The Scottish Ostrich, Part I

Traitors to the Cause in the Highlands

The West is confronted with Islam--on home soil, moreover.  The Chattering Classes and the Commentariat are frenetically attempting to win this culture war by insisting upon Western "values".  They act like generals berating the troops: "Hold the line, boys.  Steady! Steady!"  They want the West to remain true to liberty, equality, and fraternity.  It is only as the West practises these cultural values towards Islamic people that they, grateful subjects, will come to see the West as culturally superior.  It is only by enjoying Western liberty, equality and fraternity practised towards them that Islamic believers will see the light and move away from their historically primitive, violent religion into Westernised modern Islam, a new reformed religion (as argue for by Ayaan Hirsi Ali) bearing the aura of Western glory.   

In this great cultural cold-war, the Chattering Classes believe that the real enemies in their midst are those in the West who speak critically of Islam. Even Hirsi Ali is regarded as an enemy of the West because of her strident criticism of Islam.  By so speaking they are traitorously spiking the great guns by which Islam will be won over to Western cultural and "religious" values.  The critics, by their criticism, actually blaspheme and undermine liberty, equality, and fraternity.  They are the West's Fifth Column.  The Western critics of Islam are more like medieval Crusaders than truly tolerant sons of the post-modern West.  Thus runs today's received wisdom amongst the Chattering Classes. 

Overstatement?  Nah.  Let us give a typical example--one amongst many.
  In Scotland, the West Highland Free Press has just fired two columnists.  One columnist dared to say some truthful, yet critical things about Islam.  He was terminated.  Another columnist wrote in support of his former colleague.  He too was terminated.  Ironies abound.  So much for the West Highland Free Press.


The first offending columnist was Professor Donald MacLeod--one of the finest Christian theologians of the last two hundred years.  The second was a a former Labour MP and Government Minister.  Both were terminated because they were deemed to have traitorously undermined the West's cultural values in its campaign to convert Islam to Western secularism.  This, from The Daily Telegraph:

In a plot line worthy of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s satire on journalism, the founding editor of an award-winning Highland paper has been sacked over his defence of freedom of speech.  Brian Wilson, the former Labour MP, has written for the West Highland Free Press for 38 of its 43 years, since founding it with four others in 1972.The only gap in contributions came when he was a minister in Tony Blair’s government.

He was dismissed for using his weekly column to defend his friend and fellow columnist, the Free Church of Scotland theologian Prof Donald Macleod, after he wrote about the spread of Islam in the UK. With 62 years of contributions between them, readers could have been forgiven for thinking they were in with the bricks at the paper’s headquarters in Broadford on the Isle of Skye.But in a newspaper sacking possibly without precedent, the weekly paper chose to publish both offending columns before getting rid of both contributors.

The very Highland stramash prompted outrage and incredulity on Twitter, with a baffled Gary Robertson, the BBC Radio Scotland presenter, asking: “Did they sub and publish the column?” Another user said the move was “utterly bizarre”, and Catherine MacLeod (no relation), a former Labour special adviser, said getting rid of two of the UK’s “best and most informed writers” was “sad and dreadful”. One Twitter user asked if “SNP fingerprints” were behind the move.

What were Professor MacLeod's sins?  Ah--grievous indeed.

In his column on May 22, Prof Macleod wrote that all minorities prefer to keep a low profile. He added: “Generations of British Muslims have done exactly that, many have made an invaluable contribution to British society, and many are perfectly prepared to listen quietly while Christians 'witness' to them. "But when minorities become majorities, things change... in the event of Islamic dominance in Britain our friendly Muslim shopkeepers will have little option but to march behind the radicals."

Note carefully the assertion, "our friendly Muslim shopkeepers will have little option but to march behind the radicals."  Is this racist scaremongering?  Clearly the Chatterers thought so.  Hold that thought.  Although Professor MacLeod was arguing from the historical past of  Islam, in Part II, we will fast forward to the present, providing examples where Muslims had been living peacefully with their non-Islamic neighbours for centuries, but when the Islamic radicals took over, everything changed.  But, back to the rarefied Highlands and the fetid air of the West Highland Free Press . . .

When Mr Wilson learned later that the theologian would no longer be contributing, he used his own column to back him, describing Prof Macleod’s “Footnotes” column as the “most intellectually challenging, erudite and beautifully written column in British journalism”. He said the article was “leading on to wider questions about Islamic influence within Europe, including implications for democracy and freedom”.  He wrote: “The precedent he quoted was what happened in Algeria between the fourth and seventh centuries, from Augustine to Mohammed, so in raising current issues he was - as ever - taking the long view of history.”

The former MP said not everyone was expected to agree with Prof Macleod, but the established way of expressing dissent was to publish letters.  He went on: “Unfortunately it did not end there and as a result of whatever else transpired, Donald concluded that he should no longer contribute his column.”

Mr Wilson said his own dismissal was “pathetic” and was retribution for his column. He told The Daily Telegraph: “They published Donald Macleod’s column and then got rid of him, and then they published my column and get rid of me. The joys of employee ownership. It is all a bit sad. If it had to be on any issue then I’m glad it was about freedom of speech, which is something the Free Press has always been very strong on.  It is stupid on the issue, it is stupid on journalistic principle, it is stupid on journalistic practice. Once you publish a column it becomes the property of the paper, not of the columnist.”

Mmmm.  The West Highland Free Press has been positively medieval, acting more like Hamas than a Western newspaper of former years.  In a spectacular fail, it is the one guilty of betraying Western cultural values of  liberty, equality, and fraternity.  But in so doing, it has illustrated once more that when these important values become secularised and cut off from God, they move rapidly to justify force, domination, oppression, and tyranny--all in the name of liberty, of course.

Doubtless the West Highland Press will soon festoon its offices with the busts of Robespierre and Napoleon.  True Western patriots.