Islam versus Europe

Where Islam speads, freedom dies. Sarko is using the pretext of these shootings to suppress French freedoms further. Of course, the context suggests he will use these powers only to deal with jihadist websites. But following the false moral ideal of non-discrimination, these laws will undoubtedly be couched in abstract terms. When the authorities prosecute Muslims using these new laws, they will be accused of Islamophobia. Then, in order to prove they are not discriminatory, they will round up some Counterjihadists or French nationalists and prosecute them too. Even if Sarko's government doesn't do this, the Socialists undoubtedly will the next time they get in. This is exactly the pattern we saw in Britain with the anti-terrorist Prevent programme, originally rolled out to combat Muslim extremism then extended to embrace "all extremism", including people simply making the point that Britain would have been better off if we had never let Muslims or third-worlders in.

Consider how broadly framed the legislation he describes is. Anyone visiting the sites will be prosecuted? So even a Counterjihadist visiting the sites to report critically on them runs the risk of prosecution. Read the description of Forsane Alizza in this CNN story. As far as I know, I am virtually the only person writing in English who ever paid any attention to Forsane Alizza before now. In fact, the facts reported in this CNN story may well have been compiled from the posts on this blog. There was a lot of Google traffic yesterday based on the keywords "Forsane Alizza". But, according to Sarko's new law, I could now be prosecuted just for visiting their website?

If Sarko's plan comes to fruition, this act of jihad violence will have succeeded in disempowering the resistance to jihad. Our freedoms will be yet further circumscribed; the redemptive capacity of our civilisation diminished yet again. Even when the Muslims lose, they win. Under the prevailing set of rules, that is. The only way to change the outcome is to change the rules, and that means challenging the moral principles that underlie them. Discrimination is not wrongful; it is a moral duty. The use of our powers of discrimination to make moral judgements is what defines us as human beings. Only by abandoning the ideal of non-discriminatory, rule-based restraints on the actions of governments - in other words the ideology of human rights - and embracing full-throated democracy instead, can European civilisation save itself.