This article was published in The Sunday Telegraph on 25th July 2004 -  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/25/do2504.xml Below it is the text of my letter to the editor.

Muslims are a threat to our way of life
By Will Cummins
(Filed: 25/07/2004)


In 1748, the novelist Horace Walpole had cause to draw attention, in a letter, to the outrageous behaviour in France of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the exiled leader of 1745's failed Jacobite revolt. Prince Charles Edward Stuart was terrorising Louis XV - the rebellion's mentor, on whom Charles relied for everything - with endless threats and the most insolent demands. Walpole could not help remarking on the narrowness of Britain's escape.

"What a mercy," he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, the then Prime Minister, "that we had not him here!" If, said Walpole, the Pretender was prepared to bully the government of France, even though he was entirely in its power, what would he have done with a British government under his control?

And what, I have been asking in recent articles, would Islam's equally insouciant "exiles" in Britain do with a UK government in their power? Indications from the Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections were not encouraging.

Konrad Henlein, the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans - whose cynical attitude to liberal, democratic, minority-friendly inter-war Czechoslovakia offers a metaphor for what we face - once observed: "We must always demand so much that we are never satisfied." He wouldn't have got very far in Leicester South, where the idea of refusing Muslim voters any part of their global Jihadi agenda was so distant from the candidates' minds that they couldn't even wait to be asked.

However, my fellow Telegraph writer Jenny McCartney is plagued by a very different anxiety. She is deeply concerned for, not because of, Britain's burgeoning Muslim population. It is the persecuted Jews of the Third Reich, not its Nazis, to whom we should compare this notoriously gifted, useful and self-effacing group, she has written in her column of July 18.

Jenny sees in the revulsion for Islam displayed by the British National Party an echo of the anti-Semitism to which hideous German publications like Der Sturmer gave vent. Though why she has to ransack back numbers of hoary Fascist tradesheets when almost every mainstream Muslim paper in the world today is full of loathsome anti-Jewish rants and images isn't clear.

"In the miserable event" of "an al-Qaeda attack in Britain", she wrote last week - which repeated warnings from our Government have termed inevitable - "there is little doubt in my mind that assaults on peaceful, law-abiding British Muslims would increase".

Well, it's good to know that, as the rest of us hug our bottles of Evian in the irradiated ruins, mourning thousands of dead, Jenny will be lying awake at night worrying that someone might drop a dog poo through the letterbox of her local balti house. Such outrages, she warns, will be "fanned by an increasingly hysterical rhetoric - already in place - that encourages non-Muslim Britons to see each and every Muslim citizen as a threat". Whose rhetoric is that exactly?

The Guardian newspaper is the Bible - perhaps one should say the Koran? - of Islamo-fascist Britain. However, it has recently been lending its opinion pages to one Fuad Nahdi, a leading Islamic "moderate" who publishes Q-News, a magazine for young UK Muslims. When two British Muslims launched a suicide attack in Israel, this is what he wrote in The Guardian of May 2, 2003: "I am not surprised by news of Britain's first suicide bombers. What, however, I find astonishing is that it took place in Tel Aviv, not Manchester." He goes on to say, "We should brace ourselves for the forthcoming intifada on the streets of Birmingham and Detroit."

Mr Nahdi, who arrived in Britain from Kenya in 1983, is comparing himself and his fellow Muslims here to the Palestinians conducting the second intifada against Israel. In Muslim folklore, the Palestinians are a native people disposessed by Zionist invaders. Mr Nahdi seems not to have grasped that, in Britain, he and the rest of the faithful are the "Jewish settlers", we, the usurped Palestinians. If anybody is going to mount an intifada against the invader, it will be us.

Jenny writes that those who are afraid of Islam ignore the diversity of the religion, which replicates that of Christianity itself. Christianity too, she writes, has its extremists. To which one might, like St Paul, say, "and what has Christ to do with Baal?" All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics. A dog is not the same animal as a cat just because both species are comprised of different breeds. An extreme Christian believes that the Garden of Eden really existed; an extreme Muslim flies planes into buildings - there's a big difference.

If, for instance, Muslims meet with defeats in the Balkans (a fact which Jenny finds deeply disturbing), it will certainly not have been for want of trying. It is more a tribute to their incompetence than their humanity. As the Tunisian intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb points out in his recent book La maladie de l'Islam, Muslims' defeats are a symptom, not a cause, of Muslim decline.

When his children became "a thwart, disnatured torment to us all", the scales fell even from King Lear's eyes. But "Jenny Wren" McCartney wishes Britain to feed the cuckoo in its nest because that's what wrens have always done. Doesn't she think that cuckoo looks, and behaves, a little like the "detested kite" to which Lear compared Goneril?


This is the text of my complaints letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,


I was quite shocked to read the article by Will Cummins entitled "Muslims are a threat to our way of life". I felt as if I was reading some fascist rag produced by the BNP. Quite apart from showing ironic disdain for the hate-filled attacks experienced by Muslims and Asians in Britain ("Well, it's good to know that, as the rest of us hug our bottles of Evian in the irradiated ruins, mourning thousands of dead, Jenny will be lying awake at night worrying that someone might drop a dog poo through the letterbox of her local balti house."), Cummins also makes a particularly nasty insinuation that Muslims are nothing more than an evil fifth column ("The Guardian newspaper is the Bible - perhaps one should say the Koran? - of Islamo-fascist Britain."), as well as comparing Muslims to dogs ("All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics. A dog is not the same animal as a cat just because both species are comprised of different breeds.") He could have chosen any animal to make his point; he could have chosen eagles and penguins, but he chose dogs, the one species that throughout most cultures is considered to be a lowly, even filthy animal (in most European languages dog-related insults are some of the worst).

But perhaps most shocking of all was this passage: "In Muslim folklore, the Palestinians are a native people disposessed by Zionist invaders. Mr Nahdi seems not to have grasped that, in Britain, he and the rest of the faithful are the "Jewish settlers", we, the usurped Palestinians. If anybody is going to mount an intifada against the invader, it will be us."

Is this anything other than the most evil racist propaganda? It is clear that by "we" Mr Cummins means "white", "native" Britons who are being oppressed and dispossesed by the evil foreigners. The final sentence of the passage is a call to arms to rid Britain of these elements. Is this not what is otherwise termed "incitement to racial hatred"? And you, The Telegraph, a newspaper that I have respected and have read for many years, is actually publishing such filth. I know that you are right-leaning but this is really too much!

Oh, and just in case we missed the point, Cummins hammers it home in the last few lines : "But "Jenny Wren" McCartney wishes Britain to feed the cuckoo in its nest because that's what wrens have always done. Doesn't she think that cuckoo looks, and behaves, a little like the "detested kite" to which Lear compared Goneril?"


Yours most sickened,
Roland Glasser

PS, I will also be contacting the Press Complaints Commission