “The result of 25 years of multiculturalism has not been multicultural communities. It has been mono-cultural communities… Islamic communities are segregated.” – Ed Husain, former Muslim extremist.
• This approach, giving social-services, is based on the belief — oft-refuted — that Muslim extremists (both Muslims-by-birth and converts) have suffered from deprivation. It also greatly rests on the naïve assumption that rewarding them with benefits — for which genuinely deprived citizens generally need to wait in line — will turn them into grateful patriots, prepared to stand for the national anthem and hold hands with Christians and Jews.
• The British government has shown itself incapable of enforcing its own laws when it comes to its Muslim citizens or new immigrants. Rather than stand up to our enemies, both external and internal, are we so afraid of being called “Islamophobes” that we will sacrifice even our own cultural, political, and religious strengths and aspirations?

Part 2 delineates the ways in which the weaknesses of so many modern democratic states emerge from its strengths.  Here is Part 2’s bullet point summary:

• ·The irony, of course, is that so many people, have adopted a way of interpreting human rights and liberal values in a manner that often undermines them.
•  It is time for some home truths. Islam has been at war with the West for some 1,384 years, with very little respite. When Muslim Arab armies invaded Syria in 634, went on to destroy all but a rump of the Christian Byzantine empire (which it finally defeated when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453), took control of Spain, Portugal, Sicily and other lands on the north Mediterranean coast, it was the start of endless jihad wars.
• Most importantly, we seem unable to understand that Islam is, above all else, a totalitarian project covering all aspects of human life from the spiritual to the material, from law to government to clothing to food to sex to taxation and more. This totalitarianism rejects democracy in the most basic way, as having come from mere humans rather than divinely, from Allah.
• Unfortunately, concluding that modern terrorism “has nothing to do with Islam” or that “Islam is a religion of peace” visibly contradicts the historical record.

Part 2 also contains a potted history of PC as it developed post-war:

As anti-establishment groups shifted away from support of the working classes and moved to an emphasis on Franz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” there arose the unshakeable conviction that all evils stemmed from imperialism and colonialism, and consequently from the white people who participated in colonial projects. 

Add into the mix Edward Said, who promoted the idea that the West, with its history of imperialism and colonialism had left the Middle East and especially Muslims, the world’s victims, and hey presto! Western democracies, became the greatest villains of history – especially Israel. 

This blanket assumption has in turn led to a blanket refusal –  despite massive evidence to the contrary – to confront the truth about Islam, and so there is  “A sort of paralysis engendered by a fear of being thought an “Islamophobe” that makes it hard if not impossible for people in the public eye to admit that there is another truth, that has, unfortunately, been well known for centuries.”

This paralysis along with the urge to destroy anything traditionally Western is leading to a kind of “de-civilization” process in which a politically correct intelligentsia “are effectively handing over our civilization to people who hate it”.