Flüchtlinge willkommen

So, even now, say a few Germans. In Sweden they cried (until they brought in border checks),

Flyktingar välkomna.

Dalrymple turns to Max Frisch’s Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1953), written

in the aftermath of the Second World War as an attempt to explain (and to warn) how a patent evil like Nazism can triumph in a civilised society.

The play’s protagonist, Dalrymple explains,

is a comfortable bourgeois living in a town that is beset by several mysterious acts of arson. He is visited at home by Schmitz, a hawker, who half-persuades, half-intimidates his way into an invitation to lodge in Biedermann’s attic, and who soon brings a second hawker, Eisenring, to stay in the house.

Gradually it becomes clear that Schmitz and Eisenring

are the ones setting the fires in the town, but Biedermann refuses to acknowledge it. His blindness arises from moral and physical cowardice, and from wishful thinking—the hope that what he sees does not really mean what it obviously means.

Schmitz and Eisenring bring barrels of gasoline into the house and Biedermann,

pusillanimous to the last, helps them make the fuses and gives them the matches with which they burn his house down.

Dread of the Muslims

The West is running scared of the Mohammedans

Muslims know that Europe is running scared of them. They feel no gratitude whatsoever for the tolerance they may encounter in, for example, Britain, says Dalrymple, but rather

contempt for the spinelessness and decadence of a country whose tolerance can so easily be turned against it, and whose liberties might without difficulty be used to propagate and eventually impose tyranny.

Their contempt is not lessened by the knowledge that British society

does not have the will to impose upon them some of its own laws, notably those with regard to the education of their children.

Oppression of women

Dalrymple writes:

I have heard in my medical practice from innumerable young Muslim women that they were removed from school by their parents at an early age, several years before the law allowed, but I have yet to hear of even a single case in which a school or the school inspectors took effective action to return such a child to the school. I concede that the white girls who remain in the schools from which the Muslim parents illegally withdraw their daughters learn little after a certain age except how to be a lumpen slut, of the kind with which this country is so exceedingly well endowed: but the law is the law, and the subsequent fate of so many Muslim daughters is far from enviable.

Needless to say, Muslim men in Europe have it much easier than their womenfolk. A man, Dalrymple points out, can

have an arranged marriage to a woman he would not have selected for himself (but who is nonetheless useful to him as a provider of domestic comfort), and lead a happy life elsewhere; a life that often includes the possession of a concubine or two, more often than not of the lumpen white-slut class. It will not come as a surprise to learn that he treats his concubine or concubines with contempt and often violence, and the fact that they are willing to put up with it confirms him in his opinion of the decadence of the West.

Extraterritorial rights

You might have thought

that the girls who have been subjected to this culture that is now so much at variance with our own would have received loud, consistent and vociferous support from feminists. On the contrary, the feminists are the dog that did not bark, because feminism has appealed to the same kind of mind as multiculturalism has appealed to. And the only way the two isms can be held in the mind simultaneously is to ignore actual real-life evidence of their incompatibility.

Dalrymple explains that the fact that no one has consistently raised a voice in defence of these girls

has played its part in persuading certain Muslims that they are extraterritorial. They know that when the government talks of women’s rights, they — the Muslims — are excluded from its rhetoric, because it would take conviction and guts to include them. They draw the conclusion that our society is running scared of them.

Multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers

Muslims have become all too aware that Western society is, says Dalrymple,

but a rotting fruit waiting to fall from the tree.

Loosing off — from a long way away — a few missiles at, for instance, Syria

will not have changed their impression; rather, it will have confirmed it, and their opinion of the West’s cowardice.

Every multiculturalist, says Dalrymple,

believes — whether he knows it or not — that it is right to force young girls into marriages they don’t want, to deprive them of the schooling and careers that they do want, to regard them as prostitutes if they leave their abusive husbands, and to punish, even to kill, those who cross cultural and religious boundaries. As an Italian commentator once put it, multiculturalism is not couscous; it is the stoning of adulterers.

Muslim men bent on evil

Those who become terrorist murderers cannot, of course, be satisfied with what Western society offers them, for they are, Dalrymple points out,

in the grip of a utopian ideology.

So were many successful people in the West once attracted to communism,

another ideology that would have destroyed their own freedom.

Hirsi Ali versus Islamism’s fellow travellers

Proselytiser for the European Enlightenment view of the world

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, says Dalrymple, is right to insist

that a profound change in the relations between the sexes is the key to Muslim integration into Western society.

For many young Muslim men in the West, Dalrymple points out,

a powerful appeal of Islam is the sanction that it gives to their domination of women. This domination provides them an ex officio source of self-satisfaction that discourages further effort, and simultaneously deprives their society of the talents of women. The natural result is material and intellectual failure by comparison with other religious groups; and disappointment leads to morbid hypersensitivity to criticism, insensate rage and the blaming of others.

Many in the West,

from a combination of fear and self-hatred, are unwilling to make the distinction between a respect for the right of people to practise a religion within the law, and an exaggerated respect for the religion itself. Hirsi Ali rightfully pours scorn on the fellow travellers of obscurantism.