why we need to talk about the Muslim Problem

In Lionel Shriver's literary thriller We need to talk about Kevin, we are presented with a series of letters from the mother of a deeply disturbed boy, who goes on to massacre other children in a school, to his father.

That section of the press which is free of ideological blinkers is increasingly sending us warnings - letters, if you will - about a problem we have in Western society, an elephant in the room which will soon crush those who delight in pretending it isn't there.

The sustained Muslim surge towards hegemony in our civilisation is revealed in the pedestrian as well as the horrific, in footnotes and appendices as well as screaming headlines.

For example, the Telegraph's Nick Britten reported recently that in Birmingham's "mixed-race area of Hall Green", it is no longer possible to buy ham on the produce of Domino's Pizza, although Halal options are available - an honour whose equivalent has never been extended to the city's 3000-strong Jewish comunity. The Halal Food Authority's president, Masood Khawaja, commented sinisterly: "This is only the beginning".

This week, it was reported that Leicester City Council's libraries department has decided to put the Koran on upper shelves, as Muslims believe that their sacred text should be "placed on a high shelf above commonplace things". The news that this was happening was broken by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in their publication Guidance on the management of cotroversial material in Public Libraries in section 5.1 of Appendix C, on page 41 of a 42-page document.

Although the city's Federation of Muslim Organisations advised the council, who sought it's advice, that all sacred books should be put high up so that the major religions' texts are seen to be equal, it remains to be seen whether the Muslims of Leicester, who have been repositioning the Koran unilaterally, will tolerate their book being placed alongside the Jewish and Christian Bibles.

What I find somewhat concerning is the use of the word "appeasement" in these stories and many like them, no doubt meant to evoke images of Neville Chamberlain flapping his piece of paper on which was Hitler's guarantee, gained at the 1938 Munich Conference, not to go to war with Great Britain in return for a promise of non-agression upon Germany's imminent annexation of Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. The point about this story is often missed: Hitler had wanted negotiations at Munich to break down as a pretext to start a war, because he knew Britain's air defenses were inadequate, and some trade-unionists were agitating to slow down the already hesitant process of producing Spitfires, preparing to make their opposition to production of war matériel overt when the secret non-agression pact between Hitler and Stalin would be made formal with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.

Hitler was furious with Mussolini for crowing about his role in bringing about the agreement on Chamberlain's piece of paper, for in deferring a war the victory was Chamberlain's. I think a much more appropriate comparison for the present situation comes from the First World War, when the German High Command arranged for Lenin to be transported in a sealed train from Switzerland to Russia, where the disorder caused by his agitation would take Russia out of the war and let Germany concentrate on its western front. The Soviet empire that resulted from German strategy displayed the law of unintended consequences in spades.

Similarly, Labour has encouraged the growth of a militant atheist clerisy that favours Islamism at every turn in order to oppress our long-standing Judaeo-Christian culture. Gone are the days when socialism owed more to Methodism than Marx, a point Gordon Brown was at pains to demonstrate in his biography of the left-wing Scottish MP, James Maxton. Just as Kaiser Wilhelm II's recruitment of communism as a weapon of war eventually led to the fracturing of his country for 45 years, so corporatist fawning to radical Islamism in the self-declared fight against traditional British values has cloven Britain into effectively untouchable radical militant preachers of hate and terrorism, their cannon-fodder, and the rest of us. And political correctness, a concept formed upon the orders of Lenin, is the favoured armament.

The attrition is visible all over the place. Nadia Eweida, banned by British Airways for wearing a cross visibly at work; Lilian Ladele, the registrar who had to resort to litigation against London's Islington Council because she felt that "marrying" gay people was contrary to her Christian beliefs; Caroline Petrie, a district nurse suspended by the NHS because she offered to pray for a patient; and, most recently, Jennie Cain, sho was suspended from the school where she works as a secretary, her crime being having emailed friends from her home asking for prayers when her five-year-old daughter was reprimanded for talking about Jesus to a classmate.

On the other side, as Archbishop Cranmer explains, militant Labour peer Lord Ahmed recently bullied the House of Lords into banning democratically-elected Dutch MP Geert Wilders with the threat that he would mobilize a private army of 10,000 Muslims against Parliament if he were to arrive to give a talk and show his film, Fitna. Given that Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner to Great Britain, has made a thinly-veiled threat about emotions running high among the million-strong Pakistani diaspora in the UK over allied actions in the war upon terror, I can easily believe that Ahmed's figure of 10,000 stormtroopers under his command is realistic figure.

Breaking news today is that the preacher of hate Abu Qatada has been awarded compensation by European Human Rights judges because he was imprisoned without trial. Qatada is fighting deportation to Jordan for fear that he might be tortured there. If he was truly Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, why isn't he being encouraged by all necessary means to provode intelligence here that might protect British and US civilians and troops? I'm sure Allah would reunite him with his fingernails before deciding what to do with him and his associates for trampling the reputation of a fine religion into the mud.

And there's the rub. Islam once had a wonderful reputation for scholarship and tolerance that is fading fast. This is affecting me as well. For example, when lawyer Saleca Faisal Parkar won a discrimination case against her employers for egregious abuse on the grounds of race and gender, I was left feeling cold because of the actions of her co-religionists.

Anyway, here's something for you that the House of Lords was never allowed to see: the first part of Geert Wilders' film Fitna. I don't link to it, containing as is does disturbing images, out of any desire to cause offence, but because the elephant in the room has grown to such mammoth proportions that it threatens to trample us all, and this is why we need to talk about what I can find no name for other than the Muslim Problem. If watching it makes you feel a bit overwhelmed, try singing a hymn afterwards. How about Onward Christian Soldiers?