Muslim Immigration Must be Limited

About thirty years ago, I met a former English soldier who had landed in Normandy on D-Day. When the fighting ended, he was stationed in the British occupation zone in north-west Germany. He told me that the Germans he met were lovely people: kind, polite, decent, helpful, and charming. I wasn’t surprised. Most people in their personal lives share the same virtues and vices. Few of us are either heroes or villains.

The problem with Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, though, was not individual people, it was the Weltanschauung (worldview) of Hitler and the Nazis. Politically, socially, and culturally, the widespread dissemination of Nazi propaganda — the everyday philosophy of Germany under the Nazi dictatorship (what one read in the newspapers, heard on the radio, and was taught at school or university) — was antithetical to human rights, individual freedom, and democracy. Nazism normalised antisemitism, legitimised military conquest as the rule of the strong (while rejecting dialogue and the civilising effects of mutually beneficial economic relations), and classified human beings as inferior or superior based on race. Within Germany, individuals could be personally decent, but their genuine fellow feeling for others was negated at a societal level by the political and philosophical regime under which they lived.

The postwar solution by the victors of World War Two was the eradication of Nazism as a Weltanschauung. The Allies believed, correctly, that Nazism and liberal democracy were incompatible and that any attempt to establish democracy in Germany while Nazism retained residual influence, was doomed. Therefore the Allies denazified the entire population. If you were a former Nazi you could retain citizenship, but by political decree you had minimal influence in the new Germany. This was, by any measure, a common-sense solution to a radical problem. As the political philosopher Karl Popper said, you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant.

Why discuss events that occurred eighty years ago in Europe? It’s simple: totalising ideologies that are inimical to individual conscience and that punish dissenters should not be allowed to negatively influence the pluralist culture of liberal democracy.

While the horror of the mass murder on Bondi Beach is fresh in our memory, a repressed idea will flicker into the consciousness of many people — one that is not acceptable in the self-referential echo chamber of the cultural left establishment, but which is nonetheless true. The liberal-democratic West must accept that Islam, a totalising ideology similar to Nazism in its rejection of alternative opinions, is antithetical to liberal democracy, and that Muslim immigration — beyond a small percentage of the population — is not conducive to a cohesive society. Moreover, Islam, like Nazism or communism, is incompatible with a pluralistic society. Individual Muslims are good people, just as ordinary Germans were decent people in their everyday lives, but Islam, as an ideology, brooks no dissent and fosters a radical, dehumanising view of non Muslims, especially Jews.

When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Arab Muslim Palestinians, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, gave radio broadcasts to the Arab world from Berlin during World War Two, he emphasised the similarities between Nazism and Islam, citing that they were warrior creeds, that they each rejected democracy, that both were at war with Jews as a people and with Jewish values (which is ironic considering the extent to which Islam borrows from Judaism and Christianity), and that they both were engaged in Jihad with their enemies. The 1400 years of Islamic history, while simultaneously one of the great multifaceted civilisations, is a testament to the breadth of his claims.

Islam in power is an authoritarian ideology, one where even the mildest dissent is suppressed. When Muslims, however, are a minority in a democracy, they generally live a parallel life to the majority of their fellow citizens, only interacting when economic necessity applies. This, in itself, is a perfectly legitimate way of life, and one of the joys of pluralism is that, once you are not harming your fellow citizens or attacking the state, you can live however you choose. Your values are your values and neither the state nor your fellow citizens can force you to conform, either through government coercion or societal expectation, to affirm the dominant cultural narrative.

But after tens of thousands of terrorist attacks in multiple countries in Islam’s name, it is past time that we stop tying ourselves in knots attempting to reject the overwhelming evidence of both history and our eyes. Islam is incompatible with pluralism or liberal democracy and it is not unreasonable or discriminatory for governments to formulate policy that accepts this as a fact. This does not mean that we discriminate against our Muslim fellow citizens or victimise them in any way. It simply means that government should not import millions of Muslims, many of them young men, from countries with no conception of Western values, and that the percentage of Muslims in any democratic country should not, through government policy, be encouraged to rise above a limited proportion of the population. Liberal democratic values should be the minimum sine qua non of immigration policy.

Individual Muslims, ethically or morally, are no better or worse than other people in society, but when the percentage of Muslims in a population rises above a critical mass their preoccupation with Islamic theology becomes more radically ideological and less amenable to the notion that other people have alternative views, and that these views should be respected. The group dynamic, in other words created by ideology usurps the individual (similar to the totalising effects of the Weltanschauung propagated in Nazi Germany), and becomes, like a snowball rolling down a hill and gaining mass, the dominant presence in a society. The result is that the most doctrinaire form of the ideology become the norm. This idea is not controversial. Put any group of similar people together and they will regress to a crude, general, cultural mean, especially if their worldview dissents from the dominant zeitgeist. This attitude is both a statement of identity and a defence mechanism, and its incarnation is neither malevolent nor Machiavellian in its motivation. It’s simply human nature.

Islam is one of the great civilisations in world history. It has spread from the Arabian Peninsula to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, across Asia to the Indonesian archipelago. But its Din (worldview) is archaic in the technological world of the twenty-first century and its clash with modernity will unleash countless horrors unless liberal democracies pre-empt, by mitigating its influence within their societies, the inevitable consequences of its decline. Limiting Muslim migration to the West is the first step in this regard.

We cannot, to be clear, allow the murder of innocent Jewish people (and others) on our beaches and streets to become normalised. Individual people are usually decent. Ideologies antithetical to pluralism and democracy are not.