Progressives In Trouble On Terror

THE PROGRESSIVES of the world are united in their opposition to the war in Iraq, which they say is a distraction that deflects from the War on Terror. Given that a war is needed at all.

They are right about the distraction. Whatever happens in Iraq, the fate of Canada and Europe is more important. And the big news about the War on Terror is that it puts the whole progressive project in jeopardy. A couple of articles in the last week show why. Not surprisingly, both of them rely for support on Melanic Phillips’ new book Londonistan, a book that had trouble finding a publisher in London.

In London the take-no-prisoners conservative columnist Simon Heffer looks at the recent raid on a house in East London inhabited by two Muslim brothers.

The police had acted upon a tip, or intelligence, that the Muslim residents were involved in preparing a chemical device designed, perhaps, for release in the London Underground. In the end they found nothing, but accidentally wounded one of the young men living in the house.

The brothers' sister said yesterday that "you do not expect to be woken at 4am with a gun in your face". The Muslim community in the area is outraged and complains of harassment and disruption.

Yes, the Muslim community has learned to play the victim game beautifully.

In Toronto, upon the arrest of 17 alleged bomb plot conspirators, the police went out of their way to avoid identifying as Muslims the 17 Muslim accused who all went to the same mosque. Because in a multicultural society we don’t want to stigmatize or target anyone because of their minority status.

"Minority-rights doctrine," writes Melanie Phillips in her new book Londonistan, "has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority."

The reason we have been dragged into this multicultural fantasyland is that it has served our progressive friends, partly by giving them a key to the public purse and partly by giving them a sense of nobility and compassion. The original purpose of the doctrine was to privilege the progressive activists who represented marginalized and minority communities. It allowed them to mau-mau the majority culture and advance the tribal interests of the minority communities that they led.

But when the multicultural matrix is used by radical Muslims to attack the majority host culture, then things undergo a sea-change. For then multiculturalism threatens to slip out of the control of the progressives who invented it for their own use, not for Muslim extremists. Yet how can they repudiate their own progressive belief and faith? Writes Melanie Phillips:

"It is impossible to overstate the importance -- not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism -- of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa."

In other words, Americana, British, and Canadians are going to have to choose between their traditional culture and the multicultural culture that seems, more and more, to be naked before the aggression of the Islamist extremists.

Life just isn’t going to be much fun for progressives as this plays out.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.