by Roger Kimball
Britain’s leaders celebrate multiculturalism even as the ideology reshaping the nation grows increasingly hostile to the civilization that welcomed it.
It turns out that I have found something to agree with Keir Starmer about. During Ramadan this year, the prime minister described Muslims as “the face of modern Britain.” I think that is correct. Whether it is also something to be happy about is another question. The PM, for his part, couldn’t be more pleased. Muslims in Britain, he went on to say, are “a success story when it comes to diversity.” Was that qualification—“when it comes to diversity”—a nod to reality? Or was it merely his capitulation to some sort of self-imposed linguistic quota according to which he must punctuate two out of three pronouncements with the word “diversity” or go without his pudding?
The jury is still out on that. But it is clear that the prime minister is very concerned about linguistic rectitude. For the last couple of years he has been trying to come up with a definition of “Islamophobia” that he could get past the troublesome partisans of free speech and enroll on the statute books as a hate crime. To date, he has had to compromise and substitute “anti-Muslim hostility” for the crisper-sounding “Islamophobia.”
Longtime readers will know that I have often poked fun at the term “Islamophobia.” Although you can find instances of the word from a century or more ago, the term was popularized in its current sense by the Runnymede Trust, a left-wing British think tank, in 1997. In some ways, the use of “Islamophobia” as a term of abuse was a brilliant move, both psychologically and politically. What a coup to have been able to paint one’s ideological opponents as by definition mentally disturbed. After all, a “phobia” is a species of mental illness, an irrational fear or hatred of something. But the question arises: is it irrational to fear or hate partisans of a religion that explicitly wishes to compass your death or destruction? I ask for the parents of Daniel Pearl, the 3,000 victims of 9/11, and the many thousands of now-deceased people who found themselves on the receiving end of “the religion of peace.”
Of course, many Muslims denounce the violence that has made their religion a near synonym for terrorism. This is true. Still, the philosopher Roger Scruton was right (in his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat) to say that wherever Islamists have gained power—Iran, Afghanistan, Paris, Minnesota, Birmingham—the result is “not the reign of peace and prosperity promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists.”
Some 70 percent of the world’s refugees are Muslims fleeing from Muslim states. Where are they going? To the West, of course. The alarming irony, Scruton points out, is that “having arrived in the West, many of these Muslim refugees begin to conceive a hatred of the society by which they find themselves surrounded and aspire to take revenge against it for some fault so heinous that they can conceive nothing less than final destruction as the fitting punishment.” A further and no less alarming irony: by providing welfare benefits without social membership for Muslim refugees, European states have conspired to create within their borders “a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.”
Keir Starmer would probably accuse me of “Islamophobia” or at least “anti-Muslim hostility” for pointing out these unpalatable truths. But truths they are, and Roger Scruton was hardly the first person to articulate them. I will offer a little chrestomathy of earlier warnings about the nature of Islam in a moment. First, by way of a palate cleanser, let me share a short list of recent terrorist incidents, along with the religion of their perpetrators, that I came across on X.
- Munich Olympics massacre (1972)—Islam
- Beirut barracks bombing (1983)—Islam
- TWA Flight 847 (1985)—Islam
- Rome & Vienna airport attacks (1985)—Islam
- Pan Am Flight 103 (1988)—Islam
- World Trade Center bombing (1993)—Islam
- Paris Metro bombings (1998)—Islam
- U.S. Embassy bombings Kenya and Tanzania (1998)—Islam
- USS Cole bombing (2000)—Islam
- 9/11 attacks (2001)—Islam
- Bali bombings (2002)—Islam
- Istanbul bombings (2003)—Islam
- Madrid train bombings (2004)—Islam
- London 7/7 bombings (2005)—Islam
- Fort Hood shooting (2009)—Islam
- Toulouse/Montauban shootings (2012)—Islam
- Boston Marathon bombing (2013)—Islam
- Brussels Jewish Museum shooting (2014)—Islam
- Ottawa Parliament attack (2014)—Islam
- Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher attacks (2015)—Islam
- Paris November attacks (2015)—Islam
- San Bernardino shooting (2015)—Islam
- Brussels airport/metro bombings (2016)—Islam
- Nice truck attack (2016)—Islam
- Berlin Christmas Market attack (2016)—Islam
- Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting (2016)—Islam
- Westminster Bridge attack (2017)—Islam
- Manchester Arena bombing (2017)—Islam
- London Bridge/Borough Market attack (2017)—Islam
- Barcelona/Cambrils attacks (2017)—Islam
- Strasbourg Christmas market attack (2018)—Islam
- London Bridge stabbing (2019)—Islam
- Samuel [Paty] beheading (2020)—Islam
- Vienna shooting (2020)—Islam
- October 7 Hamas-led attacks (2023)—Islam
- Arras school stabbing (2023)—Islam
- Solingen knife attack (2024)—Islam
- New Orleans Bourbon Street attack (2025)—Islam
- Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack (2025)—Islam
- Winterthur train-station stabbing (2026)—Islam
Add up the number of victims, and we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of people. Was this some sort of perversion of Islam? Not according to the Qur’an, which repeatedly enjoins Muslims to kill and terrorize non-Muslims and anyone who leaves Islam (apostasy is a capital offense in Islam). What we might call the kinetic side of Islam is not a secret. Many commentators have underscored its intolerance and penchant for violence. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing to a correspondent, noted that he had “studied the Quran a great deal.”
I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.
In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer pauses to consider the Qur’an. “This wretched book. Schopenhauer writes, “was sufficient to start a world religion, to satisfy the metaphysical needs of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.”
Winston Churchill provided a first-hand survey in his 1899 book The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan.
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
The critical role of a martially equipped Christianity in reversing the colonizing force of Islam was also something that Teddy Roosevelt stressed. In Fear God and Take Your Own Part, a collection of essays from 1916, Roosevelt noted that “If the peoples of Europe had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.”
Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.
The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization.
“The victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization.” Those are terms that people like Keir Starmer find unintelligible. “Civilized men,” forsooth! Who are they? And how rude—how “Islamophobic”—to speak of “enemies of civilization.” We have seen time and again where that rancid timorousness leads. Warnings aplenty have been ringing in our ears. Lord D’Abernon once said that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” Let us hope that we still enjoy the dispensation afforded by that adverb.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/14/the-face-of-modern-britain-jihads-triumph/
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