Editorial from Church & State, Winter 2007 (Number 87)

Dark Forebodings—
Muslims, Demographics,Ireland And The West

Mary Kenny warns us that we are losing the demographic race.

Who are "we" to an English Tory from an Irish radical background? The Christian Europeans perhaps? Or at least the Europeans who are not Muslims.

The Muslims are outbreeding us—that is Mary Kenny's warning to the world. And we must take them on.

And how are we to do that? By breeding faster?

But this is the same Mary Kenny who, in her days as a mini-skirted Dublin radical, broke the contraceptive ban by buying condoms in Belfast, bringing them to Dublin by train, and waving them about for the newspapers to see.

By that combination of things she exemplified an essential of the modern culture which, she now says, threatens us with extinction—free sexual display dissociated from reproduction.

So what can one say about her warning thirty years later that we are losing the demographic race, except repeat that refrain from Moliere's play: Vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin!—This is what you wanted, by George!

J.J. Campbell, leader of the Nationalist Party in the North after the retirement of Joe Devlin, warned his people seventy years ago of the danger of race suicide through contraceptive culture. He was of course a bigoted male-chauvinist reactionary, and we would not dream of suggesting otherwise. But we have remarked on a number of occasions that his comment was not illogical, and did not fly in the face of experience.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Irish were, in the words of the Young Ireland song that James Connolly liked to quote, The Aliens Of The West. In those days we belonged with the great bulk of humanity that was regarded as alien by the West—a word that took the place of "Greater Britain" after Britain found it expedient to discontinue that term.

But we are no longer aliens. We have joined the elite of the world. We are the most globalist of the globalists. The common ruck of humanity has become alien to us. And we demand that the aliens should be kept down.

Mary Kenny may have transmogrified into an English Tory. And she may have become a good Catholic. And Celtic Tigger Ireland may have sloughed off its Catholicism. And the Irish Independent may be an expression of those tendencies which are causing us to be losing the demographic race. But Mary Kenny is not out of place in it. Extremes meet.

Gerry Gregg (the Stickie-minded television producer) proclaimed in the Sunday Independent (4 Dec.): The Battle Continues For The Divided Hearts And Minds Of Irish Muslims: "40,000 Muslims now live in Ireland" [which is about 1% of the population]. And "57% per cent of young Muslims favour the imposition of Sharia Law". And that is a danger to our "Western values".

And what are our "Western values" just now? (If you take your eyes off them for a minute you find that they've changed.) For Gregg they seem to be "tolerance and integration". And our virtue of tolerance now seems to mean that these aliens cannot be tolerated, but must be integrated.

And that means that they must stop being Muslims and offer themselves up to be re-made into whatever it is that we are. And that is problematical because the most definite thing that we are in the Dublin 4 view seems to be that we are not Muslims and that we can't stand Islam.

We are a tolerant people who cannot stand intolerance. And we are in imminent danger of having Sharia Law imposed upon us by that 57% of the youth of the 1% of the population. And that danger to our "inter-ethnic harmony and social cohesion cannot be evaded by politically correct wishful thinking. Nor will that 57% be appeased by lofty presidential appeals to a common civil spirit or a shared humanity".

Not even though "Mary McAleese is popular with Irish Muslims–some 82% like her. Maybe that's because she shows respect to the Muslim big-wigs and knows her place when visiting Saudi Arabia".

So the watchword is: No appeasement of Islam either at home or abroad. And if want Saudi money, let them beg us to accept it; and let not the President observe the customs of the country if she must go there.

There is only one right way to behave anywhere in the world, and that is the way we behave. The old maxim of behaving like the Romans when in Rome no longer applies.

We live in a new era since 9/11. Diversity is no longer acceptable at home or abroad. The War On Terror requires uniformity. In order that we should triumph, the rule is that he who is not with us is against us.

But it doesn't all fit together. The two states on which we depend most as a basis for enforcing our will are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and they are the most Muslim states in the world. And Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most stable state, being feudal in composition. Pakistan, a military dictatorship, appears less stable, but it is a reliable enough ally for the time being in what we find it necessary to do to the world.

President Bush hinted a couple of years ago that the time had come for Saudi Arabia to be democratised, but he soon fell quiet on the subject. Somebody close to him told him what he should have known as a matter of course—that a democratised Saudi would probably destroy our world. It would, at the very least, by a major addition to the Axis of Evil.

Saudi stability does not rest merely on oppression. The state is a creation of a fundamentalist tribal/religious upheaval in the 19th century, and it is permeated with clan and (extreme) religious loyalties. And if either its feudalism or its religious fundamentalism was destroyed, and a force of democracy was generated, the world as we know it—the world that runs on petrol—would never be the same again.

Saudi tribal fundamentalism is a corner-stone of our world. For practical purposes it is part of the liberal-democratic world order. It is unlikely that it would remain so if we bombarded it with liberal-democratic propaganda and gave tangible support to internal elements of dissent. Which is why we do not do that.

In Pakistan a sort of elected liberal Government was overthrown by Musharraf's military coup, and President Bhutto was tried for corruption and executed. (And by the standards applied by Judge Moriarty in his Tribunal, there can be little doubt that he was very corrupt.)

Pakistan is a congeries of clans and fundamentalist religious bodies, but, unlike Saudi, it is not a state self-made by these forces. It has no traditional ruling aristocracy or clan or religious hierarchy. It has a formal state structure at the top which is unrelated to the society underneath, and which is required to present a face to the world as if it was the representative of a society of a very different kind. And Musharraf governs by mediating between the society that actually exists in Pakistan and what we require Pakistan to do, and to pretend to be.

He does this with exceptional skill and flair.

Last year he made a kind of internal treaty with the tribes of Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan, whom the British used to police by bombing in the 1920s (after they had won the Great War for democracy and the rights of nations). He was criticised for this by Washington. It didn't look good in the new war for democracy—a supposedly modern Government making a treaty with lawless and fundamentalist bodies of its own citizens. That was when Musharraf let it be known that in 2001, when Washington divided the world into those who were for it and those who were against, Pakistan was threatened with nuclear obliteration if it did not take its stand decisively with the forces of Good against the forces of Evil.

That is one way, if not quite of gaining friends, at least of disposing of possible enemies. But it stimulated Musharraf to press on with making a Bomb for himself. And his revelation of the threat silenced criticism of his treaty with the Waziris.

But the US could not let the matter rest. Late in 2006 a peaceful madrassar—a Muslim school—in Waziristan was bombed from a great height, because Washington had informed the Pakistan authorities that it was a haven for terrorists, and everybody was killed. But, when the Waziris exacted a fearful revenge on the Pakistan Army a short while later, the world took little notice. And Musharraf appears to have accepted it philosophically, as a legitimate quid pro quo.

These are some of the ways that the world is being governed since it was re-created in 1990, when it was saved from Communism.

But to get back to our theme: How is Sharia Law to be imposed on us by 57% of the youth of 1% of the population? (Let us say, at a rough estimate, by 0.3% of the population.)

The matter was gone into on Tonight With Tom McGurk (RTE radio, 21.09.06). Muslims made no secret of the fact that they preferred Sharia Law to our English Common Law, modified in recent years by borrowings from the Spanish Inquisition. And it would be introduced when the Irish people voted for it—when 1% became 51%.

David Quinn, former Editor of the Irish Catholic, and ardent Thatcherite economist and Imperialist, saw in this a deadly danger to our way of life.

Paddy O'Gorman, who had a connection with this magazine in the distant past—if we were Buddhists, we would say in a previous incarnation—now pokes at odd corners of Irish society for RTE to see what moves in them. Recently he poked at Muslim communities in Ballyhaunis and Kildare and asked about Drink and Girl-friends and Marriage. And he got nowhere with them. Here were people with a culture that was formed centuries before Brian Boru usurped the High Kingship of Ireland, living amidst the most modern culture in the world today, and being entirely unimpressed by it. If David Quinn and Gerry Gregg listened to those programmes, they must have had nightmares for weeks afterwards.

O'Gorman's questions were answered freely, matter-of-factly, without embarrassment, and they uncovered no latent resentment of the restrictions imposed by the Muslim way of life. Bachelors and married men were questioned about arranged marriages, and all seemed to think it was at least as good a way of getting married as any other. If you were taken with the appearance of a girl you tried to get a marriage with her arranged. Or it might be that friends or family directed you towards a girl who might be suitable. Then, when you got married, you discovered if appearances led in the right direction. And they didn't think that having a succession of girl-friends was a better guide to successful marriage than their way. Because either way you couldn't really know until the marriage was actually contracted.

It was evident that they had not sealed themselves off from the life that surrounded hem. They had observed it, reflected on it, and found no great attraction in it.

But the real difference was not brought out by Paddy—perhaps because it is virtually unthinkable to anybody who lives in the Irish media today. It is that Muslims still have the idea of marriage as an existing reality, while in contemporary Ireland, perhaps even more than in Britain, it is a superseded idea—a name left over from the past—a piece of romantic nostalgia. There are, of course, many thousands of individuals who still contrive to make marriages in the substantial form. But Marriage has ceased to be a public institution, encouraged and sustained by the prevailing culture.

There was only one woman on Paddy O'Gorman's programme. The old, fundamental, division of labour still applied. The woman reared the family, and the man provided the means of life.

Ruth Lee of the Institute of Directors in Britain recently criticised some marginal Budget proposal in favour of the family with the categorical statement that having children is "an individual lifestyle choice", and that the state had no business encouraging it. And the Irish state has now gone even farther than the British in strict economic individualisation.

This is in accordance with the highest values of the European Enlightenment, which proclaimed that the individual is an end and must never be treated as a means to an end. And this view was incorporated into Christianity and declared to be an essential Christian position—though it is hard to find it in the Bible.

If, in the prevailing culture of a society, the individual is an end and the having of children is a "lifestyle choice" of which the state should take no account, that must mean that the reproduction of the species is an optional extra. And, if that is part of the value system of 'the West', then 'the West', in order to be true to its values, should take no account of the demographic race.

In raising a scare about the demographic race, and demanding that something be done to prevent Islam from winning it, Mary Kenny is on the verge of abolishing the most vital distinction between Islam and Christianity in contemporary affairs.

Peoples have lived contentedly within the culture of Islam for more than a thousand years—and not only Muslims. The peoples who are now trying to exterminate each other in the Middle East under the impact of Western Christian military power and ideology, lived side by side peacefully within the Ottoman Empire—not only Shia and Sunni, but Jews and many ancient varieties of Christians.

But they lived in "the dark Egyptian night" (as Kipling put it in The White Man's Burden). They lived in the variety of their traditional forms, unprogressively, not driven by demonic elements in their ways of life to abolish each other for the purpose of establishing globalist uniformity.

It is intolerable to us that there should be multitudes of people who do not live like us, and who in submitting to our irresistible military power, do not give up their own ghost and give in to ours. They threaten us by refusing to give in.

How might we make them give in?

The Irish Times of 4th November carried an article entitled, What Is Missing In Islam Is Need For Modern Theological Insights by Andrew Furlong who, according to the blurb was the Dean of Clonmacnois in the Church of Ireland, and was sacked "when his doctrinal views were considered unacceptable by his church".

Furlong's argument is both self-contradictory and to the point. If Islam had a theology, it would be vulnerable to us, because we could argue with it about God. On the other hand God is something we can know nothing about—is that why Furlong was sacked by his Church?—and therefore theology (the science of God) has for its subject a "hypothetical reality".

When Paddy O'Gorman tried talking to Muslims about doctrine, they suggested that he should go and discuss it with the Imam. What their religion was to them was not a set of metaphysical doctrines, but a satisfactory way of life—a thing which Christianity has comprehensively ceased to be for the Christians.

The former Dean of Clonmacnois writes:

"theology is seen by modern scholarship as a human product, which is not to deny that God may be real. For example, in a previous era it might have been believed that the gods revealed to humanity that each had taken the initiative to choose an ethnic group to support, protect and fight alongside in battle. Now it is recognised that such beliefs are simply human claims. Despite asserting that they have knowledge about the character and will of God, all the religions also contain the contrary idea that God, if such a reality exists, is beyond comprehension and unknowable to us in this present life. All we have, therefore, are our speculative ideas about this awe-inspiring but hypothetical reality. Although the Hebrew and Christian scriptures were once believed to be inerrant and dictated from heaven, the majority of scholars no longer accept this. Similarly with Islam, does not the Koran need to be recognised for what it is—a historically and culturally conditioned human product… What is the reason for taking it literally when it is so ambiguous and contradictory, just like other scriptures? Has it divine authority or is it a human, culturally-conditioned product? …As human beings, we are nearly all free to search for meaning, wonder and values in the face of the implacable mystery of our existence. Why are we here at all? But, given that we are here, we need to search for spiritual and political visions for living. As global citizens today, could we not think in terms of a resource of wisdom and spirituality fed by religions, by art and culture, by history and science" etc.

There is in fact no global citizenship, unless it be citizenship of the world-dominating United States, and perhaps its British adjunct. Even the European Union is not part of it, despite its pretensions, and must play second fiddle.

And if we reach the conclusion that sacred scriptures are not divine revelations but human constructs, why should that lead to Muslim theology—which on that assumption is the science of a non-existent subject?

Presumably because Furlong knows that theology—the inheritance of Christian Rome from the philosophy of Greece, which decreed that "the unexamined life is not worth living"—must be destructive of the religion which goes in for it.

There is little or nothing in the Koran of what Europe calls theology. There is no anthropology, or zoology, of God. There is no Joshua, no Job, no Paul, no Revelation. What there is, is a guide to living, which is said to be a message from God. And, if it is found to be a satisfactory way of living, how is it devalued by the fact that "modern scholarship" holds that it was devised by a man? It has lasted because of what it is. And what could be of greater value in human terms than a satisfactory way of life in this world.

Paddy O'Gorman kept asking his Muslims about Drink. Here they were in the country of pubs, and had they really never been in one? And it seemed that they just couldn't see the point in alcohol.

Imagine he awfulness of it. Contentment without the help of theology or alcohol

Contents of Number 86

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