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Marcel Proust wrote that "other people, as we get to know them, are like strips of metal dipped in acid: they gradually lose all their qualities - and their defects too, at times." Politicians, of course, only lose their qualities.
What was fascinating about Thursday's by- elections in Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill was the extent to which the candidates of Britain's main parties were prepared to appease the singular agenda of what has come to be called "the Muslim vote". (In both constituencies, Muslims form roughly 20 per cent of the electorate, within an overall minority population of 30 per cent.)
In Leicester South, the tribunal before which the intrepid candidates satisfied the Faithful was the "Friends of Al Aqsa" committee. They were questioned on the three issues that meant most to Muslims in this very deprived ward. Not health, transport or crime but "Palestine", "Iraq" and "faith [read Muslim] schools".
Yvonne Ridley, the candidate for George Galloway's Respect party, was at something of an advantage here, having been converted to Islam and kidnapped by the Taliban. However, Sir Peter Soulsby, a former leader of Leicester council, who lost the seat for Labour, was very nearly her equal in zeal.
"I opposed the war against Iraq last year," he assured the committee, "I marched against the war . . . but now Saddam Hussein has been successfully overthrown, I want to make sure the people of Iraq are not abandoned." This answer, amazingly, wasn't craven enough. (Proust also wrote: "We forgive the crimes of individuals, but never their participation in a collective crime.")
Little profiteth it a man if he gain the whole of Leicester South, and loseth his own soul. Especially if he loseth Leicester South as well.
One might have expected the Tory candidate to display a little more character, but not a bit of it. "I am passionately in favour of diversity," Christopher Heaton-Harris informed the Ulema, the body of Muslim legal scholars, "that is why I have pledged to campaign for more faith-based schools." (He also let it be known that his "spiritual home" was Leicester.)
And on "Palestine" he went even further than Ms Ridley, who was at least prepared to "respect" Israel within its 1967 borders. Were the Muslims of Leicester to elect him, Mr Heaton-Harris said, he would campaign for a Palestinian state "sufficiently large to meet the needs of its people" and "with sufficient resources - if not from within its own borders, then from its neighbours". (It is unlikely that he was referring here to Syria.) This answer was so satisfactory that the Tory's campaign was supported by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK (MPACUK), one of the most extreme of our Islamic groups.
MPACUK must have been even more pleased by the political establishment's reaction to the television expose of the British National Party (BNP) by BBC1 on Thursday. The party has been ferociously attacked, not so much for its members' obvious racism and violence, as for the vote-winning distaste for Islam displayed by its leader, Nick Griffin. This is rather like condemning the Nazis, not because of the Holocaust, but because they built autobahns.
In the speech he made in Burnley on February 19 attacking the BNP, Michael Howard pointed out that to feel concern about asylum and immigration is justified by the facts. By pursuing extremist immigration policies that devastated indigenous communities, he said, it was the political mainstream, not "racism", that was pushing decent voters into the arms of the BNP.
Now, as its disastrous efforts in Leicester and Birmingham show, Mr Howard's own party is trying to outbid Labour and the Liberal Democrats with Islam-friendly policies that do not even appeal to the local Janjaweed. Meanwhile, among the majority of the UK population which is not Muslim, support for the odious BNP continues to grow. Thursday's programme, in disseminating its shrewd - and recent - anti-Muslim focus, will simply recruit more of us.
This is because Islam is not, or not only, a religion. According to the Hadith and the Koran, where we find the messages Allah wishes Mohammed to convey to mankind, Islam is a supranational army and state. It is the only state to which Muslims may bear allegiance, and its purpose is to bring all men under its political sway.
A famous "moderate", Dr Zaki Badawi, the Egyptian director of the Muslim College in Ealing, has written: "Islam endeavours to expand in Britain . . . It hopes that one day the whole of mankind will be one Muslim community, the Umma."
In 1999, the Vatican hosted a conference of Muslim and Christian leaders, attended by the Titular Archbishop of Smyrna. He reports that a Muslim participant was disarmingly frank about the purpose of Islamic settlers in pluralistic Western societies. Addressing the Christian delegates from Europe, he allegedly said: "Because of our religion, we will invade you; because of your democracy, we will destroy you."
There were 23,000 Muslims in Britain in 1954. Today there are 100 times that many. In the next 50 years those 2.3 million Muslims will increase at an even swifter rate. The political implications of such an expansion are vast. The Muslim's kingdom is very much of this world. Our kingdom will therefore be very much of the Muslim's world.
All but an infinitesimal minority of our Muslims are peaceable and law abiding. But even an infinitesimal minority could bring about the Muslim Millennium in a less than ecumenical way. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, and the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, have said that several Islamist attempts to attack the capital with conventional or biological weapons have already been foiled.
On March 31, for instance, eight British Pakistanis were arrested with half a ton of explosive material near Heathrow Airport. On April 6, the police allegedly foiled an attempt by Muslims to release the nerve agent osmium tetroxide by detonating a huge bomb at Gatwick. Despite these successes, Sir John and Mr Livingstone have both described an Islamist nuclear, conventional or biological strike on Britain as "inevitable".
The Conservative Party should stop playing the Muslim Block Vote's game of divide and conquer. As the by-elections show, the party will only ever gain a small number of Muslim supporters. Breaking with the Umma would be a radical move that millions of voters would respond to. Do the Tories not sense the enormous popular groundswell against Islam?
Charges of "racism" would inevitably be made against the party but they would never stick. It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object. The Conservatives would be charged with cynicism and expediency: look who would be talking!
But unlike the "Nazi-Soviet Pact"
that the feminist, pro-gay Left has forged with Britain's Muslims, a Tory
platform hostile to Islam would be neither incongruous nor immoral. An
anti-Islam Conservative Party would destroy the BNP as quickly as Margaret
Thatcher despatched the National Front in 1979 when she warned that, unless
immigration was curbed, Britain would be "swamped" by "an alien culture".
Infinitely more is at stake now.
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