In 221 BC the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, ordered that any literature not in the official archive should be burnt and its authors buried alive. Officials who refused to carry out his orders were sent as convicts to the Great Wall. Qin hoped that as a result, a new, unified China would start afresh, all evil reminiscences of the past expunged. Modern businessmen might call this ‘going forward’.Chinese censorship also included certain words. It was death to utter the name of the Emperor or members of the High Council. Modern Britons are familiar with such taboos. In our present climate of racial hysteria if we say or write the words ‘……..’ ‘…….’ or ‘……’ in reference to race, we can be thrown into jail, and as with any crime if convicted, sent to prison and subsequently denied employment.
Like the Emperor Qui, our government has enacted legislation with which they hope to purge the wicked past of the British press and start anew. An investigator will examine newspaper and magazine articles which complainants allege have unnecessarily invaded their privacy or caused them hurt. The powerful will complain the most, meaning that scandals such as the stealing of public monies by our parliamentarians will never again be found out.
Stories that might highlight the private squalor of peoples’ lives in high places, their sordid dealings over money, divorce, neglect of their children, greed and ignorance, sloth and gluttony, will attract heavy fines because such things are now considered normal. The fact they are often associated in public office with wrongdoing is considered archaic.
Journalists who refuse to submit will be spectacularly ruined. Even if they win a case they will still have to pay the costs, often running into tens, even hundreds, of thousands of pounds, of their accuser. Very soon the censor will sit not in an office in Whitehall but in every journalist’s head.
As liberty dies, religions often spring up to protect the weak and give meaning to peoples’ lives. This is why in this edition of the magazine we have published an article by a devout Muslim on what type of education his fellow believers want for their children in Britain. Reading it one is struck by the parallels between the rise of Christianity in the closing years of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam in modern Britain. Muslims, like our Christian ancestors 2000 years ago, seek to supplant the rule of a corrupt and licentious civil authority with the rule of God. The difference however is that Christianity, at least in its early stages, was not haunted by those who believed in forcible conversion or jihad. While here only a tiny handful of fanatical Islamists do, in a fundamental Islamic state such as Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are second class citizens, while apostates are in theory subject to the death penalty, even if rarely, or ever, carried out.
From the article it appears that British Muslims, while they await the Caliphate, when the world will live under Islam, wish to lead separate lives from the rest of us, taking only those necessities of our science and technology that will allow them to prosper in a capitalist economy. As the writer says, a true Muslim is a citizen of the world, which has become a global small village. ‘We are,’ he writes,‘going to prepare our youth for that objective in the long run’. The devout Muslim, it seems, believes in a Britain which is part of the Ummah, the world-wide rule of their faith, to which all secular governments will be subordinate.
However it would be a great mistake if, like the liberal left, we sentimentalise Islam or think that, like Christianity, it will eventually secularise. Muslims believe that the Quran is God’s direct word out of the mouth of the Prophet and therefore anything which contradicts it must be opposed. This rules out all but token democratic government as no man can set himself up against the word of God. The results of this are only too plain in the Middle East in a series of bloody wars of religion. Nor are they set to improve as long as we refuse to employ our greatest defence against Islam, free speech. Isn’t this where Lord Leveson came in?
