Bad and worse

Bernard Lewis, speaking to the staff of The Jerusalem Post, didn't go out of his way to cheer them up.

Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.

"Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence," he said. "They have no respect for their own culture." Europeans had "surrendered" on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness" and "multi-culturalism," said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.

He's not about to be moving home.

"The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim." Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe's future would be, "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?"

And can you blame him?

Attacks on Jews reached their highest level for more than two decades last year, an authoritative research report said Thursday.

There were nearly 600 anti-Semitic assaults, incidents of vandalism, cases of abuse and threats made against Jewish individuals and institutions, it found. The number of attacks was up by nearly a third on 2005.

Who is doing the attacking? Here eucumenism is flourishing.

White attackers were responsible for anti-Semitic incidents in fewer than half of those where the colour or racial background of the perpetrator was identified. More than a third, 37 per cent, of attackers whose background was known were Asian or Arab.

Since 1984, when the recording of anti-Semitic incidents by the trust began, white attackers have been in a minority only last year and in 2004.

It is Islamophobia we are supposed to be worried about, yet according to the police figures, a Jew is four times more likely to be attacked than a Muslim. Surprisingly, despite the fact that there is a lot of suspicion about towards Muslims, it rarely seems to spill over into violence. All the more surprising given that the provocation has not been lacking. Brendan O'Neill at Spiked Online.

Amongst the left and their allies in self-selected Muslim community groups, it’s widely claimed that Islamophobia is stalking the land. In fact, Islamophobia is a myth, an invention by groups keen to play the victim card against what they view as a seething white mob of Muslim-haters. For all the hysterical talk of ‘an orgy of Islamophobia’, acts of anti-Muslim hatred or violence remain remarkably low. One Muslim commentator says Muslims in Britain are ‘subject to attacks reminiscent of the gathering storm of anti-Semitism in the first decades of the last century. In truth, there are a tiny number of attacks on Muslims. At the end of last year, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that in 2005-2006 – in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, when politicians, the police and others predicted there would be an anti-Muslim pogrom – there were only 43 cases of religiously aggravated crime, 18 of them against Muslims (or ‘perceived’ Muslims). This represented a decline from 23 anti-Muslim crimes in 2004-2005 (3). Kristallnacht it ain’t.

Fairness demands that I add that O'Neill then goes on to lambast the ‘anti-Islamist intelligentsia’ and their fears of civilisational takeover. He makes some good points; eg that the number of terrorist attacks has fallen in the last 30 years. However, terror was a broader church in those days. A more salient point:

the anti-Islamist intellectuals dodge the harder task of interrogating what it is about British and Western society that can make the backward and obscurantist ranting of Islamic sects seem like an attractive alternative for often well-brought-up and educated young Muslims.

Rather unconvincing, though, is this logic inherited from the appeasers of the 30s.

The one thing that seems to sustain their [terrorist] violence is the Islamo-obsessions of the political and cultural elites.

I don't think so.