“…their obvious awareness that an English person (as they would probably call me) might well think of Islam as being anything but peaceful. True enough, they were cocky. Yet behind the front lay a defensiveness that all Muslims must surely feel….” — from this nauseating article by Dave Hill
What a perfect mixture of sentimental gush and self-regard is this presentation of these young Muslims who are not the charming and pitiable young boys Dave Hill seems to think they are. But the hero of the tale is the teller, congratulating himself for his large-heartedness, his capacious sympathy.
What is the point of the tale? It is that Muslim teenagers, pretending to collect “money for Ramadan,” arrive, four at once, knocking on the doors of non-Muslims, and essentially trying to extort money for themselves. They do so not with express but always with implied threats — for threats need not be stated, but will be assumed by many when four teenage males knock at your door asking for money for any reason. That they made up the ridiculous story of collecting money for Ramadan might have led someone else, but not Dave Hill, to wonder about “Muslim charity” and why Muslims never contribute to non-Muslim causes.
Hill might even have looked in Al-Qaradawi’s guide to what is Haram and what Halal to find out that Muslims are not supposed to offer non-Muslims any greetings on non-Muslim holidays — though some rules can be broken, apparently, where it is necessary to shore up the position of Islam. In case of need, it is all right because Jihad is war, and “war is deception,” and everything that needs to be done to strengthen the position of Islam can, therefore, be justified. Thus Al-Qaeda members could shave their beards, or even drink at strip joints. Dave Hill might have taken a quick look at Al-Qaradawi’s guide.
But instead Dave Hill offered us only large-hearted sympathy — his large heart, his sympathy. That sympathy apparently did not extend to others who might have been similarly shaken down by these four Muslim “boys.” He might have wondered what effect they would have had on an old-age pensioner, male or female, opening the door at night to four teenage Muslims asking for money. (Asking? Or is the implied threat of doing something if the money is not forthcoming so obvious as to make the “asking” really a “demanding”?) He might have imagined this pensioner either fearfully surrendering money, or fearfully denying it, shutting the door, and wondering what would then happen, if not that very night, then on another night. No, none of that for Dave Hill.
The moral Dave Hill drew from his willingness to have five pounds taken from him? The moral he finds in five teenage Muslims with a preposterous story — who should have been told, “At Ramadan money is not collected” and “You don’t collect from non-Muslims for Ramadan, period” or “Come back at Hallowe’en in costume and then there will be treats for all those participating”? That he had improved these young men’s view of the Infidel.
Yes, one can imagine those reading the story and thinking to themselves something like — oh, how sad. How telling. These young boys (all of a sudden they become “young boys” in that kind of mind, with that incipient mustache, that delicate fluff, so carefully referred to, merely adding to the empathy), those “poor young Muslim boys” who “want so much to be part of our society, who wish they could participate in some way, wish they could truly trick or treat” but “they can’t.” Why can’t they? Because Muslims must not take part in, must not even recognize, any non-Muslim holidays, and indeed, in some school districts, in order “not to offend” a handful of Muslims, hundreds of children have now been deprived, in each case, of the traditional Hallowe’en costume display (google for examples).
Hill appeals to our sentiment of pity. He wants us to feel how sad it must be for these “young boys.” He wants us to think that behind their “cocky” money-demanding front, they were merely good lads — so unlike all the other boys who come, four in number, and knock on your door and ask for money for entirely phony reasons, and who, in their numbers, might so obviously be seen as threatening (threatening, for example, in what they might do to your car, or your house, that night or another night, if you were to refuse them).
So while he, Dave Hill, sees beyond their behavior that did not require explicit threats to be taken as threatening to what in his view was a “defensiveness that all Muslims must surely feel,” intelligent readers will see something else. Four boys, a knock on the door at night — a “defensiveness that all Muslims must surely feel”? “Surely”? “Surely” only if Muslims have the same worldview as the craven Dave Hillses of this world. We see a man who was afraid to say no but who pretends to himself that it was not fear, but rather genuine sympathetic curiosity. He reassures us and presents himself as a superior moral being who, in this cruel age of stereotypes (about Muslims, bien entendu) and a refusal to simply “see each other as human beings” (or some such twaddle that ignores the belief-system of Islam), manages to transcend those mental barriers that some non-Muslims have thrown up. Hands across the table. All gods chillun. The gush of bomboggery (brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god) dangerously misapplied.
Dave Hill sees through — he thinks — what he thinks is their hollow bravado to the tender and wounded Muslim souls beneath, and “that defensiveness that surely all Muslims must feel.” Is he crazy? Surely they don’t. Look around the world. Look at Muslims on the march everywhere, attacking Buddhists here, Hindus there, setting off bombs in undergrounds in London and Madrid, assassinating political figures and moviemakers and threatening to murder still other political figures, and cartoonists, and writers, and publishers, and translators, and the Pope, and anyone else who does not parrot the Muslim view of Muhammad, of the Qur’an of the Hadith, of Islam. Look at Muslims especially in England — from the official Muslim organizations constantly making demands and laying the blame for Muslim violence on the government and non-Muslims to the huge percentages of Muslims who openly declare that they would never collaborate with the police or that they support terrorist acts against non-Muslims. Others admire the London bombers. Still others, including all of the leaders of all of the major Muslim groups, that have consistently engaged not in self-criticism but in menacing verbal attacks on England, on its security services, on its foreign policies, on its everything — implying that millions of Muslims could “be radicalized” if their demands are not meant. “Defensiveness”? What “defensiveness”? Yet this brain-damaged Hill draws the conclusion that “surely all Muslims must feel” a “defensiveness” that he detects in these youthful practitioners of extortion.
The real story here being told is not that of Dave Hill as a superior moral being, capable of unusual and admirable empathy. It is rather the story revealed unwittingly by Dave Hill, the story of how he came to possess not a mind, but a bowl full of mush. And how that bowl-full-of-mush-of-a-mind endangers him, about whom we need not care, but also endangers the rest of us, who deserve not to be endangered by the dimwitted and ignorant among us. Yes, a bowl full of mush. But with no old lady, or any lady at all — let alone Britannia herself –nearby, whispering “hush!”
Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, cows jumping over the moon. And Goodnight, Great Britain. It was swell while it lasted.