When a Muslim Sits Next to You on the Subway…

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7/7, Alexander Armstrong, BBC, BBC Iplayer, Bomb scare underground, Etiquette, HIGNFY, Ian Hislop, iplayer, Islam, Justin Bieber, Muslims sitting next you on the tube, Notting Hill Gate, Paul Merton, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Underground

Last week on the popular satirical news quiz ‘Have I got news for you”, the guest host Alexander Armstrong quipped that to have ‘quiet crisis of liberal conscience’ was the ‘standard procedure’ for when a Muslim sits next to you on the tube. The joke received what it deserved; a pattering of knowing, nervous giggles.

What do you do when this happens? If you’re a Londoner – or, for that matter, New Yorker, Muscovite, Parisian, Roman or Berliner – this situation and your reaction to it is really no laughing matter. Choose wrongly and you may lose the use of your legs or even perish altogether.

Where I live (in Putney) I have the luxury of using the District Line, a relatively Muslim-light part of the capital’s network. I’m aware of the crisis Armstrong alludes to, but whenever I’ve used the Islamised lines of East-London, mine has a different content. It isn’t a crisis of ‘conscience’, but rather of etiquette. The question isn’t ‘How might I suppress/conquer my own bigotry?’, but ‘Will my fellows think me cowardly or rude if I switch carriage at the next stop?’.

I should clarify before going forward that we are talking here of devout Muslims; that is, bearded, religiously dressed men, or completely veiled women. I don’t feel any anxiety sitting next to a brown person. It should also be clarified that I mean here situations in which one will be seated for a long time.

With that out of the way, I’ll confess to what I’ve done in the past – not always, but on occasion. If a devout Muslim has chosen a neighbouring seat, I will often wait until the train is at the following station, head calmly out like that is my stop and then hop back into the neighbouring car instead. On most of the these occasions, it has been because the Muslim in question is embellished with a backpack or bulky satchel (those with memories of 7/7 will appreciate why this matters). I’ve never felt a whiff of bad conscience for doing this. My legs, my arms and my life mean infinitely more to me than my sense of political correctness.

I also think that if Muslims should ever dare to repeat an enrichment of the 7/7 kind, we could make good use of this gesture as a means of protest. Though I still make cover for myself when switching carriages, in the event that Muslims once again bomb our infrastructure, we could make standing up when a Muslim sits next to us a very emphatic display of moral resistance.

In dignity and silence, this public motion would make known our willingness to put our safety before the bullying demands of established politics.

D, LDN.

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Conservatives have won the Islam-in-Europe debate…..But the young are already in a different world.

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America 911, anti-Semitism, Ayn Rand, Birmingham, BNP, Bravery, Christianity, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Coffee, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, EDL, English Defence League, Eurabia, Generation War, homosexuality, Inter-Generational relations, internet freedom, Islam and the West, Judaism, Lil Wayne, London-centric, Mark Steyn, Multiculturalism, No to Turkey in the EU, Pamela Geller, Pat Condell, politics, Rihanna, Rihanna Muslim, sex, suicide, Zionism

We are almost 12 years on from the September the 11th attacks in America, and we are at last approaching the point where we can say the right has triumphed in the debate over Islamism in Europe.

This might sound a bit too optimistic to some, but I see the evidence all around. There are no serious, mainstream conservatives or liberals still arguing for the unconditional appeasement of Islam in Europe. A huge wave of European conservative and liberal intellectuals have converted almost wholesale to neo-conservative ideas, or at least those which involve the defence of Western culture. They still don’t want to be American of course, but at last they’re realising that it wouldn’t be a ball to be Iranian, Algerian or Turkish either. The ‘either-or’ fallacy has collapsed and while America bolts leftward, Europe has never been so united in ‘right-wing’ sentiment.

If you cast your mind back just a few years ago, you can appreciate the magnitude and speed of this shift. Think back as late as 2006 when the world was first mesmerised by the oratorical skills of Barack Obama, and consider the then fashionable opinions in Europe regarding the War on Terror. It was still broadly regarded as an idiotic cowboy initiative, and the reasons for it – the threat of radical Islam – was deemed to consist mostly of hype, bloated and promoted by arms manufacturers and straw-chewing Christian fundamentalists. George W. Bush, the great dumb American caricature, was still beloved by comedians and political cartoonists in London, Paris and Berlin. You could still get a laugh by pointing to the verbal errors of the out-going President, or by linking the uneducated twang of his accent to the foreign policy he initiated. The threat of Jihad was not just a lie, but an American lie, and it was patriotic not to believe it.

And look at things now.

With veiled faces multiplying, darkening the romance of Parisian streets, Pakistani paedophiles pimping orphan girls in Oxfordshire, kebab houses degentrifying great swathes of Birmingham, and terror alerts issued in Stockholm, Belgium and Denmark – no European can any longer think it patriotic to deny that this is a problem. One could call it fashionable, one could call it bold, and provocative, but no longer is it patriotism.

The right has won the debate….but only among people of a certain generation.

For the young, the debate is ongoing, and the anti-Islamist side has its work cut out.

One of the reasons it is still a challenge is the ongoing demographic shift among European youth. Not only are Muslims growing in number and influence with each new generation, but they are managing to integrate ‘sideways’ with other immigrant communities; in particular those of Christian black Africans. Islam is becoming respected on the street even by Christians, as a natural part of third-world identity. Islam, and even Islamism, is increasingly viewed as being as much a victim of ‘the system’ (and a cool enough means of rebelling against it) as hip-hop and gangsterism.

This is a cause for concern for anyone who understands where the real cultural power lies these days.

When a Counter-Jihad activist watches a good Mark Steyn or Pamela Geller video on YouTube, they might well feel a sense of relief that the “the message is getting out there.”, and that “People are waking up…”

But such a feeling can’t survive a glance at the view count for these clips. The figures are usually at best around the 10-15,000 mark.

Even videos of the late Christopher Hitchens, one of the most popular and media-friendly intellectuals of recent memory, rarely score views over 100,000. Pat Condell, the atheist commentator maxed out on less than 4 million views with a video that was uploaded more than 3 years ago. This is nowhere near sufficient.

Notice also that the ‘video demographics’ reveal a majority of viewers to be over the age of forty.

None of that data bodes well for the future.

Elsewhere on the cultural map, if Lil Wayne or Rihanna release a new music video, views can head toward 100,000,000 within weeks.

Who’s to say that in the future, there won’t be a Rihanna in a headscarf, or a Lil Wayne with a prayer-cap? Were that to occur, the number of people educated by the Counter-Jihad community over the last ten years, would be cancelled out by the number of younger citizens gained over period of hours. And then the offices at the Daily Telegraph could go as crazy as they like; it wouldn’t matter one jot to the younger generation. They would accept a Muslim Rihanna as perfectly natural – as well as historically and culturally consistent. The third-world in the White man’s world is one-world after all – all distinctions or divisions fall away, disappear…..

And who is to blame for this?

I, as a young person, would nominate the ethno-nationalists; people who maintain that there is no qualitative difference between foreign cultures, and that all are equally undesirable. Only European, White culture is acceptable. All else is an invasion or a surrender.

We cannot win against Islamism if we surrender to this kind of catch-all racism.

We should be glad that groups like the EDL and SION have made a start at unifying world cultures in a defensive phalanx, rather than, as the BNP would do, scattering us all like birdseed to be eaten separately.

D, LDN.