Britain can ban Donald Trump, but it can't ban the Trump effect

Is there anything more embarrassing than the British Parliament indulging the nonsensical idea of banning US presidential hopeful Donald Trump from entering the country because he said something we didn’t like about Muslims?

The greatest pity is that precious time was devoted to a ban that would never actually happen. It was a purely indulgent exercise, pandering to half a million idiots who thought that their lovey-dovey view of the world should be the only one that the rest of us are exposed to: in other words, freedom of speech if you think as we think. Some MPs doubtless thought they’d done their kudos a lot of good by supporting a ban on Trump entering the UK with pious condemnation of The Donald and his view that Muslims should temporarily be banned from entering the US. Good for them.

There’s a problem, however. What half a million zealots and some foolish MPs who inflate Britain’s importance to the man don’t realise is that there is a lot more sympathy for Donald Trump’s ideas in this very isle than the lovies wish to acknowledge. If they want to understand why, they need to understand that Donald Trump is a symptom of the West’s failure to have a proper debate, whether about Islam or migration. The fact is, it is being left to people like the Donald to say the unsayable: to give voice to the palpable fear of Muslims that dare not be proclaimed. IT undoubtedly exists, whether it's justified or not. Banning all Muslims from entering a Western country, whether the USA or (hypothetically) the UK is, of course, unworkable. How do we know who is not simply denying their Islamic faith to secure entry, whether for purposes good or ill? Not only that, but it has only ever been the world’s vilest ideologies that have sought to deny basic rights arbitrarily on grounds of race or belief. The legal system’s founding principles and basic morality would preclude such a move. Finally, home-grown extremism would not be resolved, and the move would do nothing to stop the grooming of young people by jihadists already operating within ISIS heartlands.
So, we can quickly dismiss Trump’s suggestion as stupid. We can’t so quickly dismiss those in our own fine country who have great sympathy with it. Why? Because, for every UKIP-supporting Racist Twitter troll lapping up the Trump way, there will be 10 decent people silently saying, “Some-one had to say something.”
That some-one should have been our politicians. That some-one should have been writers in the centre-ground of politics (Yours Truly included). That some-one should have been in the media. But actually, that some-one is Donald Trump.
The opportunity has been there to acknowledge the fear and concerns that people have and to propose sensible, measured responses. But our responses have been pathetic. First comes the desire not to offend or appear too judgemental of Muslims. Almost as soon as the appalling Paris attacks had been reported, we were treated to endless discussion about how Muslims will be treated now: how they will be persecuted, how people will judge them and how life is already hard enough for them. All of that may have been valid material for discussion the following week, but you could have been forgiven for forgetting that a hundred people went to a concert and had their brains blown out in the name of an Islamic cause.

Next up: the distancing. David Cameron is, I believe, honestly trying to come up with practical ways to tackle extremism, like his English classes for Muslim women. I do really want to know, though, how we can discuss such an inherently sensible idea without confronting the attitudes (and the men) that stand as the cultural barrier to learning the lingo in the first place for the target group. Fact is, I can’t help wondering if those who most need that kind of intervention are those least culturally empowered to access it. I have Muslim female friends in the UK. I also have Muslim female penpals across the world. All of these women are bright, well-educated, highly eloquent in English and thoroughly supported by their families to get a good education, to realise professional aspirations and to make their own choices in life. There is nothing Islamic about suppressing that and keeping women as second-class citizens, unable to play a full and equal part in society. We can’t discuss integration of those without such support, without a plan to tackle those competing to block it.
But of course, we shouldn’t expect serious answers to these questions. David Cameron, like so many others, puts far too much distance between Muslims and the bad stuff, so much so that The Commentator has branded him an “isolated leftist extremist.” Indeed, following a vicious knife attack at Leytonstone tube station, one man’s words to the attacker went viral: “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.” More troubling than the inelegant grammar was the way Cameron said that he couldn’t have put it better himself. He wasn’t the only one: lavish praise was heaped on the slogan. Yes, it was heroic to say it at the time to an extremist nutter on the loose, but to make a political message of it? All that signifies is that we only half accept the truth that’s staring us in the face: extremism absolutely is Islamic, and the extremists are Muslim. Until we really understand that, the writers, the media lovies and the politicians will never say what really needs to be said: extremism will only be countered by an equally powerful narrative, grounded in Islamic teaching and theology. I am convinced that Islam, like my own beloved Christianity, is a religion that teaches peace and seeks to foster kindness and charity in its adherents. I believe Islam is a sister religion. I believe that it is a vast majority who live peacefully, driven by love of their faith and fellow human beings. I believe this majority deplores extremism and suffers the consequences of it more than most of us. But like my beloved Christianity, Islam has a complex holy text that, if not properly understood, can easily justify violence and even murder. Those experts, who can convey the true meaning of the Qur’an, must be heard if extremists are to be truly marginalised and unable to write the reputation of Islam: their message must be proclaimed louder and more forcefully than the extremists’ propaganda. That will never happen whilst we shrug our shoulders at the extremists and proclaim, “You ain’t no Muslim bruv.” Who else will we decide isn’t a true Muslim? We have no basis to deny the extremists’ claim to be Muslim, however comforting it is to do so and however much it makes us feel like we can talk about extremism without upsetting anyone or demanding much of the law-abiding, decent Muslim majority. We equally can’t deny the professed Christianity of those who walk in to abortion facilities and shoot people in the name of a ‘pro-life’ cause, just because most of us condemn them. We Christians have to take responsibility for pointing out the eroneous nature of an interpretation of our teachings that permits such things.

Last up: the denial. What I’ve already said relates to denial, but we have to also think about denial within the context of migration. Angela Merkel may have had the best of intentions, for which I admire her. Unfortunately, however, it seems no-one was prepared to vocalise the possibility that plonking people from one culture in their hundreds of thousands in to another entirely different society, without any plan for integration, could spell disaster. IT did, at New Year, on the streets of Cologne, where robbery and sexual assault were widespread. Abysmally, the matter was covered up, so afraid was the media (domestic and foreign) and the police to confront a hard truth: the attackers were all of Arab/North African origin. It is not unreasonable to assume that fear of both far-right reprisals and being perceived as being racist lay behind this most disgraceful of continent-wide, establishment cover-ups. There is nothing racist in reporting all the facts, not just the comfortable ones. A true racist (the word is much-abused and misused), would assert that the behaviour stemmed from the inferiority of people of that racial group. No-one is seriously suggesting that such people are inherently inferior by virtue of their place of origin or their ethnicity. Plenty of people are talking about the cultural differences that lead to misconceptions about the sexual availability of Western women – misconceptions which, when combined with a roaming, directionless population made up predominantly of angry, single young men, makes for a dangerous cocktail. This may be more about culture and social cohesion than religion, but leave these inconvenient truths out of public discourse and they will be hoovered up by the same extremists who want a trumpesque approach to Muslims.
That’s what this entire article’s point adds up to: either we start talking honestly about the threats we face today, or we will leave a vacuum that a home-grown populist people pleaser like Donald Trump will gladly fill here in the very country that stupidly debated banning him yesterday. It might feel like an unlikely prospect today, but people can only take so much. We are already seeing a disturbing tendency to base the entire Eurosceptic case for leaving the EU on immigration and the security threats from the migration crisis, despite the fact that our membership of the EU makes no difference to the crisis and how it might affect us.
Trump doesn’t just take lunatics with him: he wouldn’t be doing so very well in his race to win the Republican nomination if he did. He draws decent people tired of the same old denial and the worsening extremism to him. Don’t think that sensible Brits, like their American counterparts, can’t be persuaded to rebel against the cosy consensus too. You can Ban Donald Trump, but you can’t ban the Trump effect.