So, can we live in peace with Islam? It’s a sensitive question, one the Establishment wants to suppress. But it demands an answer, and the longer it is left the more chance there is of it being ‘no’.
I think we can live with Islam. But the Establishment’s policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism and its savage suppression of free speech make it hard, if not impossible.
Undeniably most terrorist attacks are carried out by Muslims and many regard Islam as a threat to their way of life. Blocking discussion will not make these views go away but instead drive them to smoulder underground to ignite into violence that nobody wants. If that happens blame the authoritarian Establishment and its heavy-handed response to the recent anti-immigration protests.
Many think Islam intrinsically intolerant and violent, and quote partial passages from the Quran such as “And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah [persecution] is worse than killing. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers” and look at terrorist attacks by Islamists and their attempts to intimidate people and conclude that Islam is irredeemably intolerant and prone to violence.
But there are also passages like "There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejects false deities and believes in Allah has grasped a firm handhold which will never break. Allah is Hearer, Knower" that are held to emphasise the importance of tolerance and peaceful coexistence, and to encourage Muslims to engage with others in a respectful manner.
It is legitimate, essential even, to consider Islamist violence and fanaticism, but we also need to consider the broader principles of Islamic jurisprudence and ethics, which include the concepts of justice, mercy, and the sanctity of life. Muslims scholars argue that the Quran's teachings on violence are specific to certain historical circumstances and are not a general endorsement of violence.
We need to help such Muslims take the lead instead of the Islamist fanatics the woke, multicultural Establishment supports and appeases. And we need to do this urgently. Islam is here to stay, whether we like it or not, and it must be integrated as was the once dangerous Catholicism. Unfortunately, this will have to be done in the face of Establishment hostility. If we fail the future will be unbearable.
All belief systems, religious or political, produce fanaticism and fanatics, like those of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Antifa, BLM and Hope Not Hate, who are prepared to use violence to promote their beliefs.
But the root cause of our ‘Islam’ problem is the Establishment’s Globalist doctrines of mass immigration and multiculturalism, to which it demands total submission, regarding opposition as heresy to be stamped out as ruthlessly as Henry IV suppressed the Lollards, recorded in his 1401 law ‘De heretico comburendo’ – on the burning of heretics - who have:
"wicked heretical and erroneous opinions … and… they do wickedly instruct and inform people, and as such they may excite and stir them to sedition and insurrection, and make great strife and division among the people, and…do perpetrate and commit subversion of the said faith…”
The 15th Century Establishment’s response to the ‘far right’ of their time was that they would "be burnt, that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others". Sound familiar?
The current despotic dispensers of ‘justice’ might not burn heretics, but they certainly punish them much more harshly than other sinners. This, and the obvious favouritism given to Establishment-approved groups that was a major contributor to the recent protests, can only make people angrier. A burning sense of unfairness and injustice is eating away at the nation and causing large sections of the population to view the State as their enemy.
I don’t condone or support violence. I strongly oppose it. It is plain wrong and will achieve nothing but further oppression. But, as politicians say when Muslims, ethnic groups or left-wing mobs like BLM riot, it is imperative to try to understand and debate its cause to prevent the problem getting worse.
But the cloth-eared clots running the country have done exactly the opposite, aggressively blaming the ‘far right’, ludicrously blaming a group that has not existed for years for orchestrating them. The Establishment’s savage reaction has very much reinforced the widespread belief in two-tier justice.
After watching the police run away from rioting ‘Roma’ in Leeds, where the council held hang-wringing meetings with ‘community leaders’, we see riot police beating up white working-class protesters, not all of whom were rioting, and the State hunting others down and arresting them in large numbers.
People contrast this with the debasement of the police, on their knees before BLM rioters, and their standing watching the destruction of public property, making no attempt to arrest those involved. 
The BBC’s man on the spot in Bristol, Osob Elmi, reported the Establishment’s response:
“Pledges have been made by police, the council and community leaders aimed at bringing about long-term change in Bristol following the Black Lives Matter protest that saw a statue of Edward Colston toppled.
An estimated 10,000 people had gathered in Bristol to demonstrate last weekend, and many said the events felt empowering but they hoped for real change in the city.
Bristols Mayor … commissioned research into the city's history in a pledge to better understand its story, while other pledges made include updating the school curriculum and efforts to improve BAME representation within the police force.”
A million miles apart from the threats to use anti-terrorism laws to jail what the BBC contemptuously called ‘pro-British riots’ by what the government repeatedly called ‘far right thugs’.
The Bristol police in action - against a ‘pro-British’ and therefore ‘far right’ protestor. This time the tone of the BBC’s report was very different:
“They were arrested for offences including affray, racially-aggravated public disorder, animal cruelty, and assaulting an emergency worker.
The arrests came after hundreds of far-right protesters and a counter-protest group gathered for two demonstrations near Castle Park.
Avon and Somerset Police warned people involved in Saturday's "shameful scenes should expect a knock at your door soon".
Sentencing has been unlike anything seen for many years, by an Establishment that has given up policing burglary and shop-lifting. A protestor was jailed for eighteen months for shouting ‘who the fuck is Allah’ and poking his finger at police. People have also been jailed for on-line posts.
A man was fast-tracked into prison for a post showing Islamists wielding knives. The judge wanted to ‘send a clear message’, but the message many hear is that only ‘pro-British’ posters will face, in the ludicrous phrase used by fatuous Establishment politicians, the full force of the law.
A woman was jailed for a post calling for mosques to be burned with people in them. I would have no complaint about that - if the same degree of severity is applied to the Labour councillor who called for rioters’ throats to be cut. No fast-track jail sentence for him.
The men who broke a policewoman’s nose attacking the police at Manchester Airport have yet to be charged, giving the message that Muslims have special privileges denied to the ‘pro-British’.
The Batley school-teacher is still in hiding after Islamists called for him and his family to be slaughtered. No charges have been made against anyone for the death threats or the intimidation outside the school, emphasising there is one law for Islamists and the Left and another for anyone outside these ideologies.
Such double standards are not new. Wes Streeting, now Secretary of State for Health, called for a journalist to be thrown in front of a train in 2009, saying he’d do it himself. No charges followed, despite this being clearly illegal. The DPP, Keir Starmer, did nothing.
The Deputy PM called her political opponents Tory scum, and Tory MP David Amess was murdered by an Islamist a week later. Rayner claimed then that words were irrelevant. The legal establishment agreed. Double standards or what?
The murderer of the three girls in Stockport has not had his trial fast-tracked, and very few details of him have been released. Given the alarming amount of knife crime in this country surely a ‘message needs to be sent’. But no, the Establishment’s message is aimed only at the mythical far right.
The Current Home Secretary, at a Labour conference last year, said:
“My great, great grandmother was attacked by her husband. First when she was pregnant. The report says he struck and kicked her so she could not sit or lie in bed. Then he attacked her with a poker. In front of her daughter. The case went to court. The magistrates bound him over to keep the peace.
But you know the most shocking thing about that story? That is more protection from the police and courts than many domestic abuse victims get today. And it was over 100 years ago.”
This lamentable state of affairs has not been brought about by Muslims. It is not Muslims who are locking people up for posts on ‘X’, it is the British Establishment, and it is towards them that our anger needs to be directed. We need peaceful but persistent protests, physical, written, in the MSM and online against their suppression of free speech and debate and we must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by them.
The future of British and Western democracy and freedom is in our hands, the future of your children and grandchildren. You have a right to free speech. We mustn’t let them take it away.
Back to Islam. Yes, historically violence is associated with Islamic conquests, such as the early expansions and the Ottoman Empire, but equally Christianity has been no stranger to violence. Yes, terrorist groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram act in the name of Islam, but western terrorists, like the IRA and Red Army Faction, acting in the name of national freedom and social justice, also murdered innocent people.
Violent Islamist groups represent a tiny fraction of the global Muslim population and are widely condemned by many Muslims, themselves the biggest victims of Islamist terrorism.
Focusing only on Islamist violence skews perception and debate as much as the Establishment’s absurd focus on race and multiculturalism, with as dire results. We need to look past it and work with Muslim moderates, not the self-appointed ‘community leaders’ that the Establishment prefers, all too often Islamic fundamentalists opposed to integration and often recipients of taxpayer’s cash.
I have no doubt that many will say that it is impossible to live with Islam and that the presence of so many Muslims, over four million, necessarily means inter-communal strife and, like the Muslim mayor of London suggested, we’ll just have to get used to terrorism.
I understand that point of view, but disagree with it. I have lived and worked with Muslims and have no doubt that it is possible to live with them – but to do so it is necessary for those in power to act even-handedly and require Muslims to integrate.
My first contact with Muslims was on my first ship. The purser was called Norman Mohammed, a Muslim from the South Shields Yemeni population of mainly seamen, who had lived in the town since around 1890. The Yemeni’s lived there peacefully, except during the 1930s when the Great Depression raised tensions and the white population thought that the Arabs were getting preferential treatment and stealing their jobs. Norman, by the way, could have passed for a pure Tynesider except for being a bit darker.
I have lived in Singapore for several years, where the population is about 16% Muslim, higher than it is here, but there are no problems, no rioting and no terrorism since Singapore declared independence from Malayasia in the early 1960s. And that is because the Singapore government promotes the majority Chinese identity while treating the Muslim, Hindu and Christian minorities fairly and as equals.
And that is what we must do here: drop all this multicultural nonsense and assert that traditional British culture and values are dominant and that all are expected to respect and uphold them. We need to treat Muslims as equals, but root out the militant Islamists among them, removing them from positions of power while, of course, respecting our own traditions of free speech. And mass immigration, legal and illegal, must end.
And to do that we must recognise that the chief problem we face is the woke, globalist British Establishment.
This overview is part one of a series in which a deeper analysis of the issue of living with Islam is discussed. Let us start the debate here, and please comment below – but think before you post!