Ruth Dudley Edwards echoes Mark Steyn’s paranoid Islamophobic ravings

Ruth Dudley Edwards“In my many conversations with like-minded people about the threat that radical Islam poses to the British way of life – and, indeed, to European civilisation – we frequently end by despairingly agreeing that the West seems intent on committing political and cultural suicide. When we look starkly at the demographic statistics, the wimpishness of our Establishment in the face of the threat, the perversions perpetrated by political correctness and our own passivity, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that within a couple of generations, Islam will be in control in Europe….

“Consider first at a few chilling statistics. Europeans are failing to reproduce. Just to keep the population steady, you need 2.1 live births per woman. However, in 2005, the European average was 1.38. In Ireland it was 1.9, France 1.89, Germany 1.35 and Italy 1.23. Britain scored in the middle of this range with 1.6, but that was because – like France – we have a large Muslim population with a high birth rate. Indeed, Muslims are outbreeding non-Muslims throughout Europe….

“Confronted with this demographic-revolution and official statistics which showed there were too few young people to support an ageing population, European governments decided to embrace immigration as an inherent good without giving any thought to the consequences. As a result, politicians and businessmen assured us that we had to have economic growth in order to prop up ever greater public spending and that it could be provided only by importing large numbers of workers from abroad. But why wasn’t there a national debate about whether it was wise to mortgage our cultural future for the sake of a mess of financial pottage?

Where were the politicians arguing against the doctrine of multiculturalism which holds that upholding majority values is somehow illegitimate? Who among the liberal elite’s commentariat were challenging the moral relativism that flew in the face of sense and sensibility by insisting that the culture of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Keats’s poetry, Turner’s paintings and Elgar’s music was no more important than – and probably morally inferior to – the cultures of other imported, minorities?

“We know the answer all too well. Cries of racism drowned out rational argument – not just here, but throughout old Europe. As one gloomster put it: ‘Political correctness, which is to thought what sentimentality is to compassion, means that the intelligentsia of the West has disarmed itself in advance of any possible struggle.’ The result of all this, as recent events have made tragically clear, was that British culture was undermined and social cohesion severely damaged….

“But where is the resistance to this? In Britain, we have a consensus imposed by political correctness where such threats are not discussed. In other words, dissenting voices are censored. The Tories are scared to talk about immigration. Worse still, they’re shutting their eyes tight when it comes to confronting the Islamist threat within our midst and the need for Britain to face the threat to its cultural survival and deal with it resolutely.”

Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail, 5 May 2007

Sounds like an argument in favour of supporting the BNP, who have much the same line as RDE.