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by Douglas Murray
• February 6, 2015 at 5:00 am
Amid
all the giggling and the Twitter hashtags, something dark is going on in
France and Britain. None of these areas is a place where non-Muslims are "forbidden"
to go. But they do exist. They are places where behavior that is
commonplace in wider society would certainly be discouraged, sometimes
intimidatingly so.
Last
year in the UK, we discovered that a portion of Birmingham's secular
state schools had been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists. The results
of these discoveries -- which included teachings that Muslims were to
distance themselves from non-Muslims, look down on then and not take them
as friends -- shocked the nation. It still seems shaken. Yet most Muslim
leaders in the UK simply denied the findings of successive government-led
inquiries. Instead of tackling the outrages, they dismissed them as some
"Islamophobic" plot.
It
seemed we were witnessing an example of "displacement:" it is
so much easier to laugh at a foreign news station than to deal with the
jolting nugget of truth that may have been exaggerated. So much easier to
choke on your porridge at the "idiocy" of an American than to
stop your schools from being lost to extremist ideologies. And so much
easier to talk of "suing" a news channel than to prevent
atrocities of the kind we saw last month from happening again in your
city.
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Steven Emerson discusses no-go zones on Fox News,
January 11, 2015.
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When the world looks so bleak that all we can do is laugh, what we
laugh at often reveals more than we think.
The news in Europe over recent weeks has certainly been bleak. Since
the atrocities in Paris, almost every day has seen new arrests of Islamic
militants or further futile warnings from politicians and security chiefs
about the unprecedented danger our societies are in.
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