No wonder Islam flinches from crusade of Blair values 

GERALD WARNER comments in Scotland on Sunday 24th October 2004


HUSH, hush, whisper who dares, Britain’s exporting the values of Blair... If you wonder why we are enmeshed in the ever-worsening crisis in Iraq, then you simply have not been listening. The Great Charlatan spelled it out at the recent Labour Party conference, when he explained "success for us in Iraq is not success for America or Britain, or even Iraq itself, but for the values and the way of life democracy represents". 

That is true (not an encomium one can often award to any claim by Blair). The insurgency in Iraq has been provoked by fear the coalition will impose there "the values and the way of life democracy represents". Observers in the outside world, not having enjoyed the benefit of being morally anaesthetised by our own progressive consensus, assess the ‘values’ of western society in stark, even judgmental, terms. 

They see the United Kingdom, where 20% of babies conceived are aborted and 41% of live births are illegitimate, as an undesirable role model for family life. We have vowed to bring security to Iraq, but we are unable to police our own country. Figures just out for the second quarter of this year record 303,500 violent crimes in England and Wales - an increase of 11% since last year. Nobody over the age of 30 dares to venture into the centres of our towns and cities between 8pm and 4am. The adult members of society are under curfew and the elderly under house arrest: feral youth has taken over. Come on in, Iraq - the water’s lovely! 

Functional illiteracy is growing at a rate that will soon converge with Iraq’s level for males. Driven by the media, British society is swamped by every kind of vulgarity, indecency and incivility. The response of the liberal establishment to spiralling drug abuse is to legalise it. The one indispensable cement of society - the family - is under unremitting attack from the Blair regime, legally, fiscally and rhetorically. Marriage is a hated institution the Blairites are determined to destroy. 

There is a widespread pretence that many young women today are electing not to marry. This liberal assumption conceals the startling fact that, for the first time in history, marriage is not an available option for millions of women: no one in their social milieu would dream of marrying them. Young men have been relieved of all responsibility - in the name of female emancipation. Feminist commentators deplore the custom of arranged marriages in other cultures: tell that to tower-block Tracey, single mum, product of ‘peer pressure’ from age 12, serial amenity for many ‘partners’. She might think it would have been no bad thing if someone had arranged a marriage for her. 

America, leader of the coalition, at least has the merit of being a morally divided society, with one half still defending traditional values. That is the constituency of George Bush, who foolishly allowed himself to be drawn into the Iraqi adventure by the ideologically deracinated ‘neo-conservatives’. The other half of America belongs to John Kerry ("I am a Catholic"), who voted with the anti-life last-ditchers in defence of partial-birth abortion. 

Blair, addressing the US Congress last year, told that audience: "Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs. Don’t ever apologise for your values." In the United States, 25% of conceptions end in abortion and a further 25% in illegitimate births. America’s annual divorce rate has more than tripled since 1950. The black community, so stable in 1950, has disintegrated: 60% of black teenagers in the US today are the offspring of single mothers. The Jerry Springer, trailer-trash culture has overtaken much of America. In that breeding-ground were spawned the women ‘soldiers’ whose sadism and sexual grossness appalled the Middle East. Apologise for our values? Hell, no! What’s to apologise for? 

How does the secular west look to Islamic and other societies? Are people who pray three times a day, marry for life, have a punctilious sense of sexual decency and a strong attachment to the family expected to welcome as liberators the amoral, dysfunctional primates slouching out of the débris of Christendom? 

Before September 11, there was a complacent assumption that Islam was on the way out; that as soon as satellite television brought Sex and the City to the souk, Muslims would roll over, as the Christians had done, before the advance of secularism. This turned out to be a false hope: the advent of Al-Jazeerah and other stations and the facility with which militant Islam brought its message to the Internet deprived the west of the cultural advantage. Technology is not always on the side of atheist modernity: there is even an Islamic nuclear bomb now, in Pakistan. The odds are becoming more even. 

To compensate for our imploding civilisation, we have made a fetish of ‘democracy’. In Britain today, under the management of political parties which have secured a monopoly of admission to Parliament, it is now a system of elected dictatorship. We are encouraged to disregard the loss of our real liberties and to cherish the illusion that 1/44 millionth of a say in the running of the country is a precious enfranchisement. In Iraq, it would be 1/12 millionth of a say - notionally more influential, but of that country’s 12.7 million potential electorate, there are at most 50,000 teachers, doctors and westernised bourgeois who want democracy. 

In Britain, disillusionment with the whole farce is reflected in the 71.4% turnout at the 1997 general election slumping to 59.5% in 2001. Viewed from outer space, which looks more of a basket case - Islam or western secular democracy? Well, now you know who is going to win.

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