Melanie Phillips:
Spectator, 17 September 2010
Everyone can agree that today’s Britain — which we’re always being told has become so much more liberal — is the very model of a forward-looking, tolerant society in which freedom of expression is paramount. Correct?
If only. In fact, the intellectual trend in Britain is a remorseless slide towards a dark age of intolerance, reverting to a reason-suppressing, heresy-hunting culture in which certain opinions are being turned into thought crimes.
Astoundingly, people are being arrested by the police — even if the case against them eventually falls — because of what they have said. They are not inciting violence or any criminal activity. They are merely expressing a point of view. Yet for that they may find the police feeling their collars.
It is difficult to say when, exactly, the priorities of the British police shifted from the prevention of criminal offences towards criminalising people for causing offence. The police have become the thin blue line against the Wrong Opinion. Instead of protecting society against oppression, British police officers have become the agents of oppression.
Freedom of religious expression, for example, is a bedrock principle of an open society. Yet if Christians express their religious opposition to homosexuality, they are treated like criminals.
Dale McAlpine, a Christian preacher in Cumbria, was carted off by the police, locked in a cell for seven hours and charged with using abusive or insulting words or behaviour after telling a passer-by that he believed homosexuality was a crime against God.
Harry Hammond, an evangelist, was convicted of a public order offence and fined for holding a placard saying ‘Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord’ at a street demonstration in Bournemouth — even though he was attacked by members of the public who poured soil and water over him.
I have been saying that we are in the opening decades of a Dark Age for several years, this is just more proof of that, things are going to get very nasty over the next few years. And not just in a few nations, all it will be happening all around the world. What is interesting to me is the way so many Science Fictions authors of the 50s and 60s had a war between the West and the Caliphate happening at this time, and how a lot of them had it leading to a Dark Age.
After reading the whole article all I can add is that the left has spent a lot of time and effort to degrade the educational systems in all nations to make it easier for their ideology to take over.
Richad, what authors? I would like to check them out.
On the question of the freedom of speech. In Britain Gays and Muslims are now the two groups that are beyond the reach of being thought of in any way other than in the most glowing ways. It would interesting to see if they started to have a go at each other and how that would pan out. For example the mighty PeterTatchell (who is a vegetarian) could have a go at the cruelty of halal meat and see how that works out for him as the police haul him away for making a anti-muslim comment. Or how about Anjem Choudary the fire brand muslim with his hindu infidel last name could make an impassioned speech about Sharia and the fact that it dictates throwing homosexuals off a building head first and see how that works for him as the police haul him in for an anti-gay comment.
Since 9/11, free speech in Britain is only allowed for Muslims and gays, ironically enough.
Islam’s leaders have used the west’s liberal laws to undermine them at every turn. Halal markets, refusing to teach the Holocaust, school holidays for Ramadan, NHS workers who can work without proper sterilization, encouraging terrorism, persecuting and prosecuting “the kufar”, the list goes on and on.
Its not only that the liberals have let this happen, but that the right has as well. While we were comforted in thinking that “it could never happen here”, Muslims were quietly preparing the way for an enslaved west.
Its high time that the free world take a good hard look at the threat that Islam poses and treats it like the hateful ideology that it is. We outside of the Soviet Union helped defeat the major threat of world Communism, let us now defeat Islam.